Rora blinked at the sudden brightness of her surroundings, then narrowed her eyes against it, peering through her lashes. She’d been somewhere else a moment ago. She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered despite the warmth. Where was it she had been? Why was she here now on this sunlit path surrounded by boulder-strewn grassy fields with the taste of salt heavy in the air and the crash of waves all around?

She closed her eyes and tried to imagine where she’d come from, but only formless shadows filled the darkness. It was dark there, and hot. Not like this where the sun kissed her skin and the cool breeze carried the lingering warmth away. Dark and full of pain. Something else too… Something important. As important as life itself.

Her heart jumped. Sped up. Her breath too.

No.

The shadows broke apart and fluttered away like autumn leaves caught in the wind, replaced by a warm, red glow. She opened her eyes to this place. This memory. Because it was a memory, wasn’t it?

Behind her stood her childhood village with its stone-faced storefronts, their windows filled with woven and knitted treasures and stone crafted trinkets for Aesir visitors to buy. The long, low pub that hosted Aesir on the first floor and human villagers on the second, too.

Traditional homes dotted the fields she found herself amongst. They were only allowed these old buildings here on Gola Island, so different from the massive, modern houses of the Aesir and the boxy projects in the human districts on the mainland. Winding stone fences separated fields of sheep, their woolly coats thick and almost ready for shearing.

Rora stepped forward, moving away from the village and towards the highest point on the island, Cnóc an Choillín. Past her childhood home, the one she’d been forced to abandon, she walked, not sparing it a second glance. Past the lough and its shimmering waters. She followed the main road as it cut into the barren, rocky lands where she used to play with her brothers and sister as children. Where the seabirds lived and called. Where they’d hunted for beautiful stones. Where artists had sometimes set up their easels to paint masterpieces worthy of rich Aesir walls.

From the road her feet carried her up a well known path, towards the sea cliffs. Towards the person who waited for her there, in her favorite spot, where it seemed like the ocean stretched on forever and the Earth could be nothing but free.

There were only two people in the Universe to whom her mindscape was a comfortable home, and only one knew of this place. It’d taken a while to feel his presence, to understand it, and read the electric buzz of his anxiety, so much like the hour before a thunderstorm arrived.

“Brother, I’m surprised to see you.” She forced a smile. Why was a real one so hard to come by? Why were the answers to so many questions quick to flit away, like surprised little larks in a forest. “What brings you to my mind?

The Irish that flowed from her tongue seemed strange, too, as if she hadn’t spoken it in years. As if Ireland herself were a distant memory. Was she?

So many mysteries. Here in her mind, they should have been easy to solve.

Aed turned with a face resembling hers. His jaw was more square. Eyes more hooded. He had a few centimeters on her and kept his hair cut short, as was the fashion for men the last time she’d been home. But, they were as close to identical as fraternal twins could be. Oh, how she’d missed him and his face.

They’d been separated for so long. The why, like so much else, escaped her. Back when they’d lived here together it’d seemed impossible anything could tear them apart. Yesterday. A lifetime ago—when he had tended to their flocks of sheep and goats as Ma had woven her tapestries and the little ones had practiced their letters. Back then, after Da had died, but before Ma had, she had taken her sea kayak to the mainland for school, and Aed had kept her company telepathically during the long hours of violin and dance practice, nursing internships, and late nights of midwifery with their aunt. They’d been a unit. Two parts of a whole.

But then Ma had died too, the reasons a mystery they’d never solved. She’d left behind a pair of teenagers with children to raise and questions about what to do with the ancient, alien technology she’d taught them to use, but forbidden them from touching.

It’d been those final questions that’d torn them apart, hadn’t it? No details made themselves apparent, but she was certain it was what had happened. But when, and how?

“You brought me here. You cried out for me in the most terrifying way and I have been searching for you, frantically, for days now with no answer. I thought I’d lost you forever.”

Darkness. Pain. Heat.

“I don’t remember.” She climbed off the trail, over larger rocky outcroppings, until she stood beside him on the cliff, the waves exploding against the base below, sending salt spray into the air.

He studied her face now they stood across from each other, a frown on his own, and wrinkles on his brow. Another feature they shared. Under the intensity of his scrutiny, she couldn’t make eye contact, so she focused on the way the freckles on his nose and cheekbones contrasted with the lighter ones one the rest of his face. Like the fairies were especially fond of kissing him there.

“No. You won’t remember.”

She wrinkled her own brow now and let a frown settle in. It felt right, to frown. This was a time for frowns, despite the brightness of the sun and the freshness of the air.

“I don’t know what you mean.” The words came out sharper than she intended and far more defensive than they should have.

“It’s not that you don’t remember. Something terrible has happened and you won’t remember. I can feel how ill you are, how close to dying.”

