As if intoxicated beyond reason, she found herself walking through the carnage even as it raged. Something about her step made the combatants ignore her, and she was able to walk through several duels and largely ignored by the English, now appearing more and more frequently, belying their ten-to-one outnumbering at the start of the battle with their superior skills and training, winning their duels in the main with ease.
She stepped over the body of her oldest brother Finn at one point. It took her ten paces more before she stepped over his head.
Her uniform once resplendent in green was now scarlet, soaked in blood. Molly Weston did not resemble a rallying call to womankind any longer. Walking slowly and deliberately through the savage ferocity of a slaughter in progress, she looked like something from another time, another world.
The stone was cool and solid to her touch. She had sat with her back to it on many a Sunday evening, a girl being regailed by her brothers and cousins and on special occasions her uncle Lorcan with tall tales of heroes and demons, of faeries and monsters. This sacred stone had been the centre of it all – the Lia Fáil, the Stone of Destiny, the throne of the High King of Ireland.
She leant against it and screamed as though she could undo all of the horrors with a single showing of despair. Her scream was long and loud and rose above the clashing and thudding and hollering of the deathscape around her of which she was now the perihelion. This done, she sank to her knees and let out a shuddering breath.
It felt cold.
The metal, when it slid into her, felt cold, incredibly cold. She was shocked at how cold it was and then shocked at how much pain the body could feel, realising that all of the bumps and scrapes she’d experienced as a little girl were going to be nothing compared to this, the feeling of a foot-and-a-half of metal affixed to the end of a rifle being pushed through her spine and into her stomach.
The coldness vanished, the metal with it, and warmth replaced it; the hotness springing from the sensation of her blood escaping in a torrent from the gaping hole now rent in her body. She was able to turn, and saw with a faint disappointment that her killer had not stayed to ensure his job was complete – he had moved on, confident that she was beyond aid. How professional.
You had to admire that…in a way…
Slowly, with care, she settled herself against the Lia Fáil, refusing to look down at the sea of blood now pooling around her, replacing the gaudy vista of wholesale butchery unravelling before her with memories of gentle evenings, her family beside her, death nothing but a far-off impossibility.
As she died, Molly Weston’s blood seeped into the soil of the hill of Tara, along with the blood of more than four thousand of her fellows, cut down with such brutal ferocity that the collective violence of their deaths sent a shockwave through the forces beyond those normally perceivable by humanity.
With that blood, a barrier was weakened.
A door was opened.
Not completely. Not for long.
But wide enough. For long enough.
Three days had passed since the battle of the hill of Tara. In those three days all of the bodies of the fallen United Irishmen had begun to decompose. The entire hillside was now a stinking fetid sea of corpses, covered in mayflies and maggots, all in the early and most vigorous stages of decomposition.
All save one.
A hand, its fingers long and tapered and immaculate, reached out and gently touched Molly Weston, turned her dead body’s face this way and that. She was propped still against the Stone of Destiny, all but drained of her blood through the hole in her back and the matching one in her gut. And yet not one maggot crawled in her wounds. Not a single fly feasted on her. She was untouched, preserved.
“We have you to thank,” the man cupping her face whispered to her. He was on his haunches before her, and closer examination of him would have challenged that definition of him as a man. His face was angular, his smile needle-sharp in front of a tongue too darting, his limbs overly long and unnaturally flexible.
Sensing something in the air, the pale man whipped his head up and held out his hand, palm flat, as if warding something off.
“Not her!” he ordered. “Not this one! Go! Find one of the fallen!”
There was only silence across the hilltop. Until, twenty feet or so away, one of the decomposing English corpses began to twitch. It was only a finger at first, and only the slightest of movements. A few seconds later, however, the torso jerked, as if some kindly and hopelessly optimistic time-travelling doctor had decided to try to revive the dead man with a set of defibrillators.
The pale man looked over at the act of resurrection happening not a stone’s throw from him. The only emotion written on his thin face was that of impatience.
“Are you planning on taking all day, Dian?”
With horrendous clumsiness, the corpse got up. This took it several attempts. In the three days it had lain on the grass, worms, insects and moisture had already set to work with terrible efficiency. It lolled to the side, barely able to stand.
“Dooooother,” it croaked, through a throat torn to shreds from bullets and beetles. “We muuuust go…”
“Patience, brother Dian,” Dother replied, holding up a hand. “Credit where its due. This one and her kind have ended our exile through their sacrifice. You, go. Find a more hospitable host for yourself than that pathetic vessel.”
Dian, looking out at him through the one remaining eye the English solider possessed, said nothing. He shambled off, jerking like a puppet, but making remarkable speed across the fields. Dother remained there until he sensed Dian was at a sufficient distance. He brought his face close to that of Molly Weston’s, almost brushing her impossibly unblemished lips with his own.
“How to reward you…” he mused.
And then he saw it.
Alone of all the life on the hilltop, a single organism had made a home on her corpse. He saw it flit across the top of her breasts and with speed and dextrousness a human could never hope to match a flick of his wrist had captured it in his fist, which he now uncurled even as he commanded the creature not to escape. It obeyed, though not really understanding why it did, and he peered at it and began to smile.
