Hack and slash and mane of fire.

  Steel met flesh, and flesh met its end. A scream undone by metal and malice, never escaping past his lips, twice the man he was before. The smell of instant death coiled upward and hung in swaths along the drying air. The others had scattered in a blazon frenzy. Wild and selfish. Pleading for their lives. Faster than a human could manage, the blade was alight with purpose again and came hurtling towards her.

  Sadbh violently threw herself over an impending tombstone a split second before the blood-drenched battle-axe hit its mark, the heat of the overworked blade rippling mere inches from her head. The axe’s devastated screech had rung through her ear while missing her skull, splitting the night air instead, and imbedded itself deep into the stone face of a nearby grave. The headstone, a devotion to an ancestor long forgotten by time, buckled unto the sheer force of the demonic weapon, and had exploded in an array of rock and moss.

  Her wrist and palm exploded with pain as she landed against the hardened overgrowth, cold and dead in the midnight of March. She used the last of her momentum to pitch into a roll and tried to scramble behind some cover, but the valley clearing had done little to shelter the shrines of the dead over the years, and they lay as their masters, old and forgotten, broken and tired.

  She looked around, frantic, searching for cover, searching for a way out. Any way out. An old car lay way off to her left. Too far to get to. It must have run off the road above and flipped through the now flattened hedgerows. The metal was bent and fractured, more rust than solid. The encroaching vines no doubt partly responsible. They’d eat anything. The car slept, rusted and rotting. A relic from a time before. They scattered the island now. On roads and in buildings, abandoned, most barely scrap, scavenged for vital metal. And now here one lay, trapped in this valley of graves with a beast of the Old World and a warrior of the New.

  No wind took refuge down here. Nothing dared enter that could not escape. The air was stagnant and cold and heavy. The trees had wrapped around one another, a desperate embrace, standing as one against this malevolence. Ash and oak. Sad and dead now. Apple trees that hadn’t seen fruit in Goddess knows how long. No animals. No silence. Something…deeper than silence.

  Panics icy caress skimmed the chambers of her heart at the sight of the axe. Sadbh made to break into a run, but her foot caught on a piece of debris, and she stumbled. She reacted faster this time, though barely, and caught herself. But she still hit the floor, buckling under the weight of her already bruised wrist. She spat in disgust. The dirt tasted bitter and old. This whole graveyard was cursed with age and memories. The stench of it seeped into everything. Her forehead was awash with sweat, hot and sticky against the sting of the night.

  A guttural roar erupted from behind her.

  Sadbh’s body screamed at her in protest. Internal voices whispered and screamed too, some of them her own. She just needed a second. The world was turning without her, and she just needed a second to catch up. Just one second. She wheezed into her lungs, feeling the panic of insufficient breath burning through them, but she struggled against the stabbing pain for two more breaths, then three, fighting against the rising fear in her throat. Her hands trembled, fingers clawing into the mud.

  Breathe. Breathe. Malus domestica. Deciduous tree. Blossoms in Spring. Fruit is the apple.

  She forced herself to imagine the trees. She had noticed them lining the footpath on the walk down here. As dead but as beautifully familiar as the ones back home. Tall as the Spire.

  She ignored a second roar, no nearer than the last. Her panic slowed. Her breathing grew. But her sword so heavy on her back. The weight of exhaustion crept forward to wrap his humble blanket around her. She wanted so much to hang here, just one more second, a thimble in time. So tempted to let her trembling limbs fail. But fail her they did not. And she would not fail them.

  Sadbh looked up to see the last of the men who had led her here being swallowed into the tree line. They’d be dead soon. She mourned and forgot them in an instant. Another stolen thimble. Her breath lent itself to her again. She stole another. Her lungs were steady now and she risked a glance at the Ainbheartach behind her. She saw it. And screamed.