Her heart sped up again. Tired. She was so tired and the pain was so much. Someone needed her. Two someones, maybe? Who… The pain—it hurt so much.

No.

“So you have come to force me to remember?” She kept her tone even and built a barrier between her feelings and his, though it was too late. He had glimpsed the darkness, too.

A rumble in the distance rose above the waves. Dark clouds swirled on the horizon where it’d been clear before.

Go away.

They refused.

“I have come to find you and bring you to safety. Please, where are you?”

“I don’t know.” It was the truth. A memory darted by too quickly to grab hold of, yet it was enough to know just before she’d arrived here in this place of peace and denial, someone had promised to rescue her from a place of agony and shadows. The who remained a bare outline. Oh how she wanted to see. Needed to see. She was important, this who, with her promises of freedom. She held all the answers, if only Rora could remember.

It was a dream. An impossible dream and I’m making things up right now.

“Try to remember. Even just the last location you were if you don’t know where you are right now. We can be there in a moment, we can find you and heal you, you know we can.” He lifted her chin so their gazes met. There was fear in his eyes, and desperation. Thunder rolled as the clouds crept closer. The blue skies darkened and took on a grayish cast. The seabird calls became frantic. Hundreds of wing beats filled the air as skuas, razorbills, and cormorants took to cliffs to wait out the sudden storm.

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We. He had said we. We, like her other brother and sister? Or the other We? Danger lurked like her memories, just out of reach.

“Where will you take me?” She broke eye contact and extended her arm towards their house where if this idyllic scene were real and the Aesir had never taken this island from them, her sister have been home working their mother’s old loom in the ancient way, creating historically accurate treasures for a people who’d made themselves into a new species, set themselves apart from their creators, yet still craved the heritage they’d turned their backs on. “Will you bring me back home where Ma and Da’s bones are buried? Where I might one day find my wife’s grave and finally say goodbye.”

Brenn… Something pulled. Something called.

Aed wouldn’t meet her eyes now as he shook his head. “It’s too dangerous for you on Earth. You know that. The Aesir almost killed you and would have without our people’s technology.”

A knot formed in Rora’s throat and she struggled to swallow it down. She worked her jaw to loosen the sudden tension there. “I see.”

“I’ve been worried about you for over two years, not knowing where you were, if you were safe or not. I haven’t stopped trying to find you since you left. We were once inseparable.” He took her hands. “Remember how we used to come up here and you’d play your violin on the edge of the cliffs and I’d sit nearby with my sketchbook and listen for hours at a time? I never wanted to be anywhere else.”

The shadows began to coalesce again, their forms more clear now. More solid.

“I had no choice but to practice for hours and hours a day. The Aesir took the thing I loved to do most in the world and demanded perfection from me. They used my passion as a carrot. They used my genetic illness as a stick. They promised to make sure I’d never have time to dance and play again. They promised me they’d find me somewhere to work where I’d have no doctors, no medicine, and no braces. I’d suffer injury after injury, my joints would wear down, and my body would fall apart if I didn’t meet their expectations as a cultural ambassador. Those moments you remember were at the whims of a master.” She removed her hands from his and crossed her arms around herself. The wind had picked up and the air was frigid now. Thunder rolled again, closer. “Tell me, what do your new masters demand of you? What do they want from me?”

“I don’t want to find you because of them! I want you safe, Aurora.”

The shadows took form. The pain set her joints on fire and threatened to send her to the ground like a thumb puppet with collapsible limbs. She shivered with fever and Jesus, the screw on the vice around her womb continued to turn, tighter and tighter. But this was her mind, and she was strong here. Gola was an island of stones, and her father had taught her to build a sturdy fence from them. Bit by bit she built a wall around her pain, steadied her breath, then stared into the memories.

Blood and pain and darkness. She’d been so alone and so afraid, out of control of her mind. That must have been when she’d opened up to Aed after so many years with the entrance to her mindscape shut tight.

The first cries of a furious infant rose from another shadow, and didn't he have every reason to be livid at the situation he’d been born into? She’d hated him in the moments after his conception, when he’d been a growing embryo, sickening her more every day. Then he’d quickened, kicking those tiny legs and punching those tiny arms, and she’d known he was hers. Sig couldn’t have him.

Even if it meant her death.

And the Dullahan’s coach had started down the road for them. The banshee had begun her keening. She had known when the fever came they were going to die.

When her dreams had turned to Ireland more often than not, the fairy legends from childhood had seemed to come to life all around her, and her babe had grown too tired to scream for the sustenance she couldn’t provide, light had seared her eyes. When they’d adjusted, an impossible dream had come true.

“Was it your idea, or theirs to tell me Brennan was dead?”

Please let this be a misunderstanding.

His face went ashen. Thunder clapped loud enough to expand her chest. She looked away, towards the sea and the storm clouds that were almost on top of them now. The wind lashed at them both. Her skirt tangled around her legs. She must have looked like a crazed elemental witch up here, facing down a storm so large and dangerous.

