The standing stones rose before him like the ribs of some vast creature long dead, their surfaces slick with mist and time. Séamus felt his breath catch: not from exertion, though the climb had left him hollow-limbed and trembling, but from the way the air itself seemed to thicken as he crossed into the sanctuary’s embrace. The stones pulsed. Not with light, precisely, but with something deeper: a rhythm that found the stuttering beat of his own heart and matched it, measure for measure.
Aisling flickered at his shoulder, and he turned to her with a scholar’s instinct to catalogue the change. Five years she had haunted him. Five years of translucent edges and half-formed gestures, a sister reduced to suggestion and sorrow. But here, in this threshold place where the mist clung to ancient stone like memory to bone, she was more. The curve of her cheek held definition. The dark fall of her hair moved as though touched by wind he could not feel. Her eyes, grey like his own, grey like the sea that had taken her, fixed on him with an intensity that made his chest ache.
Her lips moved. Urgent. Soundless. The same warning she had tried to give him a thousand times before, in dreams that left him gasping awake, in the corner of his vision when exhaustion made the veil thin. He had never been able to hear her. Had never learned to read the shape of words on a ghost’s mouth.
“What?” he whispered, the word breaking on his tongue. “Aisling, what?”
She pointed past him, toward the collapsed floor at the sanctuary’s heart, where darkness pooled like spilled ink. Her hand (nearly solid now, nearly real) trembled with the effort of manifestation. Behind her, between the standing stones, the fey lights began their twilight dance, cold and blue as drowned stars.
His fingers found the grooves worn into stone, following spirals and slashes that predated Latin, predated Christ, predated everything but the land itself and the old gods who still walked it. The ogham spoke in the language of trees and thresholds, each notch a doorway, each angle a turning. His lips shaped the words silently first, a scholar’s caution, then gave them voice, low and reverent:
“Where three waters meet and three souls gather, the threshold opens for those who linger between breath and memory.”
The translation settled in his chest like a stone dropped into deep water. Three waters. Three souls. He thought of the spring flowing through the eastern wing, the sea beyond the cliffs, the rain that never ceased in this liminal place. But the souls,
Aisling’s urgency suddenly made terrible sense. She had not led him here to free her alone. The ritual required more than one ghost, more than one mourner. His salvation and hers were bound to others, to hauntings he had not yet encountered, to grief that was not his own. The threshold would open, yes. But not for him alone.
The mist moved with intention, coiling tighter where Aisling passed through it, her form disturbing the vapor in ways wind never could. She drifted between the standing stones, her translucent fingers trailing across surfaces Séamus had already examined, finding patterns within patterns his mortal eyes had overlooked. The druidic carvings seemed to shift in her wake, knotwork rearranging itself into configurations that hurt to perceive directly.
She stopped before the central stone, the tallest of the circle, and pressed both palms against it. The ogham there blazed suddenly visible: not carved but written in light, flowing script that named the dead and the debts they carried. Séamus stumbled forward, manuscript pages scattering from nerveless fingers, understanding blooming like frost across his heart.
The fey light descended like a falling star, its radiance neither warm nor cold but other: a luminescence that belonged to no mortal flame. It settled beside his face, patient as death itself, and cast its pallor across ogham he’d traced a dozen times without comprehension. Now the words revealed themselves: An té a thugann fuil, fuil a fhaigheann ar ais. Who gives blood receives blood in return. The price of release carved in stone older than memory.
The melody died on the mist-laden air, and Séamus’s breath caught. Not at its fading, but at what remained in its wake. The silence pressed too heavy, too watchful. His sister’s form flickered at the sanctuary’s edge, but her attention had turned elsewhere, toward the eastern colonnade where stone met shadow. Someone else walked this threshold. Someone living, whose footfalls disturbed the ancient dust.
The movement resolved itself into something neither wholly shadow nor wholly substance: a figure that moved with the deliberate caution of one who had learned to read danger in the set of a stranger’s shoulders. Séamus’s fingers found the worn leather grip of his knife, though even as they closed around it, he recognized the gesture’s futility. Iron might turn aside certain spirits, drive back the restless dead who had not yet learned they no longer drew breath, but against flesh and bone it required strength he had long since surrendered to sleepless nights and insufficient meals.
His true protection lay elsewhere: in the manuscripts that lined his satchel, their parchment edges soft with handling; in the patterns of ogham he had traced until his fingertips knew their grooves better than his own palm-lines; in the accumulated weight of stories and rituals that had carried him across black waters and treacherous coastal paths to this liminal place where the world wore thin.
Aisling’s form brightened with sudden urgency, her translucent hand gesturing: not in warning, but in something else. Recognition, perhaps. Or inevitability. The fey lights that had danced between the pillars moments before had fled, leaving only the guttering flame of his single candle to hold back the encroaching dark.
The figure stepped forward, and Séamus forced himself to stillness despite every instinct that screamed for flight. Running would serve nothing. If this newcomer meant violence, the temple’s twisted corridors offered no sanctuary; if they sought the same knowledge he did, then perhaps,
He steadied his breathing, drawing on the discipline that had sustained him through five years of haunting. His voice, when he found it, emerged hoarse from disuse but clear enough to carry across the stone-cold space between them.
“The threshold is wide enough for more than one seeker.”
The stranger emerged fully into the candlelight, and Séamus’s breath caught. A woman, tall and battle-scarred, her copper braids bound tight against a warrior’s skull. Her hand rested on a spear shaft with the casual intimacy of long partnership, and her eyes, green as spring moss on standing stones, swept the chamber with predatory assessment before settling on him.
She took in his gaunt frame, his ink-stained fingers still hovering near the knife he would never draw in time, the scattered manuscripts that represented his only true armor against the world’s violence. Her gaze lingered on the space beside him where Aisling stood invisible to all but him, and something shifted in her expression. Not softening, precisely, but a recognition of shared burden.
“You see them too,” she said. Not a question. Her voice carried the rough edges of someone who had screamed herself hoarse and learned to speak through the wreckage. “The dead who will not rest.”
Séamus’s hand fell away from the useless blade. His manuscripts had brought him here; perhaps they would protect him still, though not in any way he had anticipated.
“I mean no trespass,” he called out in Gaelic, his voice threading through the mist-thick air with more steadiness than his hammering heart warranted. The words of his ancestors, shaped by a peasant’s tongue but weighted with a scholar’s precision. Then Latin, the language of preserved knowledge: “Non transgredior. He rose slowly, hands visible, empty save for ink stains that marked him as clearly as any scribe’s tonsure. The manuscripts lay scattered at his feet like fallen leaves, their careful script catching candlelight. His credentials, his identity, his claim to belong among these ancient stones where knowledge had once been sacred and scholars had walked as equals to warriors.
The air turned colder still. Aisling’s form blazed translucent-bright, more substantial than he’d witnessed since the drowning: her small hands outstretched, her drowned-dark hair streaming as though caught in underwater currents. She positioned herself between him and the approaching footsteps, a guardian fashioned from grief and salt-water, her mouth opening in that soundless scream that had haunted five years of his nights.
The candle flame writhed like a living thing, throwing shadows that transformed his careful annotations into writhing ogham, his sister’s translucent form into something vast and terrible. His ink-stained fingers moved instinctively to the nearest manuscript (a fragment describing threshold guardians) even as his scholar’s mind calculated: three heartbeats until the stranger rounded the corner, perhaps four until he would know whether hope or ending approached through the mist-thick dark.
The weight of those years pressed against his chest like the stone walls surrounding him. Every manuscript bore the ghost-marks of its acquisition. The corner of the Armagh fragment still bore the water stain where he’d nearly lost it fording a swollen stream; the vellum sheet describing threshold ceremonies carried the smell of peat smoke from the hermit’s cave where he’d transcribed it by memory, forbidden to remove the original; the collection of oral traditions he’d laboriously committed to writing still showed the tremor in his script from three days without sleep, racing to capture the words of a dying monk who claimed descent from the last temple druids.
Each page represented not merely knowledge but cost. The calluses on his writing hand. The permanent stoop in his shoulders from hunching over borrowed desks. The suspicious glances of monks who wondered why a peasant boy sought learning above his station. The cold monastery floors where he’d slept in exchange for copying duties. The hunger that had become so familiar he barely noticed it anymore, trading food for access to restricted collections.
And beneath it all, threading through every desperate hour of study. The knowledge that she had chosen, deliberately chosen, and he had lived while she drowned. Five years of her translucent form hovering at his shoulder, mouth moving in words he could never quite hear, eyes holding questions he could not answer.
Until the dreams began three months ago. Her ghost-hand pointing westward. The vision of standing stones and collapsed sanctuaries. The certainty, bone-deep and undeniable, that she was leading him here: to this threshold, this convergence of worlds, this last desperate hope that scholarship might accomplish what grief could not.
His fingers trace the ogham inscriptions he has documented, the ancient script carved into his memory as deeply as into stone. Each stroke corresponds precisely to the carvings visible on the temple doorways beyond his chamber: the symbols match perfectly, confirming what months of sleepless study have promised. This place holds the threshold ritual described in the fragmentary ninth-century text he discovered in a water-damaged codex in Armagh, buried beneath accounts of grain tithes as though the scribe feared what he preserved.
The ceremony that can release a spirit bound by sacrifice and guilt.
His breath catches. The words swim before his vision, Latin and Gaelic interweaving like the knotwork on the pillars outside. Three participants of willing heart. The hour between dog and wolf. A threshold where the veil grows thin. He has two of three elements: the place, the knowledge. But the ritual requires what he has never possessed. Companions who would stand with him in this liminal space, who would speak the words of release for a ghost they cannot see.
Aisling’s form brightens near the doorway, more solid than he has ever witnessed her. She is trying to tell him something. Waiting.
The manuscripts form a constellation of understanding. Each placement deliberate, each connection hard-earned through years of being dismissed by better-born scholars who saw only the peasant’s son, never the mind that could hold three languages and parse meaning from water-stains and worm-holes. His ink-stained fingers hover above the arrangement, and he realizes he has created something unprecedented: a complete ritual reconstruction that exists nowhere else in the mortal world, assembled from whispers and ruins and desperate need.
His voice shapes syllables that have not been spoken in centuries, the Old Irish rolling through the chamber with a resonance that makes the candlelight shiver. Each word carries weight here, substance, as though the temple itself recognizes what the Church’s Latin cannot touch. The language of thresholds and transformations, of bargains struck between the living and the dead, between this world and the next.
The authority he wields here was purchased with years of hunger, with nights spent shivering in monastery doorways, with the casual cruelty of noble-born scholars who mocked his calloused hands even as they failed to comprehend the texts he unraveled. Every dismissal, every contemptuous glance has led to this threshold moment where only he possesses the knowledge to breach what the temple guards. Where Aisling’s drowning might transform from senseless tragedy into purposeful sacrifice.
The ogham strokes blur beneath his ink-stained fingers, the ancient grooves worn smooth by centuries but still legible to one who has sacrificed everything to learn their language. Séamus kneels among the scattered manuscripts, his body folded over the parchment he liberated from that monastery library three months past. The abbot had called it heretical, had threatened to burn it, never knowing the peasant scribe had already committed every word to memory before slipping the original into his satchel in the hours before dawn.
The words shimmer in the candlelight: threshold, witness, alignment. Terms he has parsed and re-parsed until their meaning dissolved and reformed like morning mist. Release requires precision, requires understanding not just of language but of the spaces between worlds, the moments when the veil grows gossamer-thin.
When he lifts his gaze, his sister stands within the stone circle.
Not the peripheral shadow that has tracked his movements for five years. Not the translucent flicker he has grown accustomed to addressing in whispers, drawing stares from strangers who think him mad. Aisling manifests here with a solidity that steals his breath. Her form still wavering at the edges but present, undeniably present, her drowned hair streaming behind her as though she remains suspended in that river current, as though the water never released her even as her body sank into the mud.
Her face holds the roundness of twelve years. He has aged into angles and hollows, into the gaunt architecture of obsession, while she remains eternally the child who pushed him toward the bank, who chose his survival over her own.