   The men of the Ossory had tricked her. Led her here. Betrayed her here. She had, to be fair, been pulled to the old city before that, for other reasons, but had offered her help as was her devotion. They’d agreed. She’d agreed. They’d all fucking agreed. They told her one of the Fae was responsible for their hardship, a leprechaun, haunting and tricking them, and so to this place they’d marched her.

  To her death.

  Without sympathy.

  She could never hate them though.

  There are too few of us left for me to truly hate them.

  She’d watched the demon hack its way through three of its own denizens before the small band of remaining foot soldiers ran. She’d immediately followed suit, but the very earth betrayed her. The Voices of The Ravenous Earth whispered her name, smelt her existence. It knew she was here. The soil hissed and bubbled up to grab her. Tripped her up. The yew trees behind them turned as to shadow, bending unto themselves to close the path to her. Fatal to anything that dared enter their borders. Now she was trapped. A girl, a demon and a patch of land never satiated. 

  This was the Féar Gortach, the Ravenous Earth. No magic worked here. No magic could break free from the grip of the land, a sickness said to be buried deep that dragged and clawed and devoured all magic down, down screaming to something ancient, sleeping within the Earth. And so, the land became living, endlessly searching for something, anything, to replace its missing magic. Devouring anything that crossed its path. She found it strange to think of these accursed lands in a land already cursed.

  Sadbh had smelled a fear deep within the townsfolk. It was hard not to. It was just past the smell of malnutrition and “primal survival”. Water was scarce in these parts. No magic. She’d been on her sacred assignment when the screams had called to her. And it was hard to ignore them. The men here were twisted knots in an empty shell, desperate and feral. She never understood why the men of the Ossory stayed here. Was that part of their curse? She’d thought to ask after she’d slayed their dragon. They had few resources. Even fewer teeth. And she’d fallen for their plea.

  Fallen might be a bit harsh; she’d jumped off that cliff herself. 200 ft. No parachute. It was just so rare for humans to betray one another.

  Her mistake was thinking their Fear was one of Torment, one unable to overcome the will of a lowly beast and the living land it occupied.  She’d assumed the men had actively fought against them and failed. But no. She knew now this was a Fear borne from Obedience. They served these masters, ones so tainted, and she was the price they chose to pay.

  This was no mere leprechaun. The Clurichaun roared in a chilling rage as Sadbh regained her balance. With its back to the moon, it stood in shadow, 7 ft of hulking mass bound by its simple mind and the laws of the Fae. Its axe now lay behind her on the once dew-drenched grass, free of any part of Sadbh’s anatomy. She had not yet faced the creature in a direct confrontation, instead playing a proverbial demon and mouse act. Considering its size, Sadbh had decided against immediate fisticuffs with the thing, but all her researcher knowledge wouldn’t have prepared her for this.

  And she wasn’t sure her Banféinní training would do her much good either. Three years of preparation and all she could think about right now was basic training. Parry. Duck. Strike.

  Why again couldn’t everyone have a fucking gun?

  She was a researcher. Apparently, they had enough researchers. Maev needed more warriors.

  Too late to regret it now. A life stolen. But since, she had stolen many a life.

  The Clurichaun were rare. They were once a creature of the Gods, a leprechaun twisted by the darkness of their will. It wished only to increase its treasure hoard. The bones of humanity came in a close second to the gold coins it kept hanging in a pouch around its neck. However, rumours swirled that not even the Gods had dared to create a beast such as this from their own soiled flesh.

  Man and science the abusive parents perhaps?

  Heat sprung out and boiled the air. The moon burned brighter than it should. Hotter. Silver flames caught and licked the most fragile plants in the clearing. Sadbh could feel the intense heat beneath her grey military garb. The smell of burning lilac and lavender was already noticeable amongst the din of the dead. Perhaps a flaunting of Boann for the curse she inflicted?

  The clearing here was old. Very old. The graves stood starkly against the overgrown grass, fractured teeth in the gaping maw of the earth. Some of them were dated to the 1850s, over 220 years ago. But Ireland had a history whose hand reached back deep into the abyss of the past. Who knew what this cursed place meant to the moon Goddess. Or when it had meant it.

