by Lizzy Prince
The passageway wasn’t long, and I came to the end after a minute. It opened into a round chamber with a huge stone slab sitting in the center of the room. Moving my flashlight around the circular space, I saw several alcoves with their own smaller slabs inside. I wasn’t sure exactly what they were for, but I got the impression that they could have been some kind of alter.
“Annie,” a voice whispered, and I shrieked, my phone getting tossed up in the air before smacking onto the ground so the flashlight pointed up and blinded my eyes.
I scrambled to pick it up and whipped it back and forth through the chamber, trying to figure out what was in there with me. My skin was covered with goosebumps, and my teeth were chattering so hard I was afraid I might chip a tooth.
“Annie,” the disembodied voice called out again, and I whirled around to where I thought it was coming from. My heart raced in a panicked tattoo against my chest.
Standing in the center of the giant stone in the middle of the room, was a woman who had definitely not been there moments before. I stumbled back reflexively until my back hit the stone wall behind me, scraping my skin a little as I pressed into it.
She was young, not much older than me and slightly… transparent. Holy Jesus and all his disciples, was this a ghost? Sure, hell, why not? I mean, magic existed, so why not ghosts too? A laugh that was pure nervous and crazy energy escaped my mouth even as I tried to swallow it down.
The ghost seemed content to wait patiently while I had my breakdown. Her long hair was jet black and blowing gently in a breeze that did not exist. Her pale skin was flawless and ethereal. She was beautiful and glowing faintly. Maybe she wasn’t a ghost. Maybe she was an angel. Either way, she looked not of this world. That thought triggered another, and something clicked together in my mind. She didn’t look angelic. She looked a bit like a fairy. At least, how I imagined a fairy would look.
She smiled at me, and my knees chose that moment to give up. I slid down the wall, the sharp edges of stone rasping and scratching my back as I plopped down with an undignified thunk. I knew exactly who this was.
Chapter 5
“Áine?” I coughed out in a croaked whisper. There was a fine sheen of perspiration dotting my skin, even in the freezing temperature. If I didn’t end up with pneumonia, it would be a freakin’ miracle.
The ghost smiled at me, looking pleased.
“Annie,” she said again as if we had nothing better to do than state each other’s names all day long.
“Am I hallucinating?” I whispered, but I wasn’t sure if it was directed at the specter or if I was asking myself.
Áine shook her head slowly, her hair trailing behind her as though she was floating in water rather than standing in front of me. “I am not a dream. I’ve been waiting for a very long time to meet you.”
My heart was beating so rapidly in my chest that I could see my shirt moving with little ripples in time with each beat. “Okay,” I responded with a breathless gasp.
Áine looked at me with something close to pity and shifted to sit down in the middle of the altar, crossing her legs like a kindergartner at story time. There was something so disarming about the move that I found myself relaxing. Just a little. Our gazes locked, and we stared at one another, her with a gentle smile on her face and me a look of petrified confusion. She must have been waiting for me to calm down because she just sat there patiently as if she had all the time in the world. After a few minutes of our silent staring contest, I figure out she wasn’t going to speak until I did. And all I knew was that I didn’t want to stay in an ancient tomb in the middle of the night for longer than necessary.
I cleared my throat and spoke, my voice echoing slightly in the small chamber, even though there was practically no volume to my words. “Did you bring me here?”
The smile on Áine’s face fell a bit, and she appeared almost uncomfortable with the question. “I did. I’m sorry I had to resort to such measures, but I needed to see you. To speak with you.”
I swallowed thickly, because there was an ancient ghost, or whatever she was, in front of me, and she needed to speak to me.
“Okay. Um… that’s fine,” I said, uncertain why I was trying to placate a ghost. “I thought I’d felt something earlier, like someone was calling me to come here, but there wasn’t really a way to come back here. And I guess I assumed I was losing it anyway.” My eyes darted around the small earthen chamber as I wondered how in the world I’d gotten back to the mound. “How did I get here?”
We were essentially underground, the tunnel and room sitting beneath a rounded mound of dirt and grass almost like a hobbit hole. The cold of the walls had penetrated the thin cloth of my t-shirt, and every inch of my body was frozen. I could have blamed that for the tremble in my voice, but I knew it wasn’t the culprit.
“I summoned you with a spell. You were transported here from the marked one’s home.”
Summoned? Transported? Marked one? There was so much to unpack from that statement that I barely knew where to begin. “Transported? Like teleportation?” I asked and immediately felt like an idiot. I was getting my language from Star Trek and asking a fucking ancient witch-ghost if that was what she was talking about.
“You know what, never mind. You summoned me here. Why?”
Áine sat up a bit straighter but was still cross legged on the altar. She looked as though she’d been enjoying watching me struggle to find the right questions and come to terms with where I was and what was happening. It didn’t feel malicious but a little like she enjoyed a good prank every now and again, and she found my confusion amusing. With my last question though, she must have remembered why she was there, and the joy was stripped from her.