The grey eyes that mirror his own burn with an urgency that transcends speech. She has always been the brave one, the one who acted while he hesitated, who dove into dark water while he froze on the shore.
The gesture tears through him like a blade. Her small hand, translucent but unmistakable, sweeping toward the sanctuary’s ruined floor where moonlight carves through mist to reveal the darkness beneath broken stone. Understanding arrives not as revelation but as recognition, the terrible clarity of pattern finally perceived.
Years of wandering collapse into this single moment. The fever-dreams that drove him from his village, dismissed as grief-madness by those who found him raving in ditches. The whispered syllables he caught at crossroads, always just beyond comprehension. The way his feet carried him westward against all reason, toward these islands where no scholar of his station had cause to travel. Each manuscript he stole or copied or traded his last coin to glimpse. All of them breadcrumbs she had scattered across his path, leading him here, to this threshold, to this night when the veil wore thin enough for her purpose to manifest.
She has been speaking all along. He simply lacked the grammar to hear her, the vocabulary of the dead that this place finally provides.
The boundary between worlds shivers as he crosses it. Cold rushes up through the broken flagstones, not the honest chill of winter but something older, something that remembers when these stones stood whole and blood darkened their surfaces. His breath clouds white in the suddenly frigid air. Aisling blazes brighter, her translucent form acquiring weight and shadow, features sharpening until he can count the freckles across her nose, see the exact shade of terror in her eyes.
Her mouth shapes the word again and again, lips forming consonants he should recognize. The silence between them has never felt more absolute, more cruel. He strains toward understanding, watching her jaw work, her tongue press against teeth. Brother. Brother.*
The word finally penetrates, not through sound but through the marrow-deep recognition of blood calling to blood.
Séamus drops to his knees where the standing stones converge, fingers trembling as he spreads the manuscript: copied in secret from a crumbling codex, its margins dark with his desperate annotations. The ancient Gaelic syllables scrape from his throat, each word tasting of salt and sorrow. The stones answer with cold blue light that crawls across their surfaces like frost, pulsing in rhythm with his racing heart, growing brighter as the boundary between worlds grows thinner.
The cold of her touch spreads through his skull like winter water, and her mouth shapes words he finally hears (not yet, not alone) as the blue light fractures into threads that reach beyond the circle toward something in the darkness. The manuscript’s edges curl and blacken. Behind Aisling’s translucent form, other shapes begin to coalesce: the massacre’s dead, drawn by the threshold he has torn open.
The fey lights pulse in synchronized patterns as Séamus spreads his manuscripts across the stone floor, their glow intensifying whenever his fingers trace certain passages. They are reading over his shoulder, these ancient watchers, measuring his intent and the depth of his desperation.
He can feel their scrutiny like breath against the nape of his neck, neither warm nor cold but present in a way that makes his skin prickle. The lights drift closer when he pauses over a particular text, a fragment copied from an older source that describes the idir dhá shaol. The space between two worlds where spirits might pass through if the proper words are spoken, the proper offerings made.
Aisling’s form flickers more solidly in the peripheral vision of his left eye, always just there, always watching. Tonight she seems almost substantial enough to cast a shadow, though shadows here behave strangely, pooling in corners where no darkness should gather.
The manuscripts crackle under his touch, their vellum pages brittle from age and rough handling during his long journey. His own annotations crowd the margins in cramped script: desperate theories, cross-references to half-remembered oral traditions, sketches of ritual configurations he’d glimpsed in dreams that might have been sendings from his sister or merely the fevered products of guilt and exhaustion.
One of the fey lights descends until it hovers directly above a particular passage, its illumination so bright the Latin words seem to burn against the page: Ianua requirit tres animas vinctas. The door requires three bound souls. His breath catches. He’d read this line a dozen times before, but always assumed it meant the dead: three spirits to open the way. But what if it meant the living? Three haunted souls, each carrying their own ghost?
The light pulses once, deliberately, as though confirming his sudden understanding. The temple is waiting, but not for him alone.
The hum rises from the standing stones like a voice from beneath the earth, too low for hearing but felt in the marrow of his bones, in the hollow of his chest where his heart stutters against the vibration. Séamus’s hands still over the manuscript as the sensation builds, neither painful nor pleasant but present in a way that makes his breath shallow.
The ogham inscriptions ignite along the nearest pillar. Not with flame but with a cold luminescence that traces each ancient groove, each deliberate cut made by druidic hands centuries dead. The symbols pulse in sequence, a language older than Latin, older than the Gaelic his mother taught him at her knee. He knows enough to recognize the pattern: welcome and witness and something that might mean threshold or doorway or the space between heartbeats where anything might slip through.
Aisling moves closer, her translucent form drawn toward the glowing pillar as iron to lodestone. For the first time in five years, her mouth opens and he hears, faint as wind through grass, a single word: Soon.
The grinding rises through stone and earth, through the collapsed flagstones where centuries of moss have claimed what druids once consecrated. Not threat but recognition: the crypt exhaling after holding its breath through generations of silence. Dust sifts upward through cracks in the floor, carrying the scent of old incense and older bones, of ceremonies performed when the Roman legions still feared the northern mists.
Séamus feels it in his ink-stained fingers, in the parchment that trembles beneath his touch. The manuscripts speak of thresholds and gatherings, of rituals requiring multiple voices to bridge the distance between living and dead. His sister’s ghost turns from the pillar to face him, her translucent features urgent with meaning he has been too desperate to see: You cannot do this alone.
The fey lights converge above the standing stones, tracing patterns that mirror the ogham inscriptions on the lintels: a language of invitation written in cold fire. Séamus’s manuscripts flutter as if breathed upon, pages falling open to passages he has read a hundred times but never understood: the pronouns are plural, the verbs conjugated for many voices. The ritual demands what he has spent five years avoiding: witnesses to his grief, companions in his guilt.
The stones sing now with voices older than memory, their harmonics threading through Séamus’s bones until his teeth ache with the frequency. The wavering air splits, not violently, but with the slow inevitability of a wound reopening, revealing darkness shot through with silver veins that pulse like a heartbeat. Aisling reaches toward it, her fingers passing through the threshold’s edge, and for one terrible moment her face contorts in what might be recognition or warning before the door stills, incomplete, hungry for what has not yet arrived.
The ogham lines resist him at first, their angular cuts filled with centuries of grime and lichen that his fingernails cannot fully dislodge. Séamus works by candlelight that gutters in drafts he cannot source, each flicker making the carved symbols seem to writhe against the weathered stone. His lips shape the archaic syllables (an lucht a iompraíonn meáchan na ndíoltasach) and the translation settles heavy in his chest: those who carry the weight of the unavenged.
He traces lower, where the inscription continues in a hand less practiced than the first, as though added in haste or desperation. The threshold demands multiple keys. Not a key, but keys. Plural. His breath catches.
Behind him, Aisling’s presence intensifies: that peculiar coldness that raises the hairs on his neck and arms. When he glances back, she hovers near the text itself, her form more substantial than he’s seen in months, almost solid enough to cast shadow. Her mouth moves in that soundless way that has tormented him through five years of one-sided conversations, and her translucent hand gestures frantically toward a sequence of symbols he hasn’t yet reached.
“I’m trying,” he whispers, hating how his voice breaks. “Just let me. The more desperately he needs to see her clearly, to understand what she’s trying to tell him, the more she dissolves into suggestion and shimmer. By the time he turns fully toward her, she’s little more than a disturbance in the candlelight, a cold spot in the air that might be imagination or grief or both.
He returns to the inscription with shaking hands, copying the symbols into his leather-bound journal with mechanical precision, each stroke of his quill an act of faith that meaning will emerge from accumulation, that somewhere in these fragments lies the formula for release.
The manuscript’s edges blur in the candlelight as Séamus forces his attention back to the ogham sequence, but his scholar’s mind catches on peripheral details the way a fisherman’s net snags on submerged stones. The flame gutters again (north, then west, then south) and this time the pattern registers as deliberate. Unnatural.
He turns, pulse quickening, and sees nothing but shadows pooling between the pillars. Yet Aisling has moved to the doorway, her translucent form rigid with attention, staring out toward the courtyard with an intensity that makes his breath catch. She’s never looked away from him before. In five years of haunting, her gaze has been fixed always on him, accusatory or pleading or both.
Now she watches something else.
Séamus rises slowly, joints protesting from hours crouched over stone. Through the doorway, mist coils across the courtyard in patterns that suggest movement, presence, arrival. The moss shows disturbances he cannot quite resolve into footprints: or refuses to, because acknowledging them means acknowledging he is no longer alone in this threshold place, and his solitary vigil is about to become something far more complicated.
The satchel’s leather strap parts company with his shoulder as he kneels, manuscripts spilling across damp stone like autumn leaves. His fingers find the sanctuary’s edge where floor becomes absence, where the standing stones below thrust up through centuries of accumulated earth. One page escapes his gathering hands and the wind pins it against his knee with deliberate pressure.
One who speaks for the dead, one who seeks blood-justice, one who bears broken oaths, and one who preserves truth.
Four supplicants. Four roles.
He retrieves the parchment with trembling hands, ink-stained fingers tracing words that suddenly carry the weight of prophecy rather than poetry. The temple didn’t call him here to work alone. It called him to wait.
Aisling’s form sharpens. Edges crystallizing from mist into something nearly flesh. Her grey eyes fix beyond the northern pillars, widening with recognition that transcends death. Her mouth shapes a soundless cry, but this time sensation bleeds through the veil between them: they’re coming, they’re coming, we’ve been waiting.
The words arrive not as sound but as knowing, settling into his bones like winter cold.
Four supplicants. He was never meant to stand alone.
The spring’s surface trembles with his approach, disturbed by more than his shadow. Mud churns dark around the stone lip. Fresh disturbance, too deliberate for deer. He crouches to fill the waterskin, and his hand stills above a depression: bootprint, broad and deep, pressed by burden or armor.
Behind him, thornbush branches quiver without wind. Dark wool snags there, torn recent.
He sees neither. His eyes fix only on water, on thirst, on the manuscripts waiting.
The words spilled from Séamus in a torrent, half-translation, half-interpretation, as he moved between the pillars like a man possessed. His voice carried the cadence of ritual incantation, though he spoke in common tongue for her benefit. “Here,” he said, fingers hovering over a vertical line of ancient script, “it names Manannán mac Lir as guardian of the threshold. And here,” his hand moved to another stone, “, a warning. ‘Those who bear the weight of unavenged dead shall find no rest within.’”
Muireann felt the words like a blade between her ribs. She thought of her family’s bodies, unburied in the smoking ruins of their hall. Of Donnchadh’s face, still breathing somewhere in the world while theirs had turned to ash.
“What else?” Her voice came out rougher than intended.
Séamus didn’t seem to notice. He was already moving deeper into the courtyard, his worn cloak trailing through puddles of standing water. The translucent figure at his shoulder, a girl, Muireann could see now, no more than twelve summers, drifted alongside him, her spectral hand pointing toward specific stones as though guiding his attention.
“The massacre,” he murmured, more to himself than to her. “It’s recorded here, in fragments. A betrayal. Someone sold the sanctuary’s location to…” He paused, squinting at weathered grooves nearly obliterated by time and weather. “…to those who serve the twisted path. The broken circle.”
Muireann’s grip tightened on her spear shaft until her knuckles whitened. “Show me.”
He led her through an archway where ivy hung like a curtain, into what must have once been the main sanctuary. The roof had collapsed inward, leaving the space open to grey sky. And there, carved deep into the base of the central standing stone, she saw them: the same symbols that had adorned the shields of the men who’d butchered her kin.
The mist clung to Séamus’s shoulders as he turned from the standing stone, his haunted eyes meeting hers with an intensity that surprised her. “I can,” he said, and there was something in his voice: not pride, but the quiet certainty of a man who knows his one true skill. “The ogham script, the druidic symbols. I’ve spent years…” He trailed off, fingers already moving toward the nearest inscription as though drawn by invisible threads.