“Yes,” he said with quiet satisfaction, “you shall be my first…”
Slowly, reverentially, he placed the spider inside Molly Weston’s mouth.
It stayed there for a moment, until he commanded it to do what it must, and it duly scuttled down her dead throat. From here he took over, knowing the spider had only moments of life left to it in the oxygen-starved environment of her interior.
He took the tiny spark of life that flickered inside the spider, feeling the little thing die as he did so, and he brought it to the dried-up wellspring of life that had once housed Molly Weston’s soul.
With a cry that had not been heard in this realm for millennia, he smashed the spark into the wellspring.
Molly’s eyes jerked open instantly. He hopped to his feet, lightly, acrobatically, bounding backwards to be sufficiently out of range of her wildly thrashing body, though not beyond the range of her squeals and cries and shrieks of outrage and fear and pain as the Remaking fit overtook her and the spider’s lifespark, fused with her human soul, began to have the effect he’d known it would.
She grew. Her skin darkened and hardened. Her mouth closed up and then reopened as a huge and hungry maw ringed with teeth, her human DNA overwriting the spider’s influence. Hard bristles formed all over her new skin. Her legs melded together and fused, rippling around and above her distending head and torso to become a monstrous carapace. And the legs – oh! The glorious legs, four pairs of them, they erupted, each pair causing her to emit a roar that shook the land on which he stood.
When completed, feral and confused, she launched herself at him and he dodged her attacks effortlessly time and again, spinning and ducking under her legs as she crashed to a thrashing heap, her human instincts colliding with her new spider-form.
Unti
l eventually, as he’d known it would, the hunger overtook her and she stood before him, defeated in her attempts to first attack and then consume him. All of the fight and the spirit she had possessed as a human she still possessed. He had chosen well.
“If you’re hungry, you’re knee-deep in the dead,” he pointed out, his first words to his greatest servant, whom he would one day call Sarah.
She refused. For the longest time, she refused, but was too terrified to move from that hilltop, retreating into a deep dark hole, wallowing in bewilderment and horror at the thing she had become, slowly starving to death.
He waited outside her parlour, the fly to her spider, and he told her the legends anew. The destiny of the faerie race. The gift he had bestowed upon her. Immortality. He would teach her, he promised, to project a glammer so that she could walk amongst her former kind, if she so wished.
There had been no afterlife upon her death, no Christian heaven, no Abrahamic God to salve her eternal soul. She had killed. She was a murderer. He represented her only hope, not for salvation, but for something more glorious.
He watched her emerge from that hole into the fields of the dead.
He watched as she feasted, for the first time.
But not the last.
**
Now
More of his wolf-shapes were joining him, at either end of the street. They had the place surrounded by now, Dother knew, but that barrier seemed as resolute as ever. He had to hand it to Dermot, and by that, of course, he meant he was aching to kill the little prick.
One of the wolf-shapes misjudged the radius of the barrier and was pushed backward onto the road. An oncoming car filled with fat useless stinking fetid humans blared its horn and swerved around, almost careening into the fence of one of the houses further down the street-
Yes. Yes, he had it.
He glanced at Sarah. “Don’t play with your food so,” he told the spider, as her mouth closed over the luckless boy’s torso, even as he tossed the discarded right leg to a grateful wolf behind him. “We have work to do.”
**
Co. Wexford, Ireland, 43 AD
It was the Battle of Mag Tuiread all over again.
The little settlement had been forged in a clearing in the woods, built around the river, its circumference slowly enlarged with each successful season as new homes were built and sons and daughters grew up to occupy them.
The Formorians had burst in from all sides, with a synchronicity that would have been impressive had the consequences been less horrific.
The people here may have known of the beings that walked the land. Hunting parties may have glimpsed them in the distance, moving through the trees. Whispers from travellers beyond their small borders spoke of secret doors in the plains, of fires seen on distant hilltops and the sound of song and savage laughter carrying across the night air.
Danny witnessed a huge, one-eyed Formorian warrior cleave a man’s head in two with one blow of a warhammer the size of a twelve-year-old. The man’s wife, whom he had been shielding while he still possessed something atop his shoulders, screamed like nothing he’d ever heard before and he realised dimly that he was hearing an entire person’s life spill out from their mouths as they made the last sound they knew they were ever likely to make; it was a scream that raged of loss and injustice and fear.
The warhammer curved in the air. The scream ended in a bloody gurgle.
This was no fairytale.
It was the same story wherever he looked. The village had a population of maybe two hundred souls, judging by the houses and by the numbers of people he could see fleeing, running from their homes or into their homes, depending on where the Formorians currently were – and they were everywhere, it seemed. On horseback, on foot, they rode or stomped on thunderous legs through everything these people had built, weapons swinging, the end of every swing seeming to find soft human flesh.