“You were born on the summer solstice,” she said, and I frowned at her, because this wasn’t new information to me. I was already aware of the date of my birth.
“Yes…” I said, drawing out the word into a question.
“My sister and I were born on the summer solstice as well.”
It felt like I’d swallowed a stone, and it was stuck in my throat. The tips of my fingers were tingling, and I swore I could feel my ears burning red, like I was embarrassed. But I had no idea what I was feeling. My hand moved up to grasp at the chain around my neck as more and more connections between us were revealed. This charm that had been my mother’s, that bore the same rune that marked my arm.
“What does that mean?” I whispered, digging the fingers of my other hand into the packed dirt floor beneath me. Needing it to ground me while I waited for Áine to give me some kind of explanation for all of this.
Áine stood up on the dais, that mystical breeze floating her dress softly around her. “What do you know of the tale of the two sisters?” she asked, and wondered how up to date she was on modern times. Did she think that the tale of the two sisters was something that was taught in schools, like the Oregon Trail?
“Ah…” I stumbled over my words, “a little.”
I could feel the weight of her gaze on me, and I felt the discomfort of someone assessing me. What did she want me to do, recite her life story back to her? Seeming to understand my dilemma, she nodded, which was beyond insane because she was a transparent, floating ghost, or whatever. How was she understanding my confusion? Was she reading my facial cues?
Don’t sweat the details, I thought as I tried to convince myself to just go with the flow. Hadn’t that been my mantra for this past year anyway?
“My sister and I were two halves of the whole. She was my twin, and we balanced one another. Our father was an immortal fae, and our mother was a human healer. Their union brought magic from the realm of fairy into our world.”
Áine began to sway slightly in place, as though she had the urge to pace, but her incorporeal body didn’t allow for that. “We were not meant to be.”
She looked saddened by these words, even after all of this time. Although, I didn’t really know how long she’d been around. Had she been waiting for several millennia t
o have this chat with me?
“Our father was gone before we were even born, but he came back to see us when our powers began to manifest. He told us that we were a mistake of the universe, that the powers of the fae were not meant to be held in the body of a human. That was why there were two of us. The strength of the magic was too much for one to hold. And so, our magic was split, and we were to be each other’s balance. Light and dark, life and death, these were all just two facets of the same face. You cannot have one without the other.”
She paused, looking down at her hands as if they were stained and dirty, but they looked clean from where I was sitting.
“I fell in love,” Áine said simply, as if this explained everything else. Her brown eyes looked over at me, myriad emotions flashing behind their depths. Joy, elation, pain, sorrow. I understood those emotions. Recognized them and could have been starting into my own eyes just then. Heartache eclipsed time and language. There was a universal shared knowledge and connection that I had in common with her in this too.
“And your sister wasn’t happy about that?” I said quietly, remembering pieces of the story.
Áine nodded and continued. “She feared many things. That was one of her downfalls. She worried too much while I was often lost in fancy and worried too little about things I should have been concerned about.” She appeared lost in her thoughts, like the room and I didn’t exist any longer.
“She was afraid that by giving ourselves to another, we could dilute our power, or even lose it entirely. She was so afraid of not having the ability to help others, with healing, with rain for crops, to make the crops grow strong and healthy, that sometimes she barely lived, so paranoid that she might lose that power. And while it started out as an altruistic need, it morphed into something different over time. Something dark and addictive. She became obsessed with amassing more and more power, and it changed her.
“When I met Connall she was just starting to toe the edge, and she was not pleased that I’d met someone. We had to keep our love secret because she began to spiral down into darkness. She found little ways to keep us apart at first, like stealing our letters or sending Connall messages telling him I no longer wanted to see him. Her actions slowly became more aggressive, and I found she’d put potions in his food to make him ill or to try to make him forget about me. But our love was true, and magic could not erase those feelings. It was the same as the balance that made my sister and I who we were. Every action has a consequence and her magic could not compete against the strength of our love.
“But she was my sister, and I loved her as much as Connall, and I desperately wanted to make her understand that even if I lost my magic from being with him, it was worth it to be so cherished, so adored. It was worth it,” Áine said so softly that I barely caught the words, but they seemed to drift over to my ears as though floating through the air like a particle of dust. “And we didn’t even know if it would have happened anyway. It was all Cailleach’s assumption that we would lose our magic.”
Her head fell to her chest, and her shoulders slumped as if speaking of this, even after all of these years, was still painful. “One night, I went to meet Connall, and Cailleach was standing over his still body. I thought that she’d killed him.”
My dream from the week before came surging back in crisp images. Connall lying on the forest floor, Cailleach sneering down at him like he was less than dirt, the feelings of pain and anguish that ripped through me as I, no Áine, had fallen to her knees.
“I dreamed about this,” I croaked out, and Áine nodded.
“I’ve been waking my memories in you to prepare you for Cailleach.”
“You knew your sister would come back?” My voice rose in anger and surprise even as her words confused me. All of it confused me.