Muireann watched him trace the vertical grooves, his lips moving silently as he deciphered. The ghost-girl at his shoulder leaned closer, her translucent face intent on the same markings.
“Threshold guardians,” he murmured, then louder: “Tests of worthiness. Blood-offerings of grain and silver, not flesh. And this,” his finger stopped at a cluster of spiraling marks, “, those who carry unresolved blood-debt are forbidden passage beyond the inner sanctum.”
“The raiders,” Muireann said abruptly. “They wore symbols. A spiral, but wrong. Broken. And a circle split in half.”
Séamus’s head snapped up, grey eyes suddenly sharp as flint. “Show me. Describe them exactly.”
She drew the symbols in the damp earth with her spear-tip, recreating what she’d glimpsed on leather armor slick with her brother’s blood. The spiral twisted inward, collapsing on itself. The circle bore a jagged split, like a mouth screaming.
Séamus went pale. “Manannán’s curse,” he breathed. “The broken voyage. These aren’t blessings. They’re markers of those who’ve violated sacred hospitality.” His fingers trembled over his satchel. “Your family’s killers came here first. They took something, or learned something that…” He looked up, understanding dawning terrible and clear. “Donnchadh seeks the Severing Rite. To cut ties between this world and the next.”
“To escape judgment,” Muireann finished, her voice iron. “To silence the dead who accuse him.”
Despite every instinct screaming not to trust a weakling who lives in books rather than battle, Muireann recognizes genuine gift when she sees it. When he mentions his sister’s drowning, his voice breaking on Aisling’s name, Muireann sees something shimmer at his shoulder. A translucent girl-shape that grows more distinct, as if grief itself has weight and form in this thin place. She makes her decision with warrior pragmatism: he has knowledge she needs, and something about this haunted valley makes his particular madness seem less mad than her own.
The words hang between them like an oath sworn before witnesses both living and dead. Séamus’s hand trembles slightly as their palms meet: hers calloused from spear-work, his stained with ink and rough from travel. The alliance settles into his bones with the weight of necessity. He sees calculation in her green eyes, recognizes it as mirror to his own desperation. They are using each other, yes, but honestly so.
The mist parts like a veil drawn back, and she is there. A figure resolving from grey into substance, her auburn hair darkened by moisture, her simple scribe’s robes clinging damply to her frame. Séamus’s exhausted mind registers her presence in fragments: the leather case strapped across her shoulders, the careful way she picks her path through the rubble, the ink stains on her fingers that mark her as kin to his own obsession with written words.
But it is the child that stops his heart.
Translucent as morning light through water, a boy of perhaps seven years walks beside her, his small hand clasped in hers though their fingers do not quite touch. The ghost-child’s eyes are wide and dark, his mouth moving in silent speech. And Aisling (his sister, his constant torment, his faithful shadow) turns toward the boy with such sudden intensity that Séamus feels the movement like a physical pull.
“You see them.” Not a question. Bríd’s voice carries across the ruined courtyard, soft but certain, and something in Séamus’s chest that has been clenched tight for five years begins to loosen.
“I see them,” he manages, and hears his voice crack on the words. Behind him, Muireann shifts her weight, spear-point scraping stone: she cannot see what he and this stranger perceive, but she knows enough to recognize significance.
Bríd approaches with the careful steps of one who has learned to navigate a world layered with invisible presences. The child-ghost drifts beside her, and now Séamus can see the scorch marks on the boy’s phantom clothing, the way his form flickers like flame-light. Tadhg, he thinks, remembering the name carved in the crypt’s memorial stone.
“I thought I was alone,” Bríd says, and the naked relief in her brown eyes mirrors the sudden, desperate hope kindling in his own chest. “I thought I was the only one cursed to walk between worlds.”
They speak in hushed tones over weak tea brewed from Muireann’s meager supplies, their voices barely rising above the drip of moisture from broken stones. The words come haltingly at first, each confession a wound reopened.
Aisling drowned in dark water, her small hands pushing Séamus toward the surface. Tadhg burned searching for his mother through smoke-filled corridors, his child’s voice calling until flame took it. Muireann’s family, husband, daughters, aging father, cry out in her nightmares though she cannot see their forms, only hear their final screams. Cináed’s lord and the man’s children reach for him in dreams, their accusatory silence worse than any words.
Four different deaths. Four separate guilts, each carved deep as ogham into stone. Yet the same translucent veil separates them all from peace.
Séamus feels his scholar’s mind seize upon the pattern, organizing chaos into structure. His fingers itch for parchment, for ink, to diagram what he perceives: a ritual geometry of grief, souls positioned like standing stones around a central absence. The manuscript fragments suddenly make terrible, beautiful sense.
“The inscription spoke of multiple offerings,” he whispers. “I thought it meant sacrifices. But perhaps,”
“Perhaps it means us,” Bríd finishes.
The knight’s arrival shifts something fundamental in the temple’s atmosphere. Séamus feels it like a change in air pressure before a storm: the way Aisling’s translucent form suddenly sharpens, how Tadhg stops his restless wandering to stare at the threshold. Even the shadows of Muireann’s unseen dead seem to press closer, as if straining toward completion.
Four living. Four dead. The manuscript’s cryptic phrase echoes in his mind: When the marked gather at the threshold, the door swings both ways.
“Redemption,” Séamus repeats, tasting the word. His ink-stained fingers tremble as he gestures to the standing stones, to the assembled company of the haunted and their ghosts. “Or perhaps release. For all of us.”
Cináed’s hand falls from his sword. “Then I am in the right place.”
Aisling’s whisper pierces through his exhaustion, together, together, together, no longer the drowning-song that has shredded his nights but something crystalline, purposeful. He watches her drift toward Tadhg’s small ghost, watches the child’s translucent fingers reach back. In the mist-thick air, Muireann’s murdered kin and Cináed’s fallen lord begin manifesting clearer than ever before, drawn by proximity, by resonance. The dead recognize what the living have been too wounded to see: they were summoned, not by chance but by necessity’s ancient design.
The revelation crashes through him like a wave breaking against cliffs. This was never about solitary penance or individual redemption. The druidic order had discovered something profound: that hauntings resonate, amplify, harmonize when brought together in sacred space. Four souls bound to four ghosts, each carrying a piece of the greater pattern. His sister hadn’t led him here to save himself alone, but to find the others who would make the ritual whole.
Séamus’s hands shake as he arranges the manuscripts, creating a constellation of knowledge across the cold stone. The parchments whisper against each other, their edges brittle with age but their words still sharp, still urgent. His ink-stained fingers move from one text to another, drawing invisible lines between passages that echo across centuries.
“Look here,” he breathes, and his voice carries the tremor of discovery that has nothing to do with fear. He points to where a Celtic knot pattern repeats: first in the threshold ceremony fragment, then in the resonance text, finally carved deep into the ogham itself. “The druidic order understood what we’ve stumbled upon by accident.”
The mist presses closer against the ruined walls, as if the temple itself leans in to listen. Aisling’s ghost drifts nearer, her translucent form more solid than he’s seen it in years, her drowned eyes fixed on the manuscripts with an intensity that makes his throat tighten.
“Hauntings aren’t curses to be borne alone,” he continues, the words spilling faster now as the pattern crystallizes in his mind. “They’re threads. Threads that can be woven together into something,” He struggles for the word, his scholar’s vocabulary failing him at the crucial moment. “Something whole. Something that can bridge the divide.”
His finger traces the knot pattern, following its endless loop. Four points of intersection. Four souls. Four ghosts. The mathematics of it sings through him with a rightness that feels like prophecy, like the answer to a question he’s been asking since the moment Aisling’s hand slipped from his in the dark water.
Around him, the others lean closer, their shadows merging on the manuscript pages. Even Muireann’s restless energy stills. Even Cináed’s careful distance contracts. They feel it too: the weight of possibility, heavy and bright as gold.
Bríd kneels beside him, her calligrapher’s eye catching what his excitement missed: subtle variations in the inscription depth that indicate sequence and hierarchy. Her fingers hover over the carved stone, tracing patterns invisible to less practiced eyes.
“It’s like a musical score,” she murmurs, and the comparison strikes Séamus with perfect clarity. “Each participant must contribute at specific moments, in specific positions around the circle. See how these marks deepen here, then fade? That’s timing. Rhythm.”
The ghost-child Tadhg releases her hand for the first time in years, drifting toward the standing stones as if recognizing something long forgotten. Bríd’s breath catches audibly in the mist-thick air.
“He remembers this place.” Her voice trembles with revelation. “He was here when they attempted it.”
Séamus watches the small spirit move between the stones with purpose, touching each one in sequence. Four points. Four positions. The child’s translucent fingers leave no mark, but the stones seem to resonate anyway, a vibration felt more in the chest than heard.
“He’s showing us,” Séamus whispers. “He’s showing us where to stand.”
Aisling drifts closer to the circle, her drowned face turned toward the child with something that might be hope.
Muireann circles the sanctuary’s perimeter with predator grace, her spear-calloused hand trailing along weathered stone as her warrior’s mind automatically maps sight-lines and defensive positions. But her green eyes hold something beyond tactical assessment. A dawning comprehension that transforms her scarred features.
“So we stand where they stood. The ones who died mid-ritual.” Her voice roughens, catching on memory and revelation. She stops at the eastern stone, where dried blood still stains the base after all these years. “The raiders who butchered my family: they wore these symbols because they were here. They stopped this working.”
She turns to face Séamus, and her fury has transmuted into something fiercer: purpose.
“If we complete what they interrupted, we don’t merely free our dead. We finish what an entire druidic order died attempting to accomplish. We honor all the murdered.”
Cináed straightens, decades of command settling back across his shoulders like the armor he once wore with pride. His voice carries the weight of war councils and siege preparations, no longer the hesitant murmur of the shamed exile.
“We approach this as warriors preparing for battle. Methodically.” His scarred hand gestures toward the shimmering crypt entrance. “Every inscription documented. Every step of the ritual framework understood completely before we commit.”
His blue eyes hold each companion in turn, demanding their oath without words.
“The druids rushed. Desperation made them careless, and they died for it.” His jaw sets. “We have what they lacked: time and warning. We honor their sacrifice by succeeding where they failed.”
The descent opens before them like a throat swallowing light. Séamus’s torch gutters in the stale air, casting their shadows enormous against walls that press close. The stone steps exhale cold. Not winter’s bite, but the chill of places where breath has not stirred for generations. Aisling drifts ahead, her form sharpening with each step downward, features Séamus had half-forgotten now clear as life. Above, at the threshold’s edge, Donnchadh’s mother-ghost writhes against an invisible barrier, her accusing mouth opening and closing soundlessly. The boundary holds. Below, in darkness that predates memory, Bríd’s sharp intake of breath echoes: manuscripts wait, patient as the dead themselves.
The manuscripts lie arranged on stone shelves carved into the crypt’s northern wall, each wrapped in oiled leather that has somehow resisted centuries of damp. Séamus’s ink-stained fingers tremble as he unwraps the first bundle, revealing vellum pages whose pigments remain vivid: gold leaf catching torchlight like captured sun, lapis blue deep as summer sky, vermillion bright as fresh blood.
“A Dhia,” he breathes, his voice cracking with scholarly reverence. “The Leabhar na gCéadach. The Book of Firsts. I thought it burned at Clonmacnoise.”
Bríd kneels beside him, their shoulders touching in the confined space, her warmth anchoring him to the present. Her fingers hover above the calligraphy, not quite touching, professional instinct preserving what she examines. “Look at the hand,” she whispers. “Pre-Columban. The letter forms: these predate the standardized scripts by generations.”
He turns pages with infinite care, identifying treasures thought lost forever: druidic astronomical calculations mapping the movements of stars against standing stones; ritual poetry in Old Irish, each verse a key to ceremonies the Church had tried to erase; illuminated genealogies connecting mortal lineages to Otherworld nobility, names spiraling into margins where human ancestry dissolves into myth.
