But no longer.
The rags became armour, golden and resplendent. A fearsome headdress moulded itself from nothingness around her features, obscuring everything save her eyes and mouth. Her right arm extended to the crimson-soaked skies above and with a crack of thunder, a twelve-foot spear dropped from the heavens to land perfectly in her outstretched hand.
Her teeth bared in an animal snarl and this goddess roared, so loudly that the villagers were knocked from their feet, the huts shook, and Danny was forced backwards several paces as through trying to fight against hurricane-force winds.
The Morrigan of Mag Tuiread had returned.
Danny broke his promise. He stood by and he watched, moving not a muscle to stop it.
He did nothing as she scythed through the village’s men, the luckless man whose spear Glon had run himself into first, the drunkard second. She did things to them both that made what the Formorians had done to the villagers seem like an episode of Teletubbies by comparison. His fellow warriors were next, sliced and impaled two and three at a time, cut down and sliced in half as they tried to flee.
Blood had been spilled, revenge had been taken for the unimaginable crime perpetrated. There she could have stopped.
She didn’t.
When the last of the men perished, she paused for a moment, the mammoth spear blood-encrusted from stem to stern in her grasp, her long tresses of jet-black hair flying as sparks popped forth from her skin and earthed themselves around her.
As she drew breath, she turned slowly, her eyes locking with every woman and child huddled terrified in their doorways, shaking, pleading for mercy.
None was shown.
She had become more than a figure approximating human now; had cast away the limitations of a body and become something like a swiftly moving wave of death, a black cloud that went from house to house. When it entered, shrill screams were heard from the inside. Screams quickly cut off. When it exited, there was only silence.
Finally, in the whole of the village there was only one figure left. One man. He faced her without fear as she threw herself toward him, staring unblinkingly into the eyes of this terrible avenging angel as her spear bore down-
-and stopped.
“Caderyn…” she said.
It was her husband. As ever, he held little Coscar in his arms. He stood amidst the dead and dismembered bodies of his former neighbours, toe to toe with the War Goddess that had been his wife.
“Strike,” he said softly. “Please.”
“How can you ask me that?” she returned, her voice shaking.
“How can I? How can you? How can you do this?”
“Look what they did! Look what they did to our SON, Caderyn!” she screamed in fury, pointing to the body of Glon where it lay. Realisation dawned on her face then and she ran to the body and scooped it up, throwing it easily over one shoulder as though he weighed nothing to her. “I must go,” she told Caderyn, “I must place him in the Cauldron.”
“He’ll be like you?”
“He’ll be alive!” she roared back. “I want him to live! Not to die like some HUMAN!”
Caderyn gestured to the massacred villagers. “Yes,” he said hollowly. “Yes, we seem to die easily enough.”
“Gaim, come to me,” she instructed, and the smaller boy obediently scampered to his mother and was duly scooped up also. One of her sons over each shoulder, one living, one dead, she looked at her husband, at his eyes and what they said.
“I can’t go with you,” he said.
“No,” she replied. “But even if you could-”
“I wouldn’t.”
“I can’t come back to you,” she said.
“No,” he replied, staring her down unblinkingly. “You don’t want to come back.”
There was the smallest of pauses. “No.”
At this he nodded, taking one more look around at the massacre the woman he loved had wrought. “Glon will make a fine warrior,” he said weakly, “and Gaim will need him. He’s always needed him…” and he paused, and looked down at the baby sleeping in his arms, “…but you will not take Coscar. Coscar stays with me.”
“I won’t condemn my son to a mortal life-”
“Condemn?” he choked. “Condemn? To be spared the fate of becoming one of you? Capable of this?”
She did not reply.
“Daddy?” Gaim said uncertainly. The Morrigan shrugged him off her shoulder and the little boy’s head swung tearfully between his mother and father. “Daddy, what’s happening? What happened to Glon-? Is he…is he alive?”