  The Clurichaun opened the coin purse around its neck and gently placed one stunning gold coin on each half of the bisected body before it. A mark of its treasure to be collected later. It did so gently. A sickening softness. The call of the gold was a siren’s song sung as it escaped the confines of the purse. Begging to be stolen. Begging to watch the massacre of anyone who dared try.

  The demon turned out of the darkness. Sadbh bit down, hard, on her bruised hand, stifling the rising scream from her stomach. The putrid green of its skin now bathed in the light of Boann. She did not bear this creature herself, but the Goddess seemed to delight in its slaughter as if it were her own.

  This creature was wrong. It was wrong in a way that couldn’t be described in this world. It did not belong here. No other lights came from the light of the universe. The stars themselves fled from it in fear, from the cancer of its existence.

  And she was out of time.

  The ground beside her exploded upwards as a pustulous boil and moved to return the axe to the demon’s grip.

  It’s working with the land??

  The Clurichaun snatched up the axe without pause, swinging with the blessing of the moonlight, the atoms of the air wailing as the blade cleaved them in two. The muscles in Sadbh’s arm contracted. She heard the air bubble beneath the weight of the blade; the atmosphere around her toiled and broke uncontrollably as the weapon moved nimbly towards her. The demon was merely an extension of the blade’s own will. Her eyes stung and watered against the smell of burnt rubber and ash. Nipped at her fingers. The smell of the Gods power. The sweat of her brow tasted bitter on her lips.

  The world refused to settle. Her eyes couldn’t focus for more than a few seconds. Her temples pounding. She couldn’t be sure the cause. Perhaps the axe’s doing, the curse of the Goddess…or the glint of terror in her mind.

  Either way Sadbh kept her footing. She almost bit her tongue she was gritting her teeth so hard. Any miscalculation in her attack could equal a fatal difference. She shivered under her armour despite the heat, against the horror of its being. She wanted to snap her eyes shut, not look, not think. She couldn’t even run. She was now bound to fight against its complete unnaturalness. Its silence was deadly, but its smell was worse. Acid and rot.

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  The tusks of the giant green alien from hell gleamed as it stalked toward her, menacing and proud, towering in the dark. Its wild mane of red hair burned as blackened fire, searing hot and mercilessly in the midnight pitch. She could feel the ice fire in her stomach, but she held her pose strong. Wiped her brow. Again. Wiggled her toes. Pushed against gravity with her feet. Hands up. Steady. Aware of herself.

  She heard the vibrations then, could feel the strain of their world around her. The earth was struggling to cope with the Clurichaun’s form as it charged across the grass. This was really something that did not belong here. This was something incredibly wrong. Reality shuddered and screamed and bent in on itself as it passed. Fractural cracks. It scratched at the inside of her mind. Wailed and trembled and shattered into her surroundings. Evil. Evil like she'd never felt. It was dark and cold and hot and full and empty and tore with rage at all the light and happiness she had ever known. She choked against the bile rising up her throat; fought the urge to rip off her own skin. Reality was being torn out of shape. Whatever this was, it was not meant to be here. The world was desperate to find a way for this demon to exist within our laws of physics, for a form that was made up of natural order and natural things. But this was not natural. It was the darkness beyond the dark of the universe.

  Sadbh braced herself. The Ravenous Earth had walled them in.

  In the space of a second, the Clurichaun was upon her and swung for her head. Pain flared up her legs. Her calves contracted and pulled her violently downward. Without her conscious thought. Her stomach upheaved as the powerful zing of the axe flew just above where her head had been.

  The demon bellowed and in a moment of chilling fluidity, continued the arc of its swing without pause and brought the axe down from above its deformed face. The polished metal of the blade caught the stagnant moonlight, illuminating the still wet blood that dripped from its surface. Sadbh gasped and threw herself out of the way, only glancing upward when she stopped spinning to see the axe sear into the oozing mud at their feet. The Voices of The Ravenous Earth whispered again, a cacophony of sorrow, searching for her, begging and bargaining, screaming her name, snapping at her wrists with earth and rot and death, trying to bind her to them, pull her into the deep, a moving mass of vines and grass and blackened horror. She bolted backwards on her knees, avoiding the wailing terrain as it made to grab her, trying not to listen for a familiar voice in the din.