A few of the men tried to fight back. He ached to see it; their bravery, as they stood up to these great impossibilities on their own all-too-mortal legs, swinging makeshift swords or farming implements with whatever measure of skill they possessed. What strikes did get through the Formorians’ casual defensive measures simply rebounded off the creatures’ hides as though the men were trying to battle beings made of rubber. He had time to see the knowledge of their own doom appear in their eyes before that doom was meted out at the end of a spear, an axe, a sword, a hammer.
Blood ran the soil red.
Staggering on nerveless legs towards the central well where he’d first materialised, he was almost face to face with a Formorian before he knew what was happening. It was monstrous, nine feet tall, and with a great horn protruding from the centre of its forehead that immediately put him in mind of a rhino. Whatever it was, it seemed to have the mental capabilities of a beast, too; it swung that great lumbering head, nostrils flaring as it scented the air. Two tiny eyes, almost completely blue, were deep-set back a few inches below that horn and they searched the massacre for a new victim amongst the scattering villagers.
They alighted on two little boys, huddled together on the grass, between two dead warriors. They clung to each other, not crying, not screaming, but so pale they looked like ghosts in the sunshine.
Two boys he recognised.
Glon. Gaim.
“No,” Danny breathed.
The rhino smiled, exposing two rows of teeth in both its upper and lower jaws; the foremost set were needle-sharp for tearing, whilst those at the back were thick and blunt for grinding. Hefting the axe he carried in both arms, he took a long step toward the boys..
The Morrigan’s tears as she watched her younger self play with her two oldest sons in the pond. Her insistence that she leave Danny and go to watch over them. He’d assumed it was so he could witness that little tête-à-tête between the younger version and Caderyn that had given him such pause for thought. But perhaps it had been to be with her boys, to see them in the last few moments of their innocent lives, before…before this.
Miming along with her younger self’s words. He had feeling that this was a memory she visited often, condemned to wander it as impotent and ineffectual as a ghost, powerless to change anything that had transpired here today. He could not see her younger self now, or any version of her, but he assumed the corporeal version was somewhere apart from this horrific event, perhaps protecting her husband and youngest child.
He did not want to be immaterial. He did not want to be powerless to stop this from happening; to have to stand by and witness horrors like this occur.
Standing there, in the midst of that chaos and slaughter, screams ringing in his ears, the smell of blood and death flooding his nostrils, fear and terror in the air so thick he could taste them and sights assaulting his eyes that he had never imagined to see, all of it seemed to coalesce somewhere deep inside; he felt his synaesthesia bleed sights into sounds into smells into tastes…
…and the Formorian, about to step through him, stopped in his tracks.
Blinked.
Took a step back.
Danny cocked his head. The Formorian did the same, that massive horn tilting, the sun glinting off the axe’s bloody blade.
“Oh…” Danny said as the penny dropped, “…fuck.”
With a roar that seemed to shake the world, the Formorian swung his axe. He saw it coming, and knew as soon as the movement began that he would never be able to get out of the way of that swing; the Formorian was as strong as he was ugly, and that blade would soon bite into his midriff and carry on until it exited him somewhere around the right shoulder, slicing him neatly-
- or it would, except he wasn’t standing.
He was ducking. He’d already ducked.
The axe woooshed as it cut through the air directly above his head, passing harmlessly over him. He straightened up and realised the Formorian, expecting the passage of his weapon to be slowed by the small matter of striking the less aerodynamic of Danny’s internal organs, was now slightly off
-balance since this had failed to occur. Of course, he wouldn’t remain this way for long; he’d soon step into the swing, regain his footing, and bring the axe around for another-
-except he couldn’t.
He couldn’t because with a snarl, Danny had leaped onto the giant’s back.
It was as if, a part of him mused, some portion of his consciousness was existing a few seconds ahead of time and had the ability to review courses of action that would or wouldn’t work and pass them back to his past self.
The Formorian yelled in outrage, and Danny’s world tilted crazily as he began to ride the world’s ugliest mount. For a split second as the Formorian danced a jig of fury designed to unseat his rider, he locked eyes with two astonished little boys witnessing this performance; unknown to them, two more Formorians were approaching them from the rear, weapons raised.
Rhino should have dropped the axe to the ground, freeing up his hands and enabling him to reach around and pluck off his passenger. Failing that, he should have simply have chosen to flop backwards full-length on the soil, a move that would have squashed Danny into a thin paste beneath the weight of this bastard’s massive bulk.
Mighty warriors, the Formorians. But not too bright.
What Rhino chose instead to do was to try and swing his axe up above his head to bring down on Danny, with the intention of splitting this annoyance’s head open like a log on a chopping block. It was a massively difficult stroke and one that Danny had no difficulty whatsoever in avoiding.
Unfortunately for Rhino, he had somewhat more difficulty in avoiding it.
Danny dismounted the beast as it thumped into the ground. He planted a foot on its chest and with a heave that made his arms afire with the strain, removed the axe from its current parking space, embedded in skull and brainmatter. By the time he had lifted it (How? How am I doing this? How am I strong enough?), the approaching Formorians’ footfalls had alerted Glon and Gaim, and they had scampered to the man who had despatched the previous would-be murderer, sheltering behind him and peering out.
Folk'd Up Beyond All Recognition (FUBAR) Page 13