Áine closed her eyes. “The future is never certain. There are always multiple paths that the universe can take,” she said noncommittally, and I fought not to roll my eyes. I guess annoying platitudes had always existed. “But this was the most likely path.”
I took a breath, trying to tamp down on some of the frustration that was rearing its nasty head. “What happened? With Connall, and Cailleach?”
“We had to put her in the ground.” Her face was full of anguish but also resignation, and I knew that she’d done what she had to in order to protect others.
Moments from earlier that day flashed in my mind; the mummified remains of what used to be Cailleach sucking the life out of Hattie in seconds. The terror of her touch, her milky gaze piercing through me. That horrifying husk that used to be a person was roaming around Ireland, doing God knew what. We couldn’t leave her that way. We’d traded in a minnow sized trouble for a whale of a problem.
“How did you put her in the ground?” I asked, hoping it was something we could replicate. And that I didn’t require one of the first witches to do the magic.
“All magic is about balance. In order to bind her magic and keep her in stasis, I had to also bind my own magic.”
“Oh,” I gasped, my brows furrowing as I bit my lip in confusion. “What does that mean?”
“It means that I created a spell that would keep her trapped until I was able to find a way to stop her. I gave up my magic for that spell in order to ensure she couldn’t break out and destroy the world in her search for power.”
I was still so confused about so much of the information she was throwing at me. I tried to grasp the individual pieces and break them down into easily ingested parts. Áine’s form shimmered slightly, and I had a moment of panic when it seemed like she was going to disappear without sharing any real answers. I needed her to tell me how the fuck we were supposed to fix a problem that she’d essentially put a pin in for 5000 years until someone else could clean up the mess.
“Why am I here? Why did you summon me?” The fear from this strange situation was still thrumming through me, but it was less powerful than before. The cold had fully seeped beneath my skin, and my bones were starting to ache. I couldn’t tell if the numbness I was feeling was because of the temperature or because I was barely hanging on to my sanity.
Áine almost appeared to take a step toward me but since she was only a remnant of a person, she just floated slightly in place. “You’re here because you are the only one who can stop Cailleach.”
Chapter 6
I was almost certain that my body must be shutting down because of the cold, because there was no way I’d heard her correctly.
“How am I supposed to stop her? I can count the number of months I’ve known about magic on my hands,” I said, wiggling my fingers as if that was proof that I was the worst possible choice to put the mummified terror back into the ground.
Áine didn’t appear put off by my response, she merely looked at me kindly. I fought to keep the scowl off my face.
“Annie, when I created the spell to put my sister in the ground, I thought of all possible scenarios. I wove a safeguard into the spell so that if Cailleach was to ever come back, a part of my soul would be reborn so that I could stop her once again.”
Áine stared at me, as though willing me to understand her words, but I didn't. Shaking my head, I tried to make sense of it all. “Do you need me to do a spell to bring your soul out or something?”
“No, Annie. You don’t have to do anything. My soul is already there, entwined with yours.” She pointed her ghostly finger at my chest, and I looked down as if I’d find her soul all obvious and obnoxious, like a coffee stain on my shirt.
If I hadn’t already been sitting on the floor, I was sure my knees would have given out. I didn't have the words to ask questions, so I just stood there dumbly, my heart thudding loudly in my ears. Besides, what the hell kind of questions would I even ask?
“When Connall and I created the spell all those years ago, we cast it so that our souls would be seamlessly woven with yours. So that you could access my powers, and I would be able to share memories to help you understand everything that happened.”
; Her words penetrated through the fog shrouding my mind. “Wait, souls? What does that mean?”
“All magic needs balance Annie, and once my sister turned to dark magic, Connall became my balance. My sister was my soulmate of birth, but Connall was my soulmate through choice. I needed him to balance me in the spell, and I also knew that our souls belong together.”
“Are you saying I have part of his soul too?” My head was starting to throb with a headache that was probably part sleep deprivation and part thinking so hard my brain was going to explode. Áine just gave me a sympathetic look, but I noticed she was also looking a little weary.
“No, Annie. My soul is connected to you. Connall’s soul is connected to Munro.”
All I could do was blink at her like an idiot. I had never in a million years anticipated that she would have dropped that bomb on me. There were many questions that started firing off inside of my head about this entire situation, but I tried to remember what the important part was. I couldn’t even begin to think about the implications of the Munro piece of things until later.
“How am I supposed to stop Cailleach?”
With a brisk nod of her ghostly, head she continued, “You need to find the lia fáil. They were gifts from the fae that once belonged to my family, but most of them were hidden to protect this world. The coronation stone where Cailleach was buried is one. The other three are the spear, sword, and cauldron.” Áine’s voice was starting to sound thin and patchy as if she was running out of energy.
Her form faded slightly before she solidified again. Fear pulsed through me that she was going to disappear before she told me what I needed to do.
“Áine? What do I do with them once I have them? Where can I find them?” There was panic in my voice, and I scrambled up stiffly to sit on my knees.