For the first time in five years, his haunted grey eyes focus completely on the present moment. Not on Aisling’s translucent form hovering at his shoulder. Not on the drowning, the guilt, the endless loop of memory. Just this: preserved knowledge, waiting patient as prayer for someone to read it again.
“They knew,” he says, understanding flooding through him. “The druids who died here: they prepared this. A library for those who would come after. For the haunted ones who could breach the threshold.”
Bríd’s hand finds his, ink-stained fingers interlacing. “We can copy these. Preserve them beyond this place.”
“If we survive the ritual,” he says, but for once the thought carries hope rather than despair.
Muireann’s calloused fingers trace the carved names, each one a ghost of its own kind. The western wall bears centuries of confessions, scratched deep into stone by hands desperate for absolution. Her green eyes narrow as she finds what she’s been seeking: symbols etched beside certain names, the same twisted knotwork the raiders wore as pendants when they burned her village.
“Bastard,” she breathes, the word sharp as a blade. “He was here. Or his people were.”
Cináed moves to her side, his warrior’s instinct reading the wall like a battlefield map. His broad shoulders block the torchlight, casting her discoveries into shadow, then he shifts with unconscious courtesy to let the flame illuminate her find.
“These aren’t random,” he says, his deep voice carrying the authority of his former rank. “Look: the symbols cluster around specific dates. Autumn equinoxes, winter solstices. Organized gatherings, not individual pilgrimages.”
Muireann’s scarred face twists into something between smile and snarl. “A conspiracy, then. Recorded in their own sacred space.” Her hand drops to her spear. “Evidence. Witnesses. When I find Donnchadh, the stones themselves will testify against him.”
Cináed kneels at the chamber’s center, one hand pressed flat against the cold stone floor. His blue eyes track the pattern of cracks radiating outward, reading the architecture like a battle plan. When he speaks, the careful courtesy falls away, replaced by the commanding tone of a knight addressing his company.
“The standing stones above. They’re not random placement. See how the floor fractures align with their positions?” His finger traces invisible lines through the air. “A vertical threshold. The living world above, the realm of the dead below, and this chamber suspended between.”
Séamus leans forward, breath catching. Muireann nods slowly, warrior recognizing warrior’s expertise.
For the first time since his exile, Cináed’s shoulders straighten fully. Someone needs what only he can provide.
Bríd’s ink-stained fingers trace the ogham cuts, their angular severity softened by centuries of moss. Tadhg mac Eithne. The child-ghost’s grip becomes almost corporeal, a desperate pressure against her palm. Below his name, another: Eithne ingen Flainn. Mother and son, murdered together yet wandering separate.
“They’re both here,” she whispers, voice breaking. “We can bring them together.”
The possibility of reunion, not just release, but reunion, transforms everything.
They gather in the circle of standing stones, the manuscript spread before them on weathered granite. Their ghosts draw closer, Aisling’s translucent fingers reaching toward Séamus’s shoulder, young Tadhg pressing against Bríd’s side, even Cináed’s unnamed shadows gathering at the periphery. Four living hands clasp together, forming an unbroken chain. The ancient wards carved into stone pulse with pale luminescence, recognizing their combined purpose: desperation alchemized into shared determination, separate hauntings woven into singular hope.
The boot prints pressed deep into the damp earth of the northern passage, each impression sharp-edged and unmistakable. Muireann crouched beside them, her warrior’s eye measuring their span: a man’s stride, heavy-laden, moving with purpose rather than caution. The tracks were no more than hours old, the disturbed moss still weeping moisture where the heel had crushed it.
She traced the direction with her gaze: toward the sanctuary, then away again, circling. Scouting. Her hand found her spear’s shaft without conscious thought, that old familiar weight steadying the sudden acceleration of her pulse.
“Séamus.” She kept her voice low, controlled. “Come see this.”
He barely glanced up from the manuscript, his ink-stained fingers hovering over a particularly dense passage of ogham. Aisling’s ghost leaned close to his shoulder, her translucent face troubled in ways he seemed determined not to notice.
“The temple distorts such things,” he said, his tone carrying that particular abstraction she’d learned meant he was three-quarters lost in scholarship. “The thin places play tricks with perception. Time moves strangely here, those could be centuries old, or our own tracks doubled back through some fold in,”
“These are fresh.” She heard the edge creeping into her voice, that old battlefield sharpness. “Someone was here. Today. Watching.”
“Muireann.” Bríd’s gentle intervention, one hand still resting on young Tadhg’s ghostly shoulder. “We’re so close now. The ritual requires absolute focus, perfect unity of purpose. If we let fear fragment our intentions. She saw it in their faces: the desperate hunger for release, for peace, for an end to their separate torments. Hope had taken root in this cursed place, fragile as spring shoots, and they would defend it against any threat. Even the truth.
She straightened slowly, her grip loosening on the spear. The rage that had sustained her for so long felt suddenly hollow, replaced by something worse: the terrible vulnerability of wanting something beyond vengeance.
“Aye,” she said quietly. “Perhaps you’re right.”
The fey lights that once kept their distance now dance within arm’s reach of the sanctuary, their cold luminescence casting strange shadows that seem to move independently of their sources. Cináed watches them circle the standing stones in patterns that remind him of siege tactics, of encirclement, but he tells himself it’s merely the Otherworld acknowledging their purpose here. The dead are restless in thin places: he knows this from the old tales, from his lord’s druid who spoke of such matters before the siege, before everything fell to ash and screaming.
He shifts his weight, feeling the phantom ache in his sword arm that comes before battle. But there is no battle here. Only scholars and scribes, only the hope of redemption through ancient ritual. The lights pulse brighter, and for a heartbeat he sees faces in their glow. Not the gentle dead who haunt his companions, but something older, something that watches with neither mercy nor malice, only the cold assessment of a predator measuring prey.
The moment passes. The lights drift on. Cináed says nothing, turning back toward the sanctuary where Séamus calls out another translation, his voice bright with discovery.
Bríd redraws her protective sigils for the third time in as many days, her ink-stained fingers trembling slightly as the symbols fade within hours rather than holding for weeks as they should. The child-ghost Tadhg tugs at her hand, his small translucent face turned not toward the crypt they seek but toward the northern chambers, toward something she cannot see. She considers mentioning both anomalies to Séamus but finds him so animated, so alive with purpose for the first time since she’s known him, that she cannot bear to introduce doubt. Instead she mixes fresh ink, adds extra intention to each stroke, and tells herself the thin veil here simply makes her wards less stable. The explanation sounds hollow even in her own thoughts, but hope is a fragile thing, easily shattered by speaking fears aloud.
Aisling’s ghost grows frantic, her translucent fingers clutching at Séamus’s sleeve with cold that burns. She points toward the sealed doorways, gestures sharp with warning he’s learned to read over five years of haunting. But hope makes him blind: he sees eagerness for release where she signals danger. When she tries to pull him from the manuscript, he murmurs reassurance: “Soon, a stór. Just a little longer.” Her face collapses, mouth opening in a silent scream he mistakes for impatience rather than the terror it is.
The phrase “balance of debts” surfaces in three separate inscriptions (threshold, altar, crypt entrance) each context subtly different. Séamus interprets through scholarly reflex: metaphorical language about cosmic equilibrium, poetic flourish typical of druidic philosophy. The literal arithmetic never penetrates his hope-drunk mind: four spirits released might demand four spirits bound. Ancient magic operates on exchange, not mercy. The temple was never sanctuary. It was scales waiting for weight.
The parchments crackle beneath Séamus’s trembling fingers as he arranges them across the weathered stone, their edges curling in the damp evening air. His companions draw closer, Muireann crouching with warrior’s wariness, Bríd kneeling gracefully beside him, Cináed standing at a respectful distance, his shadow long in the dying light.
“Here,” Séamus says, his voice rough from hours of translation. “The pattern reveals itself across three separate texts.” He traces the ritual’s architecture with one ink-stained finger: four participants at the cardinal points of the standing circle, each bearing their ghost’s true name written in ash mixed with salt from tears. The words must be spoken in the old tongue at the precise moment of dawn’s first light, when the boundary grows thin enough to permit passage.
“It’s beautiful,” Bríd murmurs, her scribe’s eye catching the geometric precision of the design. “Four souls bearing four spirits: the symmetry is perfect.”
Muireann shifts her weight, skepticism etched in the set of her jaw, but even she cannot deny the logic threading through the ancient instructions. “And you’re certain this will work? That we can all.”The texts are consistent,” Séamus insists, spreading his hands across the parchments as if to hold the promise in place. “Four haunted, four freed. The balance is exact.”
Only Cináed remains silent, his gaze drifting past them toward the standing stones where fey lights have begun their twilight dance. They move differently tonight. Not random wandering but purposeful circling, as though the stones themselves are preparing. His weathered face reveals nothing, but his hand rests on his sword’s pommel with the unconscious weight of old habit.
The mist thickens as darkness gathers, and Aisling’s ghost drifts closer to her brother’s shoulder, her translucent features almost eager.
The stones accept them with a silence that feels like recognition.
Séamus moves to the northern point, his sister’s ghost drifting behind him like mist given purpose. The moment his hand touches the weathered granite, something shifts: not in the physical world, but deeper, where the membrane between realms grows gossamer-thin. Aisling’s form sharpens, her drowned features resolving into heartbreaking clarity. He can see the exact shade of her eyes now, that grey-green of storm-tossed seas.
Bríd takes the eastern stone, and young Tadhg’s laughter rings soundless but somehow felt, vibrating through the marrow. Cináed stands west, and his fallen lord materializes in full ceremonial armor, bearing the standard Cináed failed to protect. No accusation marks those spectral features: only solemn acknowledgment.
South, Muireann hesitates before touching her stone. When she does, the shadow that has followed her coalesces into a girl-child of perhaps six summers, reaching upward with translucent hands.
The air between them ripples like pond-surface disturbed. Through the shimmer, Séamus glimpses it: a grey shore beneath colorless sky, where the dead might finally rest. His breath catches. It’s real. The Otherworld opens for us.
Bríd kneels beside the spring, grinding charcoal against stone with methodical precision. The paste darkens as she adds water, each drop measured: too thin and the sigils won’t hold power, too thick and they’ll crack before dawn. Her fingers move with the certainty of years spent in scriptoria, though her chest trembles with something dangerous: hope.
Tadhg’s ghost crouches beside her, translucent fingers hovering over the slate tablets. His eyes carry knowledge no child should possess: the wisdom of five years trapped between worlds.
She pauses at Séamus’s notation: “vessels prepared for crossing.” The phrasing troubles her, too literal somehow.
“Metaphor,” Séamus explains from across the sanctuary, not looking up from his own preparations. “Spiritual readiness. The soul as container.”
She accepts this, returns to her careful strokes. By midnight, four perfect sigils gleam wetly in moonlight.
The valley exhales mist as they descend, Muireann’s spear catching first light like a promise. White stones click into her pouch, seven, as the text specified. Cináed strips rowan bark with his knife, movements precise as prayer.
“Strange,” Muireann murmurs, examining a branch. “I thought revenge would feel different when it came.”
“Perhaps,” Cináed offers quietly, “we’ve already found what we were hunting.”
They climb back as companions, not survivors.
The sanctuary stones drink the pre-dawn grey. Four haunted souls form a compass around the ash-circle, their ghosts luminous as candle flame. Séamus’s voice carries the ritual’s first syllable,
Then Aisling’s translucent hand points behind him.
Donnchadh emerges from the crypt entrance, clutching a leather-bound grimoire, his mother’s shrieking ghost a tempest at his back.
“Forgive me,” he gasps. “I need this more.”
The bronze spiral lay between them like a covenant with darkness, its surface drinking the firelight and giving back something older, something that made Séamus’s scholar-heart sing even as his soul recoiled. The ogham inscriptions spiraled inward toward a center that seemed to recede the longer he looked, each ancient mark perfectly formed, untouched by the centuries that should have worn them smooth.
“Where did you acquire this?” Séamus heard his own voice, thin and eager, hating how it trembled with want.