  She wished she could hear the voices of her Sinsir m’Anam, her past lives, but that magic was lost here. Swallowed with everything else. Cut off from her. It was her voice and her voice alone here. So empty. The emptiness of one voice in one’s whole self was jarring. An echo in a cave. She made a mental note not to move to the Ossory.

  The axe was stuck in the mud.

  Now!

  Sadbh bolted forward, mustering up all the force her body would allow. She screamed in fury and power and whatever else she could gather from deep within as she called to her her sword, Scathach, unsheathing it from its brace beneath her raincoat, the arc of her swing rising to meet the blasphemous moonlight above them. The blade missed the bulk of the agile creature by millimetres, but connected with the wooden handle of the axe, slicing into the demon’s fingers. It jumped backward, bellowing from pain and surprise, and the weapon split in half, the handle shattering to pieces, lost to the surrounding darkness.

  Her training would keep her alive. She trusted it would. She and her sisters were the Banféinní, soldiers of the Insatiable Queen. The dulled runes on the hilt of her blade were stricken to the curse of the Féar Gortach. But the blade still held a power, a human power, one she had spent her last three years honing. Her muscles moved independently to her body. Or her mind. They caught her. Pushed her. Knew where to move. When to tense. When to strike.

  The demon snapped up from its recovering hand and snarled. Snarl did not seem like the right word for a creature with a face like that. She wasn’t even sure she could call it a face. Its head was a mask of melted green wax, alive, oozing and shifting. Hair of flame. Tusks of gleaming, unnatural white. It made her want to scream. She hated the feeling of confidence still pulsing from its body.

  Grabbing itself up, it lunged toward her, moving with a quickness she didn't expect given its size, swinging its brooding right arm toward her face.

  Sadbh ducked. Scathach moved before she did, cutting across to sear its exposed flesh. The smell of decay and bile immediately hit her as the skin split open, curdled green blood spilling in lumps onto the ground. She was close enough to smell the rot within. The blackness. The tainted soul.

  She darted backwards, gagging, swinging her sword blindly behind her as she instinctively took off in the first direction she could. She hacked up her lungs, forcing the smell from her throat and chest, blindly swinging her sword again to defend herself, trying desperately to clear her tear clogged eyes. The world was blurred, the smell overpowering. Too vulnerable. She couldn’t see.

  A jolt of electrical fire suddenly detonated up her leg. She screamed as it shook her body. The accursed earth had caught her foot. She could feel the names of the dead here burn into her skin, trying to force their memories into her. The mud and dirt swallowed her boot and was trying to claw its way up her. She tried to scream again but almost vomited and spat up blackened tar as the rot of the Clurichaun was on her again.

  Using its preternatural force, the demon hit Sadbh across the face before she had time to take in its form. She hurtled across the cemetery, smashing into the side of the old car. She choked on a scream as the air punched its way out of her lungs, collapsing into the ground, feeling her insides shift and break. A sharp fire shot up her entire body. Her jaw felt loose and…wet? What a strange feeling. Jaws can’t be wet, can they? She was just lucky her skull hadn't cracked against the metal frame.

  The world turned without her again. Just one second. But it was enough for the demon to be on her. Grabbing onto her shirt, it spun and threw her again through the air. She slammed into a nearby tree trunk at sickening speed, slicing a chunk of skin from her forehead. The impact was enough to crush her hip directly into the tree shaft. She found the air to scream, choking on the sting of hot tears.

  She coughed. When had she landed on the ground? She was aware of nothing. No? She was aware of something? Right? She had just been doing something? What was it?