“You were dead, Rora, only saved by the implants Ma put in our bodies.” He emphasized his words as if she couldn’t remember what had happened to her own body. “I had less than ten minutes to get you to Ma’s people and save your life and even then it took over a week to repair and rebuild the tissue of your heart, lungs, intestines, and even your bones from the way those bullets shredded your insides. When you finally woke up—you could barely move.

“They thought Ma had left no heirs. The Council wasn’t about to let you return to a life on Earth where they might lose you, too. It’s their responsibility to protect you and guide you until you’re old enough to lead the way Ma did. They weren’t able to protect our siblings, they wanted to keep you safe.”

Her own twin. The person she trusted most in the world—of anyone he should have known how much her wife had meant. How the loss would have destroyed her inside.

He wasn’t done. “The pub was destroyed—burned to the ground. no one had seen Brenn for weeks. It was such a slim chance she’d survived the bombing of her home after starting that damned uprising.”

And outsiders weren’t allowed on the home world, the place the Council had decided she had to remain.

Rora snapped her head back around. Her hair wrapped around her face and she forced it away. Thunder rumbled and lightning lit the sky. The roar of the waves was almost deafening now as they climbed up the side of the cliffs. Ocean spray fell around them.

“So you didn’t look for her to be absolutely sure? You just took my choice away and told me she was gone so, what? So I would settle into the life our mother never wanted for us? To live as a child among her people for the next thousand years and see if, after all that time, her lineage means anything at all? See if we suffered any accidents?”

“Our mother was a broken woman; delusional and paranoid.” He had to shout to be heard and his words might as well have been an open-handed slap in the face. “She kept us hidden away in this hellhole to be starved and tortured by the Aesir when we could have been safe among her people.”

“Safe. Right. Ma’s memories passed on to me after her death, Aed. I have a great many reasons to be angry with her for the choices she made regarding us and how we were raised, but are you absolutely certain she is the villain of this particular story?” The thunder and waves nearly drowned her words.

Torrential rain came at them from the side, carried by the wind, pelting her bare skin with icy, dart-like drops. It soaked through both their hair and clothing in seconds.

“Please, Rora. You called to me in desperation and now you expect me to leave you alone to die. Your body is withering. You’ve always been so poorly and their medical technology might not be enough to bring you back from this.” He reached out for her and she took a step backward. The frown that followed tugged at her heart, but she stayed away, shoulders back and spine stiff. Left him alone there. “Your younger brother and sister miss you, too. Tell me where you are. Let me take away your pain. The Council doesn’t want to hurt you, they want to see you safe among your people and so do I.”

With the storm on top of them, it was almost as difficult to see now as it was to hear. Rain dripped from her forehead into her eyes and lightning flashed like a strobe light, illuminating each individual raindrop so they seemed to move in stop motion.

The tempest attacked the wall around her pain. Little streams flowed over the wall and found the cracks, pooled in them, and pushed the stones away to reveal more. White waterfalls flowed over, and she could feel a fraction of it again. Then more, as an entire section spilled, the stream scattering the stones. She grit her teeth. Her sympathetic nervous system reacted. Heart rate and respiration ticked up. How had she borne this burden for so many days? How could she continue?

Aed watched, those worry lines of his changing from valleys to canyons. She could have her family back again after so long. She could live a pain free life of luxury.

No.

She shook her head slowly. Exaggerated it so Aed couldn’t mistake the gesture. Some of the violence of the storm bled off with the wind settling and the thunder growing more distant.

“I won’t be alone.” She grimaced as the pain reached another crescendo, this one worse than the last. When it had passed, she stepped forward, until he could see clearly into her eyes and she into his. “I will gladly brave the pain and risk death if it means I will be free with my wife and my son, and you can tell your people I will not come back to do their bidding.”

“Your son?” He hadn’t read it in her mind, then. “You have a son? How?”

She reached up and touched his cheek. Tears wanted to fall and she wouldn’t let them. She’d cried so many times since the afternoon he’d sat beside her bed and told her Brenn was gone. That was the word he’d used, she realized now. Gone. Not dead. But he’d let her believe it meant dead. Because her heart had stopped and they’d filled her body with so many drugs to the point she didn’t even know herself, she couldn’t Brenn through their bond, so she’d believed him. She felt Brenn now. Strong. Vibrant. Like the North Star; a distant sun to guide her.

“Don’t, Brother.” She shook her head again. “You don’t get to be part of this, you don’t get to know anything more. You made your choice. You chose them over me, and maybe one day I’ll find it in my heart to forgive you, but not today. I am going to say goodbye now and close this connection. I am among my people and they are waiting for me.”

Now she only had to find the strength for her convictions. Or, perhaps, will alone would be enough.