Donnchadh’s smile was all merchant calculation wrapped in false warmth. “From a dying druid who had no sons to pass it to. He made me swear an oath. That it would be used only for its proper purpose, the opening of the threshold.” His grey eyes fixed on Séamus with uncomfortable intensity. “He saw something in me. A need that matched the artifact’s nature.”
Bríd’s hand touched Séamus’s shoulder, gentle but insistent. “The child-ghost won’t come near it,” she said quietly. “Tadhg hides when Donnchadh brings it out. That should tell us something.”
But Séamus was already reaching for the spiral again, his fingers aching to trace those perfect grooves. The bronze felt warm, almost alive, and where his skin made contact he felt a resonance: like a tuning fork struck in harmony with some frequency his bones recognized. This was real. This was the missing piece. Every manuscript fragment he’d studied, every half-remembered oral tradition, every dream-vision Aisling had sent him. They all pointed to something like this, a physical anchor for the ritual’s metaphysical architecture.
“We need this,” he said, and the words fell like stones into still water, ripples spreading outward to touch them all. “Whatever he’s done, whatever he is: we need what he knows.”
Aisling’s ghost pressed her translucent forehead against his temple, cold as drowning, desperate as the sea that took her.
Muireann moves like a striking serpent, her warrior’s instinct translating rage into precision. The spear-point stops a hair’s breadth from Donnchadh’s throat, close enough that his next swallow will kiss iron. Her scarred face twists with recognition and something deeper than mere anger: the primal fury of a wolf denied its kill for five years.
“This is the man who sold my family to the raiders.” Each word emerges separately, carved from stone. “This worm who traded children’s lives for silver.” Her voice cracks on the final word, and the spear-tip trembles, drawing a single bead of blood.
Donnchadh doesn’t flinch. His soft hands spread in a gesture of reasonableness that makes Séamus’s stomach turn, but the scholar cannot look away from the bronze spiral’s hypnotic markings. Behind the merchant, his mother’s ghost has transformed into something beyond grief. A writhing horror of accusation, her spectral fingers elongated into claws that rake through his shoulders again and again without breaking skin, leaving trails of cold light that fade like dying stars.
“Ancient history,” Donnchadh says, his voice steady despite the blade at his throat. “We all have our ghosts to bear, warrior. The question is whether you want to keep bearing yours.”
Bríd moves with deliberate grace, placing herself between Muireann’s rage and Séamus’s obsession. Her ink-stained fingers rest gently on the warrior’s spear-arm. Not restraining, merely present. “Look at his ghost, Séamus. Really look at what follows him.”
Young Tadhg presses against her robes, the child-spirit’s translucent form trembling as he points at Donnchadh’s mother. The old woman’s specter writhes behind the merchant like something drowning, her mouth opening too wide, her fingers bending at angles that violate the memory of human joints. The air around her ripples with corruption.
“She’s not seeking release,” Bríd says, her voice carrying the weight of years spent alongside the dead. “She’s seeking consumption. If he enters our circle, he brings that hunger with him.”
But Séamus clutches the bronze spiral tighter, his grey eyes feverish. “The ritual purifies. That’s the entire purpose. We cannot let superstition corrupt scholarship.”
Cináed’s voice cleaves the tension like a blade through mist, carrying the iron authority that once rallied men on blood-soaked ramparts. The command silences them all. “We are not executioners,” he says, each word weighted with terrible certainty. “Sacred ground demands sanctuary, even for the damned.” He positions himself beside Donnchadh, not alliance but principle made flesh, his scarred hand settling on his sword hilt in that ambiguous gesture that promises both protection and threat. His blue eyes find Muireann’s green fury and hold steady, infinitely sad but absolutely immovable. “I failed to protect innocence once. I will not fail honor now.”
The moment stretches taut as stretched sinew. Muireann’s knuckles bleach white against her spear-shaft, every warrior’s instinct howling for blood, but Cináed’s scarred hand closes over the weapon just below the blade, his grip gentle yet absolute. “Stand down.” Something in his voice, the weight of failures that haunt him worse than any ghost. Cuts through her rage. The spear lowers by trembling inches. Séamus exhales shakily, bronze spiral burning cold against his palm. Donnchadh’s smile spreads like corruption through clean water.
The words leave Cináed’s mouth with the weight of ritual, each syllable precise as a blade’s edge. “By the old laws and the sanctuary rights of sacred ground, I grant you guest-right within our circle. Your person is protected, your purpose acknowledged, your,”
“No.” Muireann’s voice cracks like breaking ice. Not a shout. Worse: a sound of something fundamental shattering. She stares at Cináed as though seeing him for the first time, and Séamus watches the fragile trust she’d been rebuilding crumble to ash. “Not him. Anyone but him.”
But the knight’s face has gone distant, carved from the same weathered stone as the temple walls. His hand remains steady on her spear, and Séamus recognizes the expression: he’s seen it in polished bronze, reflected back at him in moments when guilt demands payment in blood. The look of a man who believes suffering is the price of absolution.
“You’ve killed us all,” Muireann whispers, and the words hang in the thickening air like a prophecy.
Bríd’s fingers find Séamus’s arm, grip tight enough to bruise. The child-ghost Tadhg has wrapped himself around her legs, his translucent face pressed against her robes, and Séamus feels his own sister’s presence flickering at the edge of his vision like a guttering flame. The temperature continues to plummet. He can see his breath now, pale mist in the dim sanctuary.
Donnchadh bows, the movement fluid despite his bulk, his soft hands spreading wide in a gesture of gratitude that makes bile rise in Séamus’s throat. “You honor the old ways, Sir Knight. I am… deeply grateful.”
The merchant’s smile never wavers, but his mother’s ghost writhes behind him, her spectral fingers clawing at the air inches from his neck, and Séamus realizes with creeping certainty that they’ve just invited something far more dangerous than a simple murderer into their midst.
The threshold crossing happens in terrible slow motion. Donnchadh’s boot descends toward the interior flagstones, and the air itself seems to resist, thickening like water before a drowning.
Then contact.
The candle flames twist green, casting everything in the sickly pallor of corpse-light. Séamus’s breath catches as the merchant’s mother surges forward, her spectral form gaining substance with each step her son takes deeper into the sanctuary. She’s no longer the translucent shade that haunted Donnchadh’s shoulder. Aisling retreats. His sister’s ghost flickers like a failing lamp, withdrawing to the periphery of his vision, and Séamus feels the loss like a physical wound. Young Tadhg whimpers against Bríd’s legs.
The temple is feeding on this. On the convergence of the haunted, on old sins given new proximity. The stones themselves seem to pulse with anticipation.
Donnchadh’s hands move to his coat, drawing forth a leather-wrapped bundle with practiced care. When the cloth falls away, bronze catches the green light and answers with its own diseased luminescence.
Séamus forces himself forward, each step an act of will against his body’s revulsion. The scholar’s hunger gnaws through his disgust: he must know. Donnchadh’s explanation flows with practiced ease, words oiled by years of selling dangerous things to desperate people. The bronze focus, he purrs, anchors the ritual’s power. Without it, the doorway gapes but cannot hold. The spirits would hang suspended in the threshold forever: neither living nor dead nor released. Worse than haunting. Worse than anything.
Séamus watches his own hand extend toward the artifact, trembling. He’s being manipulated. He knows this. The merchant’s grey eyes track his face like a predator reading prey, cataloguing the desperate hope that transforms scholarly caution into reckless need.
Behind him, Bríd’s sharp breath cuts the air. The sound of watching someone beloved walk knowingly into a snare.
The five figures take their positions, and the geometry feels immediately wrong. Donnchadh’s presence warps the sacred pattern like a stone dropped in still water. Séamus’s research demanded balance. Five points, five souls equally committed to the threshold’s opening. But where four carry ghosts born of love and loss, the merchant brings only his mother’s murdered fury. The standing stones’ shadows crawl across the ground toward the center, reaching for the bronze artifact with hunger that makes Séamus’s skin prickle. Muireann hasn’t lowered her spear. “When this is done,” she says, each word a blade, “oath or no oath, I will gut you like a fish.” Donnchadh’s perpetual smile cracks, just for a heartbeat, before reconstructing itself with visible effort.
The water runs black from Donnchadh’s hands, staining the bronze bowl like old blood. His mother’s ghost surges forward, spectral fingers plunging through the surface, her mouth stretched in soundless imprecation. Séamus distributes the elements with trembling hands, salt, incense, candles, spring water, and watches Donnchadh handle each with practiced reverence that speaks of forbidden knowledge. The merchant’s fingers trace patterns in the air that Séamus has never documented, gestures from traditions deliberately forgotten.
The eastern stone drinks heat from their palms, and Séamus feels the warmth spread up his arm like fever. His fingers rest atop Donnchadh’s, the merchant’s skin soft as tallow, unmarked by honest labor, and together they trace the first syllables into the mist-thick air.
“Manannán, a thiarna na dtonn,” Séamus begins, his voice barely steady.
Donnchadh’s response comes without hesitation, the pronunciation flawless, each aspirated consonant shaped with the precision of someone who has rehearsed this moment countless times: “Oscail an doras idir an saol seo agus an Saol Eile.”
The ogham script blazes beneath their joined hands, each line igniting in sequence: feather-bright, then gold, then the deep amber of peat fire. Séamus’s breath catches. The words are working. The temple recognizes Donnchadh’s invocation as it never fully recognized his own fumbling attempts these past three days.
Across the circle, Muireann’s spear point wavers, drops a hand’s breadth toward the ground. Her scarred face reflects the stone’s glow, fury and reluctant wonder warring in her expression. She has spent weeks tracking this man to kill him. Now she watches proof manifest that his death would doom them all.
Cináed’s voice cuts through the humming air, formal and inexorable as judgment: “We five stand as one. What is begun together shall be finished together. No hand raised against another until the door is closed and the dead released.”
The oath settles over them like a shroud. Each speaks it in turn. Donnchadh repeats the words without tremor, his merchant’s smile fixed in place even as his mother’s ghost erupts behind him in silent, incandescent rage. Her spectral form flickers between transparency and dreadful substance, fingers clawing at his shoulders, her mouth stretched wide in accusations none but her son can hear.
The stone’s heat becomes scorching. Séamus pulls his hand away, gasping.
Donnchadh holds his position a moment longer, eyes closed, lips moving in some private calculation.
Donnchadh’s hands disappear beneath his robes with the practiced efficiency of a conjurer. When they emerge, they cradle something wrapped in stained linen. He unfolds the cloth with ceremonial slowness, revealing a bronze disk no larger than a man’s palm. Spirals chase each other across its surface, meeting at a center point where dried blood, brown and flaking, mars the patina.
“The fochlach,” Donnchadh announces, his voice carrying the satisfaction of a merchant closing a profitable bargain. “It anchors the doorway. Without it, you’re merely shouting at locked gates.”
Séamus reaches for it, fingers trembling. The metal settles into his palm with unexpected weight, warmth pulsing through the bronze like a slow heartbeat. The spirals match fragments he’s seen in the oldest manuscripts. Pre-Christian, pre-Roman, from when the druids walked openly between worlds. This is genuine. This is real.
“At the ritual’s peak,” Donnchadh continues, gesturing toward the circle’s center, “place it there. The dead will come.”
Bríd studies the merchant’s face. His relief at surrendering the artifact seems wrong somehow: too complete, too eager. His eyes don’t follow the disk. They measure distances. Calculate angles. Map escape routes through the standing stones.
They move through the ritual sequence once, twice, three times as the old ways demand. Each circuit deepens the pattern: words flowing smoother, gestures aligning with greater precision. Donnchadh never falters, his pronunciation of the archaic syllables flawless, his movements carrying the confidence of rehearsed knowledge rather than fresh learning.
On the third repetition, young Tadhg materializes between the stones. Not translucent but solid, visible to all. The child’s spectral arm extends toward Donnchadh, mouth opening in silent warning before he dissolves like mist.
“The veil thins,” Séamus murmurs, excitement overwhelming caution. “The working draws near.”