  She heard her own wheezing breaths as it bubbled into the wet mud at the base of the tree. Something was running down her cheeks, she could feel it rolling across her jaw. Suddenly the fire again. Blinding. It pulled the world kicking and screaming back into focus. It pulled the pain to her again. Devastating pain. But a pain that meant she was alive.

  That lone voice, her voice, her voice without the voice of the Sinsir m’Anam, came through. But she realised it wasn’t her voice. It was Yseult’s voice. It had always been Yseult’s voice. Guiding her. Screaming at her. Forcing her to feel.

  Time was ticking. It screamed at her to get up. But she just wanted to stay, to lie here, listening to Yseult’s voice as it screamed. So calm. So cold to her cheek.

  Another thimble. But Yseult didn’t stop. This time she listened. The world floated back to her. Yseult’s screams grew louder.

  GET OUT OF HERE!

  Sadbh fought back and stood up, her whole body bruised and trembling, hugging the tree for all she was worth, gasping for breath.

  Deciduous tree…Sheds leaves in Autumn…Sign of the Goddess Brighid.

  She could picture the words painted so clearly on her notebook. Smell the sandalwood beneath, a gift from the scribes when her path had been taken from her. She stole a breath from the air, one she did not mean to return, and the calm greeted her again.

  But Yseult exploded through her subconscious mind, a panicked warning. She wasn't even sure it was real, but her body instinctively took over and she dove away just as the demon’s foot connected with the space Sadbh had been in only a split second before. She felt the rumble through the dead bark as it imbedded its foot deep into the decaying trunk.

  Her mind was warring, too slow in parts, too fast in others, and she could hear whispers, voices, flashes of faces she knew only from her dreams. Her past lives. Trying to save her life. Somehow breaking through from Deep within, past the curse of the Ravenous Earth, desperate to save her.

  She felt their power. Her power. Using their momentum, Sadbh swung her sword straight into the demons outstretched knee. For a split second, time stopped. The world flared into extraordinary brightness. Every single muscle in her body awoke, unfurled itself, tensing and relaxing, rearranging her physical form in a microsecond. A thousand voices, a thousand souls, solid and corporeal and acting as one through her mortal coil. How they overcome the unmagic of the Féar Gortach, she had no idea? But she thanked the Goddess that they had.

  She felt the mud beneath her right foot give way to the sheer strength now pulsing down her leg, grounding her as if she were nailed to the earth. The world paused, her body moved in the slightest micro-distances, her breath deep. Her arms shifted of their own accord to keep her balance. Her chest straightened. She was embodying raw, undiluted power.

  Her sword swung true and caught rotting flesh. Visceral pus and ooze pulsed from its gaping wound. The air around her sizzled and popped at the sheer force of the impact and she caught the ripples through reality.

  The demon cried ungodly hell and stumbled backwards; Sadbh was almost entirely sure she had only imagined the sound of a snap when she hit its knee, but one dares to dream. It thrashed, lumps of wax skin from its face boiling over and melting into the grass below. The Voices of The Ravenous Earth screeched and wailed, absorbing the demon’s essence, scrambling for anything tethered to the natural world. The demon was clawing to keep its insides inside, continually sounding a reverberating scream of agony, tearing at its own flesh.

  Sadbh kicked out swiftly upwards and collided with its molten face. It roared again.

  The sound it emitted sent a rumble through the air and the nearby effigies trembled. It howled and thrashed, and she swore she saw a flash of bright red run down its twisted dark green complexion. Hauntingly beautiful. But it was gone before she could be sure.

  Her mind raced and she steadied herself to make her final blow, but there were too many voices beginning to bubble at once inside her head. A commotion of shouts from the souls of millennia. She couldn't hear her own voice underneath it all, couldn't think, couldn't concentrate. Couldn’t turn it off. Whatever her Sinsir m’Anam had done to break through the unmagic to help her was now overwhelming her mind. She cried out, grabbing her head, almost dropping her sword. The world was bright and dark all at once.