His father dropped to one knee, rebalancing his baby brother on his knee as he did so. He beckoned the boy to him and embraced him. “Yes,” he said, hugging him fiercely, though Gaim was too stunned to return the gesture, “yes Gaim. Your Mammy is…is magic, you see. And she’s going to take him to a special place that’ll make him well. And you get to go too and this is the best bit – all three of you are going to be real warriors! No more pretending for you, oh no! You’re the real thing! Isn’t that great?”
Tears dropped from Gaim’s face. “I-I-I just want Glon,” he said, his lip curling as his face crumpled into a confused singularity. “I want Glon and I want Mammy and you and Coscar and I wanna go home and just everything be okay again.”
“I know,” Caderyn whispered. “I know you do, son.”
“Daddy…why is everyone dead? What did Mammy do in those houses? I want that to go away Daddy. Can Mammy magic that? Can you Mammy?”
“Yes,” Caderyn said firmly, turning the boy around. “Yes she can. So you go and make sure your brother gets well and while you’re away, everyone will come back to life, and you’ll be back here before you know it. And I - I’ll,” and his voice wavered before returning to normal, “I’ll be waiting.”
Glon wasn’t fooled one bit. He was about to start another round of questions when a light touch from his mother made his eyes roll white in his head. She had scooped him up over her shoulder again before his cut-strings body could even begin to topple over.
“I’ll always love you,” she told him.
“If you ever see Regan,” he replied, “tell her the same thing.”
She stepped forward, reached out, leant down to touch and kiss Coscar on the cheek. He took a step back, drawing the child tighter into his embrace. She faced him then and the heavens rumbled overhead, the red sheen to the world darkening as though the wound she’d ripped in reality had started bleeding anew.
“Time’s up.”
Danny blinked. It hadn’t been the Morrigan’s younger self who had said those…words…
…the wretched little village, scene of two massacres, dissolved to nothing. He braced himself for the next vignette, preparing to reacclimatise to wherever she chose to deposit him.
This time the space-in-between seemed longer than normal; transitioning from vision to vision before had been quick, like stepping through paper walls. This time it was as though he were passing through a sort of nexus, a busy crossroads in reality; shapes and colours, smells and sounds passed before him as though on a conveyor belt in a gameshow, but he couldn’t get a fix on any of it…save her voice.
“You’ve seen things no-one else has,” it came to him, from such a close range that it felt like she was whispering directly to his mind. “You wanted to know who I was. What this was all about. Consider that your introduction.”
He tried to reply and found that he could, so long as he didn’t mind that he had no clue where his mouth currently resided, or even if he still possessed one in this between-place.
“Introduction? You mean there’s more?”
He sensed dark amusement in her voice. “Yes, Danny. Time has run short. We are too close to her now. She will not permit the visions; it is crucial for her that you were never taught your heritage.”
The between-space began to solidify around them. He felt his arms and limbs come back online, one after the other. He was coming back, from the visions she had sent him,
back to another nightmare.
“Coscar,” he said, knowing the crow was nearby even if he could not yet bring his eyes back into working order to see it, “he’s my ancestor, isn’t he. The one we’re all descended from.”
“Coscar is…” and the Morrigan’s voice paused, “…where you came from, yes.”
“What happened to him? To all of you? How did you go from that goddess to the crow?”
“You’ll learn, Danny. Soon enough, you’ll know. But what’s important is that you embrace the gifts you’ve been given.”
The Otherworld solidified around him. Sensations of cold, and something moving beneath him in great bounds.
“My synaesthesia. It’s more than a condition. It’s…it’s connected to what you can do, what the Tuatha can do. The magic.”
Something big and alive and moving fast across the grass, with him on its back. And beside him, the crow, still perched where it had brushed its wing against his face to trigger the most incredible experience of his life.
“That’s not the gift I was talking about,” it said, and before he could reply or protest, with a chaotic scattering of wings it fluttered free of their shared mount and was gone into the Otherworld skies.