But Muireann’s knuckles whiten on her spear shaft, and Cináed shifts position, placing himself within striking distance of the merchant’s unprotected back.
The eastern sky bleeds pale gold as Séamus distributes the ritual components, his ink-stained fingers trembling. Each participant receives their portion: specific syllables, precise gestures. Donnchadh accepts his parchment with practiced grace, sliding it into his sleeve where other secrets nest.
Then the merchant produces his own vial, anointing his forehead with oil that catches the pre-dawn light strangely. The words he whispers carry wrong cadences, consonants that scrape against Séamus’s ear.
“A merchant’s prayer,” Donnchadh explains when Bríd’s eyes narrow. “For successful transactions.”
Plausible enough. Séamus nods, too desperate to question further, though his sister’s ghost shivers beside him in wordless warning.
They assume their positions as dawn’s first light pierces the mist, each body aligned to ancient stone. Séamus raises his hands, feeling the weight of five years’ grief concentrate into this singular moment. Around the circle. No retreat remains.
He speaks the opening invocation. The stones answer with bone-deep resonance.
Séamus spreads his manuscripts across the cold stone floor of the sanctuary, fingers trembling not from cold but from the electricity of approaching revelation. Three texts lie before him. The fragmentary ogham scroll from Clonmacnoise, Brother Fiachra’s Latin translation of the druidic oral traditions, and the water-damaged vellum he’d salvaged from a collapsed monastery in Connacht. For weeks they’d seemed to speak in different tongues, but now, with Donnchadh’s quiet observations, the pattern emerges like stars through clearing fog.
“The spiral moves widdershins,” the merchant murmurs, leaning over Séamus’s shoulder. His breath smells of mint and something sour underneath. “Against the sun’s path: a reversal, you see? To unmake what was made.”
“Yes,” Séamus breathes, cross-referencing the ogham notation. “The Otherworld journey requires inversion of the natural order.” His pulse quickens as Donnchadh produces the bronze disk from his leather pouch. A spiral inscribed with symbols that match, precisely match, the description in Brother Fiachra’s text. The weight of it in his palm feels like destiny.
Across the chamber, Bríd sits with her writing materials, ostensibly copying inscriptions but mostly watching. The ghost-child, young Tadhg, clutches her hand with unusual intensity, his translucent face turned toward where Donnchadh works. She feels the wrongness like a taste of copper on her tongue, but Séamus,
Séamus sees only the elegant architecture of solution. Five haunted souls, five points of the ancient cosmology, five thresholds between worlds. His sister’s ghost hovers at his shoulder, neither confirming nor denying, her presence a constant ache he’s learned to interpret as guidance. When Donnchadh explains the precise terminology for the boundary-crossing invocation, using words Séamus has only seen in the oldest fragments, it feels like confirmation. Like proof.
Like the universe finally, finally offering recompense for five years of suffering.
Séamus barely glances at the charcoal rubbing Bríd presses into his hands, his attention fractured between three manuscripts and the bronze disk catching torchlight. “Strange symbols,” she says, her voice carrying an edge he’s too distracted to hear. “Different hand entirely: see how the chisel-work is cruder? These weren’t carved by the original builders.”
But he’s already tracing the five-fold pattern in his mind, seeing how their positions will align with the standing stones, how the resonance of their shared hauntings will create the necessary threshold. “Degradation,” he mutters, turning the rubbing sideways without really seeing it. “Centuries of weather, Bríd. Look: the lines fragment here, and here. Natural erosion patterns.”
“Séamus,”
“We’re so close.” He catches her hand, squeezing too tight, his grey eyes fever-bright in the uncertain light. “Can’t you feel it? The rightness of it? Five souls, five stones, five doorways opening together. The mathematics is perfect.”
Bríd searches his face, finds only the desperate certainty of a drowning man convinced the anchor will float. She folds the rubbing carefully, tucking it against her heart. Beside her, young Tadhg’s ghost points silently toward Donnchadh’s shadow-wrapped corner, his small mouth forming words no one hears.
Muireann’s spear-point dimples the soft flesh beneath Donnchadh’s jaw, drawing a bead of blood that catches torchlight like a ruby. “We can do this without him,” she growls, each word shaped by five years of sharpening. “We can find another way.”
Séamus steps between them, and exhaustion makes him cruel: “Another way? Another five years wandering? Another decade while your family’s ghosts go unavenged and you chase shadows across every gods-forsaken coast?” He watches her flinch, presses harder. “We have the knowledge now. The ritual requires five haunted souls at five stones. We are four. Mathematics doesn’t bend for morality, Muireann.”
Behind him, Cináed’s voice falls like a headsman’s blade: “A knight’s word, once given.” Even to devils.
Muireann lowers her spear with a Gaelic curse that scorches the air.
Dawn bleeds grey through the mist as Séamus positions himself at the northern stone, its surface cold beneath his ink-stained fingers. The pattern is perfect. Five souls, five stones, five ghosts bound to the living like chains. Aisling’s form shimmers clearer now, almost solid, her drowned hair lifting in no earthly wind. He traces the final ogham mark and feels certainty settle into his marrow like benediction. Mathematics doesn’t lie. The dead don’t deceive. His scholarship has earned this salvation.
The moment crystallizes like frost forming on glass. They assume their positions as dawn’s first light catches the western edge of the circle, exactly as the texts prescribed. Séamus at the north stone, Bríd at the east, Cináed at the south, Muireann at the west, and Donnchadh, still wearing that empty smile, at the center point where the ley lines cross. Each raises their hands in the prescribed gesture. Séamus looks at his companions one final time: Bríd’s face pale but determined, her fingers trembling slightly; Muireann’s jaw clenched with suppressed violence, knuckles white on her spear; Cináed standing with the calm of a man who has already made peace with death, his silver hair catching the grey light; and Donnchadh whose eyes gleam with something that isn’t quite triumph, not yet. Behind the merchant, his mother’s ghost writhes in silent agony, her mouth stretched wide in a scream no one can hear, her spectral hands clawing at her son’s shoulders. Séamus takes a breath, tastes salt and stone and the copper tang of something ancient stirring. He speaks the first words of the ancient tongue, and feels the standing stones wake beneath his voice like sleeping giants stirring, like bones remembering flesh. There is no turning back now.
Séamus’s voice carries the opening invocation across the stone circle, each word of the ancient tongue falling like stones into still water. The air thickens around the syllables, becoming visible. Threads of silver mist that spiral upward from his breath. Aisling’s ghost at his shoulder grows more substantial, her translucent fingers reaching toward the light.
Bríd joins from the east, her scribe’s precision rendering each phoneme with crystalline clarity. The standing stones answer with that bone-deep hum, a vibration that travels up through the soles of their feet and settles in the hollows of their chests. Young Tadhg’s spirit materializes beside her, his small hand clutching at her robe.
Cináed’s baritone adds the southern anchor, steady as a warrior’s oath sworn on steel. His words carry the weight of redemption sought, of blood-debt acknowledged. The resonance builds, harmonics layering upon harmonics until the very stones seem to sing.
Muireann spits her western words with barely contained fury, each syllable a blade thrown at Donnchadh’s back. Her eyes never leave the merchant, green fire burning with the promise of violence postponed but not forgotten. The hatred in her voice should shatter the ritual’s careful balance, yet somehow it holds.
The merchant begins his central incantation, and for three heartbeats everything proceeds as the ancient texts promised. The ghosts shimmer with golden light, their forms becoming more defined, more peaceful. Aisling’s face softens into something approaching rest. The old woman’s accusing glare begins to fade.
Then Séamus hears it: a syllable wrong, a cadence shifted. The wrongness scrapes against his scholar’s ear like a blade on bone. His eyes snap to Donnchadh, whose smile has widened into something predatory, something triumphant. The merchant’s tongue moves with practiced ease through words that don’t belong, that were never meant for release.
The merchant’s lips continue moving but the words emerging belong to no ritual of release. They’re older, darker, spoken in a dialect that predates the druids themselves: the tongue of the Fomorians, the ancient enemies of the Tuatha Dé Danann. Séamus recognizes fragments from forbidden texts, words that should never be spoken aloud.
He tries to catch Bríd’s eye, to signal alarm, but she’s deep in trance-state, her voice flowing automatically through memorized passages. He attempts to break his own recitation, to shout warning, but his throat constricts. The ritual has him now. His voice no longer belongs to him, pulled forward by momentum he cannot resist.
The chalk marks they so carefully inscribed begin to pulse with that sickly green luminescence. Séamus watches in dawning horror as the protective sigils twist, their curves inverting like worms turning in soil. Their meanings corrupt from ward to summons, from barrier to invitation.
And he finally understands: every preparation they made, every safeguard they inscribed, Donnchadh has been subtly altering since they allowed him into their circle. The merchant’s soft hands, touching pillars in passing. His helpful suggestions about placement and pronunciation.
They invited the wolf among the sheep.
Cináed’s instincts scream danger before his mind comprehends it: the warrior’s sense that has kept him alive through a dozen battles suddenly howling alarm. He tries to step back from his southern position, to break the geometric pattern, but his feet refuse. They might as well be rooted in the stone itself, bound by invisible chains forged from his own spoken words.
Muireann sees it too. Her eyes go wide, fury and recognition blazing across her scarred face. She attempts to hurl her spear at Donnchadh but her arm freezes mid-throw, muscles locked by ritual obligation stronger than sinew.
The humming of the standing stones rises to a shriek. Cracks spider-web across their ancient surfaces, and through those fissures Séamus sees movement. Shadows writhing with terrible purpose, shapes that were never meant to walk in daylight.
Then Aisling turns to look at him.
Her eyes are no longer her own. Her mouth opens in a scream that emerges as the sound of tearing fabric, of the world itself coming apart at the seams.
The wound in the world screams. Not sound but sensation: reality protesting its own violation. Through the rupture they come: the druid first, throat gaping, robes black with spectral blood. A woman follows, phantom child pressed to her breast. Warriors bearing death-wounds. More. Always more. The murdered dead of Dún Scáth’s massacre, trapped between worlds for decades, now flooding through like tide through shattered seawall.
Séamus feels the ritual’s energy spike: not the controlled release the texts promised but wildfire consuming its own fuel. The standing stones shriek, hairline fractures racing across ancient surfaces. One explodes. Stone shrapnel tears through mist. A shard catches Muireann’s shoulder, spinning her from her western position.
The geometric pattern shatters.
The ritual doesn’t stop. It feeds.
Donnchadh’s laughter cracks like ice over deep water as he produces the chains. Iron links crawling with binding runes that pulse sickly green. “Ghosts this powerful,” he shouts into wind that rises from nowhere, from everywhere, from the torn veil itself, “will buy me kingdoms.” He raises the chains toward the flood of spirits, compulsion-words spilling from his lips. But his mother has been drinking the ritual’s wild power. She manifests with terrible solidity, withered hands closing around his throat, lifting him as the other dead surge forward with mindless hunger.
The merchant’s screams rise higher, no longer words but pure animal terror as his mother’s grip tightens. Her form solidifies further with each passing heartbeat, drawing substance from the ritual’s unleashed power, from the thin place between worlds now torn wide. Séamus watches, frozen between horror and a terrible satisfaction, as Donnchadh’s feet kick uselessly above the ground. The soft hands that had counted coins and signed death warrants scrabble at spectral wrists that feel nothing, yield nothing.
“Mam, please,” Donnchadh chokes out, and the word is obscene in its intimacy, this monster reduced to a child begging forgiveness he never earned. “I didn’t, I never meant. Her mouth stretches wider, jaw unhinging like a serpent’s, and the shriek that emerges carries weight, carries presence. It slams into Séamus’s chest like a physical blow, driving the air from his lungs. The sound holds everything: the slow burn of poison in her veins, the realization of betrayal, the years of watching from death’s shore as her son prospered on her murder. Thirty years of silence compressed into one endless note of accusation.