  Sadbh watched in disbelief as the demon darted up from the soil. A flash. Too fast to see. She screamed out at the voices to stop, but The Voices of The Ravenous Earth had joined in, a crescendo of panicked cries. The Clurichaun charged above her, poising itself once again in the shadow of the moon, holding it’s masticated, putrid blood in its hands. A silence unlike anything she had ever heard before fell on the grounds around her.

  Sadbh screamed as the darkness towered above her. But she couldn't hear it. The blood was pounding through every muscle in her body. She could feel her heart. She knew it shouldn’t be beating this fast, so erratic and dangerous. The voices in her head were gone. Or were now nothing but a screaming whistle, muddled and indistinguishable. The ringing was all she heard. The ringing of her heartbeat. The ringing of the voices.

  Cold night air shot through her nose and deep into her lungs and she felt the fire of her muscles as they awoke anew and burst with a rage to fight back. She plunged toward it. Scathach connected solidly with the creature, squarely at where she thought its heart would be. A brief light of time flashed.

  But the demon scarcely recognised a flinch. Its fist landed squarely across her jaw, sending her hurtling through the air once again. She slammed into the grass nearby. Her body exploded in pain, cried and toiled and stabbed at her. She slowly tried to get up. All she could manage was to roll over. The inside of her mouth was warm and wet, and she could see a thin dark line drop from her lips into the mud. She stared in a stunned daze as she watched the small blood pool, could almost see the reflection of the moon in its surface. She finally had her second.

  Sadbh whimpered as she felt the demon’s hands latch onto the back of her coat.

  It cracked her head straight into a tombstone and dropped her helplessly to the charred soil below. Her face felt so wet and the air felt strange against her skull. It struck her so odd how soft the grass was beneath her. Her body sighed and relaxed into it, the crisp cold against her cheek. She thought to wipe the wetness from her face, but she couldn’t move her arms. Couldn’t wiggle her fingers. But she could smile. So, she smiled. Thankful for the cold and the earth and the smile. Her body felt strange. Distant and close all at once.

  The demon rolled her over and the fire of fear burnt through her mind once again. She could smell the dead meat and pus from its face. She closed her eyes. She thought of her Mum. Of Yseult. Of her sisters.

  Sadbh screamed as Scathach pierced her abdomen. She wheezed and choked and vomited. Her legs fell silent, no longer was she able to feel them. The demon gently stroked her wet cheek as it held Scathach true. She forced herself to look into its eyes. She screamed. Screamed for help. Screamed for life. Screamed to try everything again anew.

  The creature stained her memory, stained every happy thought she ever had. All she could see was this face. Past and present. It drove her mad. Her body and her mind abandoned her.

  But the Clurichaun stayed. It watched her. For so long it watched her. Her face stung from tears she could not control. Images of her mother flashed again. Her sister.

  She couldn't remember what bread tasted like or where she had lived or what year it was. Her breath left her then. Left her choking. She could only stare into blackness. Frozen. Stuck trying to remember the last person she spoke to. What her home looked like. Who she loved.

  Sadbh cried out as hard as she could, one last burst of rage and energy and the primal fight to survive. Borne from the horror and despair at the loss of her memories. Of who she was. She spat at the demon. Growled and hissed. She scratched and punched with arms that wouldn’t move and begged for mercy with a voice she couldn’t find. The Clurichaun just stared.

  Finally, she lay in silence. Lay in her fear. Her Sinsir m’Anam wailed in horror and rage and violence as they were ripped from the world, forced into the Other. Forced to become The Doirocha.

  Finally, she was truly alone. The loneliness lasted only a second before her final breath, only a second before the creature would devour her, but it was a moment that seemed to last a lifetime. A stolen thimble.

  The Werewolves of Ossory howled into the night at the now blood-stained moon, an omen of the enraged War Goddess at the loss of her Banféinní. Only one thought crossed Sadbh’s mind before she was pulled to the Other, one single thought reaching out to sister Yseult.

  I’m sorry.

  And then, she was gone.