On they went, bounding toward a hilltop no more than a half-mile distant, on which sat the biggest standing stone circle Danny had ever seen. Each slab had to be forty feet high and twenty feet thick at least. Crowning it, resplendent in its impossibility, was a hovering circlet of stone that had decided not to bother with the inconveniences of gravity. Four huge and hungry bonfires bordered the structure to the north, south, east and west.
Impressive as this was in terms of scale, Danny was rather more immediately concerned with the other feature of their destination. Namely, that the whole thing was absolutely heaving with every conceivable type of horrendous creature imaginable. Hundreds of them, circling each of the compass-point blazes, with another multitude within the central summit’s stone circle perimeter.
He caught the smell of magic, immediately familiar from the visions. But magic was far from the only aroma permeating this place. Somewhere, meat was cooking. A lot of meat. Somewhere else, meat was rotting. The twin smells, one alluring, the other overpoweringly nauseating, hit him simultaneously.
“Wwwwwe haaaaaaveeeeee arrrrrrriveeeeeed,” Wily the wolf-faerie informed him. “Caaaaarrrrmannnn awwwwwaitssssss youuuuuuuuuu.”
“Oh…”
A thousand possible ways to end that thought sprung to Danny’s mind, some of them involving long and spectacular strings of swearwords, others involving a sort of impromptu re-creation of a Scooby Doo episode with him as an honorary member of the gang getting the Christ as far away from this living nightmare as possible.
Instead, he closed his eyes for a moment and brought to mind every single memory he had of Ellie, of Luke, of every time in his life when he’d felt calm and happy and at peace, and all of the sensory inputs that had come with them.
When his eyes opened, the faerie fortress was still before him, the seemingly endless hordes undulating and chanting, already noticing his arrival atop one of their own and beginning to draw closer to him. Teeth glinted. Claws shone. Wily was leading him into the thick of the crowds. There was no possibility of escape. The crow was gone. He was alone against them.
“Take me to her,” he told Wily, readying himself for a speech of manly defiance that would show these fuckers he meant business. “And what the fuck are you bunch o’ ugly cunts look-“
“Everybody, yeah…” trilled a voice.
He trailed off. The crowd of faeries that were thickening around Wily as he padded forward all turned their attention away from Danny and toward Danny’s waist as one.
“Rock your body, yeah…”
“…looking at,” Danny finished, but by that stage the wind had rather left his sails.
“Yoooooooouuuuurrrrrrrrr arrrrrssssseeeee issssss sinnnnnnnginggggggg,” Wily observed.
“Aye…I noticed,” he said, fighting down the urge to blush and an acute sense of being an incredibly stupid fucker while he was at it. He’d seen that he still had signal strength down here, but had gotten so wrapped up in the whistle-stop tour of the Morrigan’s origin story that it had faded from his mind. Fishing the phone from his jeans pocket, he saw that it was indeed Ellie calling.
“I ammmmmm taaaaakinnggggggg himmmmmm tooooo seeeeeeee ouuuuurrrr Quueeeennnn,” Wily rumbled to the assembled. One got too close and started to reach out a claw for Danny. Wily’s head snapped around – his jaws clamped – there was a shriek of pain – and the claw was gone. Forever. The crowd shrank back.
“You will die, human,” one of the horde surrounding them slavered. It was like a giant upright wasp; a segmented body, filament-thin wings, red and white hoops rather than yellow. A curved stinger protruded from the crown of its head.
“Our Queen will tear you apart,” this one came from a creature that seemed to have no solidity to it whatsoever; it oozed along like a great slug, but at speed that had enabled it to push to the front of the crowd. He could see no mouth and for a moment wondered where it had spoken fr…no. Wait. There it was. Vertical and four feet long and running half the length of its mass, revealing pulsing innards. He thought he caught a glimpse of something moving inside; something alive, perhaps still being digested…
“Our day of victory is at hand!” squealed a two-foot tall gnarled little thing, jumping up and down with barely repressed excitement. He was as bald as a cue ball and as wrinkled as a thousand-year-old paper bag.