The other ghosts halt their chaotic surge. Hundreds of translucent forms pause mid-reach, heads turning toward the spectacle. For one suspended moment, the supernatural storm stills around this nucleus of vengeance. Even Aisling’s familiar presence at Séamus’s shoulder grows quiet, witnessing.
Donnchadh’s face purples, then greys. His mother’s fingers sink deeper, passing through skin and muscle as if his flesh were morning mist. Her other hand rises, clawed and terrible, reaching for his chest. For his heart. The chains lie forgotten at her feet, their binding runes dark and powerless, while justice finally claims its due.
Then the moment breaks, and the dead remember their hunger.
The dead surge forward like a tide breaking against cliffs, and Séamus throws himself into their midst, Bríd’s name torn from his throat. Translucent bodies press against him. Cold that burns, grief that suffocates, need that claws. A woman’s face looms before his, jaw slack in the moment of her death-wound, and he sees the ogham inscriptions on the doorway behind her through the hollow of her throat.
“Bríd!” His voice disappears into the cacophony of the dead, their voices layering over one another in languages living and extinct. A monk’s Latin death-prayer tangles with a warrior’s Gaelic curse, with a child’s cry for mother, with the wet sounds of drowning and burning and bleeding out.
Muireann’s spear cuts silver arcs through the spectral mass, each swing passing harmlessly through forms that close again like water. She fights anyway, because fighting is all she knows, her scarred face twisted with fury at enemies she cannot touch. Beyond her, Cináed’s armored form staggers backward, spectral hands grasping at his shoulders, his waist, pulling him toward the darkness gathering at the sanctuary’s heart.
The circle’s salt line lies scattered, useless as ash.
The child who held Bríd’s hand through years of gentle haunting releases her fingers. Tadhg’s small form swells like storm clouds gathering, his translucent body darkening from pearl to slate to something that drinks light. The ritual’s corrupted energy pours into him. The first death, Séamus realizes through mounting horror, becomes the vessel for all that followed.
The boy’s face contorts. Innocent features stretch and multiply, overlaying with the death-masks of monks and warriors and women and children, a palimpsest of massacre written on a child’s countenance. His mouth opens impossibly wide.
The sound drops Séamus to his knees. Not a child’s cry but a hundred murdered voices screaming as one. Accusation and grief and betrayal given sonic form, vibrating through bone and spirit alike.
Bríd reaches desperately for her small companion, but her ink-stained fingers close on shadow and absence. “Tadhg, please,”
The boy-thing doesn’t hear. Cannot hear. Has become something beyond hearing.
The mother-ghost’s fingers sink into Donnchadh’s throat like roots into soft earth. His merchant’s smile finally breaks, revealing the terror beneath years of calculation. Blood vessels burst in his eyes as something essential flows from him: not blood but the stolen years themselves, unspooling like thread from a spindle.
“He knew,” Donnchadh chokes, each word costing him decades. “The boy… always… the vessel…”
His mother pulls him toward the widening dark, and Séamus sees the merchant’s future written in her triumphant rage: an eternity of transaction, payment extracted forever.
The stones descend like drowning men, each disappearing into earth that ripples like disturbed water. The rift inverts. No longer doorway but throat, swallowing rather than releasing. Aisling’s translucent form stretches impossibly thin, her mouth open in a scream Séamus cannot hear. He slides across stone made treacherous, his scholar’s fingers finding no purchase, reaching for Bríd’s hand even as the temple becomes funnel, becomes hunger, becomes the price of desperate bargains paid in full.
The words turned to poison on Séamus’s tongue mid-syllable, the Latin consonants twisting into something older and fouler. Not the language of release but of binding, of chains forged from breath and intent. His voice locked in his throat as comprehension struck like a blade between ribs.
The parchment in his trembling hands began to smoke, not with clean fire but with the greasy luminescence of corpse-light. Through the curling edges he could see it now. The faint impressions beneath Donnchadh’s careful forgery, the original words scraped away with methodical violence. A palimpsest. How had he missed it? Years of training, of squinting at damaged manuscripts by candlelight, and he’d been too desperate, too eager to believe.
“My mother always did have elegant handwriting,” Donnchadh said, his voice carrying across the circle with obscene satisfaction. He stood beyond the standing stones, safely outside the ritual’s perimeter, one hand pressed against a bleeding palm. “Even in her grimoire. Especially in her grimoire: all those pretty curses she never had courage to use. But I do, you see. I have courage enough for both of us.”
The merchant’s face was transformed, the oily charm burned away to reveal something harder beneath. Not the cunning of a survivor but the cold calculation of a man who had murdered his own mother and spent five years planning how to profit from her ghost. His grey eyes reflected the sickly green light of the counter-sigils, and for a moment Séamus saw the resemblance to the spectral woman who even now was beginning to manifest behind her son’s shoulder, her translucent fingers reaching.
“The irony,” Donnchadh continued, almost conversational despite the chaos erupting around them, “is that she wrote this curse for me. For me. And now I’ve used her own words to.
The counter-sigils ignite in sequence around the circle’s perimeter, each flare causing another standing stone to crack with the sound of splintering bone. Séamus’s gaze follows the spreading corruption and his stomach lurches with the sickening comprehension of how thoroughly they’ve been deceived.
There: beneath the fallen lintel where they’d sheltered from yesterday’s rain. And there: behind the curtain of ivy where Donnchadh had claimed to relieve himself. Another carved into the shadow-side of the altar stone itself, invisible except when the sickly light caught it at this precise angle. Every moment they’d left him unwatched, every time they’d turned their backs, the merchant had been inscribing his trap with methodical patience.
Donnchadh’s soft hands are bleeding from the work, deep cuts crossing his palms where he’d used his own blood as ink. But his smile is ecstatic as the trap springs shut, his grey eyes reflecting the green fire like a man witnessing his own apotheosis. Behind him, his mother’s ghost solidifies with terrible purpose, her spectral fingers reaching for his throat even as he laughs.
Aisling’s ghost convulses as the corrupted ritual takes hold, her translucent form darkening and solidifying in ways that violate the natural order. Flesh where there should be mist, weight where there should be weightlessness. She’s not being released but transformed into something that can be bound, bought, sold like livestock. Séamus lunges toward her, his ink-stained fingers passing through her changing substance, and feels the terrible heat of her anguish burning through the veil. The sensation is wrong, all wrong: touching the dead should be like touching fog, but this sears his fingertips with her trapped agony. The rift widens not into peaceful passage but into a gaping wound in reality itself, its edges raw and suppurating with otherworldly light. Through it, he glimpses not the Otherworld’s beauty but something vast and hungry that has been waiting for precisely this invitation.
The satchel’s leather blackens and curls, spilling manuscripts that ignite mid-fall. Each page a constellation of dying knowledge. Séamus watches his life’s work unmake itself: the Lebor Gabála annotations, the ogham glossaries, the painstakingly reconstructed druidic calendars. The flames consume meaning before matter, leaving blank vellum that crumbles to ash. The particles spiral upward, drawn into the rift’s maw like moths to a lamp that devours rather than illuminates.
The floor ruptures with sounds like drowning men gasping. Stones that witnessed druidic rites for five centuries suddenly plunging into absence. The crypt below has been replaced by something that predates the temple, a throat opening into primordial dark. Salt-rot and copper-thick blood-smell pour upward in exhalation. Séamus feels gravity lose conviction, the earth beneath him forgetting its covenant with solidity, tilting toward the void with terrible deliberation.
Séamus’s vision shatters like dropped glass, each shard reflecting a different death. He perceives through a druid’s eyes as the blade enters between ribs, the cold shock, the betrayal worse than the steel, then through a child’s perspective as flames consume the manuscript room, small hands beating uselessly against a barred door. The visions cascade without mercy: a woman’s final breath as she shields her infant, the baby’s cry cutting short; an old man’s confusion as his apprentice drives the knife home; lovers dying within arm’s reach, fingers straining toward each other across an impossible distance.
His mind cannot contain the multiplicity. Each death-memory carries its own weight of terror and incomprehension, and they pour into him like water into a drowning man’s lungs. He tastes blood that isn’t his. Dozens of flavors of mortality, copper and salt and the bitter residue of betrayed trust. His ears ring with screams layered so thick they become a single sustained note of anguish that vibrates in his bones.
Aisling’s form beside him convulses, her translucent features rippling like disturbed water. Her mouth opens in a soundless scream that seems to draw the darkness into her, her jaw unhinging beyond human possibility. The spectral tide catches her, pulls her backward into the churning mass of the dead. Séamus lunges for her, his ink-stained fingers grasping at her dissolving hand, but she slides through his grip like mist, like memory, like everything he’s ever failed to hold.
The devastating truth crashes through his fragmenting consciousness: she is not ascending to peace. The ritual has not freed her. Instead, she is being absorbed into this roiling collective of unresolved death, her individual spirit dissolving into the massacre’s eternal moment. He is not losing her to rest but to an eternity of shared trauma, condemned to relive these murders forever in an endless loop of violence and terror.
Blood runs hot from his nose, his ears. The present moment fractures completely.
Bríd’s carefully inscribed sigils flare with blinding light across her skin, the ink she’d mixed with her own blood now burning like brands beneath her robes. The ghost-child Tadhg materializes with unprecedented solidity beside her: but wrong, all wrong. His features twist into something ancient and hungry, his small jaw distending to reveal too many teeth, his eyes filling with the collective trauma of dozens of murdered souls. The massacre’s anguish flows through him like water through a broken dam, and he is no longer the lost boy seeking his mother but a conduit for something vast and terrible.
Her protective wards become chains. The sigils she inscribed so carefully to shield them now bind her in place, her feet rooted to the stone as if she’s grown there. The dead converge with terrible purpose, their translucent hands layering over her arms, her shoulders, her throat. Each touch carries the full weight of their death-memories: drowning in the sacred spring, burning in the manuscript room, bleeding out slowly in the dark while their brothers died screaming nearby.
She tries to call out to Séamus, to warn him, to beg him to run: but her voice emerges as a chorus of the dead, speaking in languages she doesn’t know, words that taste of ash and iron. And she sees the horror bloom in his grey eyes as he looks at her and sees not his beloved but something wearing her face like a mask.
Muireann’s warrior rage, her one constant through years of grief and blood, inverts to primal terror as ghostly children clutch at her with fingers that burn like frostbite. Her spear passes uselessly through translucent forms, but their touch finds solid purchase, flooding her with their death-memories: the cold spring water filling small lungs, the smoke choking, the darkness closing in while they called for mothers who never came. In their distorted faces she sees her daughters reflected back, their voices rising in chorus: “Máthair, máthair”. Not love but accusation, not greeting but condemnation. Her legendary courage shatters like pottery dropped on stone. She stumbles backward, heel catching on fractured flagstone, and the void beneath the temple floor yawns wide. The ghost-children cling tighter, their impossible weight dragging her down into darkness.
Cináed’s tactical mind (honed through forty campaigns, reliable as sunrise) fractures like ice beneath a warhorse. The standing stones rotate through geometries that mock Euclidean space, and corpses flow upward between them, defying God and nature alike. His lord’s family materializes from the spectral tide, faces locked in burning agony, fingers pointing, mouths shaping “oathbreaker” in accusatory silence. His sword becomes anchor-heavy with accumulated failure, and when he tries reaching for Séamus his arm refuses, muscles remembering that paralytic moment when he watched his sworn charges die.
Donnchadh’s accusations pierce the maelstrom, each word a blade finding vulnerable flesh: “He knew, the scholar knew, needed your deaths to anchor it, his sister’s been dead too long, needs fresh ghosts to trade,” And Séamus sees how it appears from outside his intent, sees the pattern of manipulation that isn’t there but could be, and when Cináed’s eyes find his across the spectral tide there’s doubt flickering, tactical reassessment, a soldier recognizing potential deception. Muireann’s scream might target ghosts or him. He cannot distinguish anymore, cannot trust his ink-stained fingers moving in patterns he doesn’t remember learning.