Don’t show fear. You act like it’s not your inevitable right to be brought before Carman and every single one of them will fall on you right now and rip you to shreds. You’re the first human most of them have ever seen. They have no idea what you’re capable of and they are scared out of their minds.
He glanced around for the crow. Nowhere to be seen, but clearly the lines of communication had not been closed; surely that had been the Morrigan’s voice sounding in his head. They were scared of him? Could that be possible?
“Gonna bring the flava, show you how…”
Possible or not, it was his only chance. Danny forced his shoulders to slump and adopted a look of pained impatience. “Lads,” he said, as exasperatedly as he could, “will you shut the fuck up? For two minutes?”
“You do not command us, human!” drooled Wasp-Thing. A huge drop of what could only be poison welled at the tip of that head-stinger. The wings began to thrummmmmm as if it were preparing to launch an attack.
“Get him! Get him! Get him!” squeaked Pint Size. “Kill the filthy aaaAARRRRGHHH!”
Danny waited until Wily’s head had stopped moving and the great wolf’s jaws had stopped crunching. In the sudden hush that had fallen, the crack of bones was very loud indeed.
“Backstreet’s Back – Alright!”
“Prrrroooooceeeeeed, Dannnnnnyyyy Morrrrrrrrrigggggannnn.”
I have got to change that fuckin ringtone, he thought.
Swallowing at the ease with which his mount had brutally despatched and devoured his (albeit miniscule) agitator, Danny answered the call. “Ellie?”
“Danny...”
He frowned. That wasn’t Ellie’s voice.
“Dad?” he said.
“Yes, Danny, I-“
“Da, I-“ he began.
“Danny listen to me. We’re in trouble. Ellie’s-”
“Ellie’s with you? What’s going-”
“You’ve gotta get back up here as quick as you can. Get the sword. Get something. There’s too many of them out there, son.”
The sword? His Da talking about the sword? How was that possible? His Da knew about the Sword of Nuada? Danny’s legs dug into Wily’s sides as though protecting him from toppling off, a prospect which didn’t feel all that far-fetched. His head was spinning. If his Da knew about the sword…what did that mean? Too many of what?
It was his father’s voice, he was sure of it. But there had been something new there to
o, an edge. In the years since Tony Morrigan had re-entered his son’s life he had seemed like a man going through the motions. Danny had chalked that lifelessness down to the fact that his Da’s decade-long adventure with his new life and whatever old slut he’d shacked up with had finally come to an end – maybe she’d kicked him out, sending him crawling to the one woman stupid enough to take him back.
Disappointment that he was back with the family, back with the son, he’d deemed not good enough.
None of that dead quality had existed in his father’s voice just now. He had sounded firm, in control…
Alive.
He had more questions lined up, but got to ask none of them. There was a strangled cry from the other side, and a single click. Not even a dnnnnnn – the call had simply ended, and his mobile had returned to its menu screen as if nothing were amiss.
“Da! DA!”
He redialled. Nothing. No connection. Tried again. Same thing. On his main menu screen, the signal strength dropped from four bars to three, to two, to one, to lost. Seemingly the Otherworld had finally decided to stop switchboarding his calls.
Not the Otherworld. Her.
It was the Morrigan’s voice, in his mind. Danny glanced back up to that imposing, primitive fortress at the summit of the hill – more a mountain, in actuality – on whose nursery slopes they now stood.
Hurry. It seems you’ve caught her attention. I fear I may have not escaped her notice as completely as I hoped – she has sensed our time together. She fears what you may know.
And if she discovers what I know? Danny couldn’t help but think. Or more to the point, what he didn’t know. He had a power, of some sort; but it had failed him during the Morrigan’s massacre of the villagers, whether through her own intervention he didn’t know. From what he’d gleaned thus far, Carman was undisputed ruler of this entire domain. That included the thousand or more hellish creatures into whose midst he was now going. What chance did he realistically have of coming out of any sort of confrontation on top?
Folk'd Up Beyond All Recognition (FUBAR) Page 21