The spectral hands multiply like drowning fingers, cold as deep water, and Muireann’s body moves before thought, pivot, spear-thrust through translucent ribs that scatter like mist and reform, kick backward against grip that has no substance yet pulls with the strength of ocean currents. Her braids whip across her vision as she spins, and through the chaos of reaching dead she sees him: Séamus, standing perfectly still at the circle’s center where the standing stones frame him like a throne, his lips moving in patterns too deliberate for prayer.
The scholar’s ink-stained fingers trace shapes in the air. Sigils? Commands? His grey eyes reflect ghost-light, unfocused as always, but now that distance reads as calculation rather than distraction. How convenient that he positioned himself there, at the ritual’s heart, where the dead part around him like water around stone while they tear at her, at Cináed, drag Bríd screaming into darkness.
Donnchadh’s words echo in her skull: needed your deaths to anchor it. The merchant’s accusations had seemed like desperate lies, but warriors know deception wears many faces. The scholar who appeared so broken, so guilty: what better disguise for manipulation? She’d trusted grief because she recognized it, but grief makes weapons of everyone it touches.
Another spectral hand closes around her calf, pulling. The crypt entrance yawns behind her, exhaling cold that tastes of old bones and older betrayals. She drives her spear into the stone floor, anchoring herself, muscles burning as the dead multiply their grip. Through the forest of reaching arms she watches Séamus’s lips form words in a language she doesn’t recognize, watches his hands complete their pattern, and rage ignites in her chest like forge-fire.
“SÉAMUS!” His name rips from her throat, no longer plea but accusation, promise, curse. If she survives this, if the dead don’t claim her first, she’ll make him answer for this betrayal with her spear through his scholar’s heart.
His sword-hand moves to the hilt through pure instinct, decades of training overriding thought, but the blade remains sheathed because tactical assessment offers only impossible choices. The exit lies three strides behind him, clear, unobstructed, the mist beyond promising escape into the valley’s concealing grey. Survival, the soldier’s first imperative.
But Séamus stands at the circle’s heart, untouched while the dead surge past him like floodwater around a standing stone. Positioned there. The word carries weight: not trapped there, not caught there. Positioned. As one positions pieces before an attack.
Bríd swept away before she could verify the inscriptions she’d been copying. Muireann isolated where her spear finds only mist. And he himself placed precisely where a man might flee, might abandon companions, might save his own worthless life again while others die for his failures.
The pattern reads like battlefield treachery, like the siege where he stood at the gate while his lord’s family burned. Every instinct screams trap, but instinct has betrayed him before. The dead press closer, their spectral hands reaching, and he must choose: the soldier’s escape, or the knight’s doomed charge toward people who might be his murderers.
The scream dies not from distance but from spectral fingers, small, child-sized, sealing her mouth. Tadhg’s ghost-face twists into something that never belonged to a seven-year-old boy, an expression of calculation and ancient appetite that transforms familiar features into a stranger’s mask. The realization strikes with the force of betrayal: she never questioned his attachment, never wondered what need could anchor a child’s spirit through years of wandering, what hunger might wear innocence as camouflage. His translucent hand tightens, and she tastes grave-earth on her tongue. The ghost she’d pitied, protected, promised to help: had she been the one trapped all along, carried like provisions toward this moment?
The spectral tide fractures reality itself, Séamus perceives Cináed’s reaching hand as weapon-draw, sees murder-intent where moments before stood fellowship. Through the translucent bodies surging between them, Muireann glimpses Bríd’s ink-stained fingers tracing patterns in air, each gesture trailing phosphorescent rot, binding-sigils meant to trap rather than free. Trust inverts to terror; each companion transforms into the precise nightmare their guilt anticipated, their deepest suspicions given flesh by the veil’s tearing.
The words strike Séamus like physical blows, each syllable a perfectly aimed dart. Through the chaos he sees Cináed’s face contort. Not with disbelief but recognition, as though Donnchadh merely voiced what the knight already suspected. Bríd’s distant scream cuts off mid-breath. Muireann’s spear-point swings toward him instead of the merchant. The accusation spreads like blood in water, poisoning everything it touches, transforming sanctuary into abattoir.
The cold strikes first. Not the chill of winter wind but something fundamental, the absence of warmth at a level that makes his bones ache with wrongness. Séamus stumbles backward, his heel catching on the very line he’d inscribed with such painstaking care three hours ago, when hope still seemed possible. The ogham characters glow with a sickly phosphorescence, pulsing in rhythm with his racing heart.
Aisling reaches him first. Her translucent fingers pass through his chest, and the sensation is drowning from the inside. Water filling lungs that remain stubbornly empty, the panic of suffocation without the mercy of death. Behind her, others press close. A woman with riverweed tangled in her hair. A child whose bloated face still holds the surprise of falling through ice. An old man trailing anchor chains that make no sound as they drag across stone.
They don’t speak. Their mouths work soundlessly, forming words in the language of the drowned: a vocabulary of bubbles and brine that Séamus’s scholar’s mind tries desperately to parse even as his body convulses. Each touch steals something essential. The memory of his mother’s hearth-fire. The taste of summer mead. The sensation of sunlight on skin.
He tries to break the circle, to scuff the protective marks with his boot, but his legs betray him. The inscriptions weren’t drawn to be broken from within. Of course not. A cage needs only one door, and he’d sealed it himself with Aisling’s guidance, trusting her completely.
The irony cuts deeper than the cold. She’d led him here through dreams, shown him the precise symbols, whispered the correct pronunciations. Not to free her. To join her. To finally give her what she’d wanted since the moment she’d pushed him toward shore and let the current take her instead: his company in the depths, his warmth to sustain her through eternity.
The dead press closer, and Séamus feels himself becoming translucent at the edges.
The threshold splits with the sound of tearing silk magnified a thousandfold, and through Séamus’s failing vision, his sight dimming as the drowned press their cold reality into him, he sees the standing stones begin to crack. Not breaking, but opening, like stone made flesh developing wounds. From each fissure seeps something that catches the fey-light: thick and luminous, neither liquid nor vapor, pooling at the bases in spreading circles that steam in the frigid air.
The pools birth abominations. Half-formed things that were never meant to exist claw their way into being: faces without skulls behind them, hands that terminate in wisps of ectoplasm, torsos that fade to nothing below the ribs. They keen in voices that exist somewhere between sound and sensation, drawn through the catastrophic rupture by the gravity of so much death concentrated in one space.
Bríd’s scream cuts through the cacophony, and Séamus tries to turn toward her but the drowned hold him fast. The veil hasn’t merely torn. It’s hemorrhaging, and with each spirit that forces through, the wound widens further, reality’s fabric unraveling like rotted cloth.
Bríd’s meticulous documentation ignites with cold fire that doesn’t consume but transforms, the ink lifting from the pages to write itself across the air in spiraling ogham that burns into her vision even when she closes her eyes. She feels the ritual spreading through every copy she’s ever made, every text she’s touched, creating a web of sympathetic connections that pulls at her consciousness like fishhooks embedded in her mind. The child-ghost at her side begins to scream, his small form flickering between states of being (solid, translucent, absent) as the catastrophic inversion tears at his already tenuous existence. Through the burning script she sees other scribes, distant and unknowing, bent over her copied texts as the same cold fire blooms across their work, spreading the contagion of this failed ritual like plague through parchment.
The iron chains Donnchadh brandishes, purchased at ruinous cost from a hedge-witch who swore they could bind even the most violent spirits, shatter with a sound like breaking teeth, fragments spinning through mist-thick air before embedding themselves in stone, wood, flesh. Through each shard a ghost reaches as through a doorway torn in reality’s fabric, translucent fingers suddenly solid enough to grip living throats, to tear at hair and clothing, dragging the screaming living toward the threshold’s ravenous emptiness.
The ghost-hand closes around Muireann’s spear-arm with impossible strength: burning ice that turns her flesh grey and translucent where spectral fingers grip. She watches the possession spread upward like frost across glass, her muscles no longer answering her will. The dead warrior wearing her limb pivots, turning her weapon toward Cináed with terrible precision. Her voice screams warnings her body refuses to obey, trapped behind her own eyes as passenger to her possessed flesh.
The temple stones grind inward with the sound of continental plates colliding, each grinding scrape resonating in Séamus’s teeth, in his bones, in the hollow spaces where his certainty used to live. His leather satchel. Five years of salvaged manuscripts, his translations of the ritual, every scrap of knowledge he’d preserved through hunger and cold and the endless grey mornings of guilt: catches between two pillars that shouldn’t be able to move, that couldn’t move according to every principle of the physical world he’d studied.
The leather splits with a sound like a body breaking.
Ancient vellum explodes outward in clouds of dust that the unnatural mist devours before the fragments can fall, and Séamus lunges forward with a scholar’s instinctive horror, his ink-stained fingers grasping at nothing, at less than nothing, at the erasure of everything he’d built from the wreckage of his sister’s death. The ogham inscriptions he’d trusted to guide them (copied by candlelight in monastery corners, traced with trembling fingers onto his own skin as reminders) begin rearranging themselves on the walls around him.
He watches the letters crawl like insects across stone.
The meanings invert. Threshold becomes trap. Release becomes binding. Peace becomes torment. His life’s work rewrites itself into a chronicle of his failure, and worse, far worse, into evidence that he’d understood perfectly all along, that some part of him had wanted this, had led them all here not to free Aisling but to join her, to drag the living down into the grey space where he’d been dwelling since the day she drowned.
The ghost at his shoulder (his sister’s translucent form) turns to face him fully for the first time in five years, and her mouth opens on a scream that sounds exactly like his own voice.
Bríd’s scream cuts through the chaos as the spectral child Tadhg fractures like dropped glass. His form multiplies, splits, becomes dozens of versions swarming her like wasps made of grief, each wailing in a different pitch that harmonizes into something that shouldn’t exist in the mortal world. She staggers backward toward where the floor collapsed into the crypt below, her ink-stained fingers reaching for Séamus across a distance that stretches, that grows wider with each heartbeat though neither of them moves.
The space between them fills with translucent bodies that pass through him like ice water, like drowning from the inside out, and he realizes with the clarity of absolute horror that he can no longer judge distance, that Bríd might be ten feet away or a hundred, that he’s been trying to reach her for seconds or hours or the same moment repeating forever. Her mouth shapes his name but the sound arrives delayed, distorted, as if traveling through water or time or the grey space between death and memory.
The air turns viscous, each breath dragging through his throat like swallowing stones, and Séamus feels his lungs crystallizing with cold that blooms from within. Frost patterns spreading across his ribs, his heart laboring against the thickening of his own blood. Around him the dead compress into impossible density, twenty souls occupying the space where one should stand, their translucent forms achieving weight through sheer accumulation until they become a wall of spectral matter that resists like frozen clay when he claws forward. His fingers sink into their substance (cold, yielding, obscene) the texture of drowned flesh preserved in winter water. They cling to his hands, his face, seeping into his mouth when he gasps, tasting of salt and earth and the copper-dark flavor of someone else’s death.
Aisling manifests before him, water streaming from her hair in defiance of death’s stillness, and their eyes meet, grey recognizing grey, before the void-sky catches her like a hook through flesh. Her form stretches upward, not rising but being pulled, the tearing visible in how her edges fray and scatter. The gentle sorrow he’s carried five years twists into animal terror across her features, her mouth wrenching open around a scream that produces no sound, hands dissolving even as they reach for him, and he understands: what waits above is worse than any haunting, worse than the half-life she’s endured, something that will unmake her.
Through the press of spectral flesh he glimpses Cináed’s silver hair before the dead close over him like drowning water. Muireann’s possessed arm rises, spear moving with inhuman grace. Bríd’s auburn braid vanishes behind surge-tide corpses. The knowledge detonates through his chest: his pride in ancient texts, his scholar’s certainty, has led them here. They trusted his expertise. He has authored their deaths as surely as sharpened iron, destroyed the only community his isolation ever found.
The manuscript’s edges curl and blacken where ghost-flesh brushes them, but the text itself pulses with that otherworldly luminescence, each letter traced in what he’d dismissed as water damage now revealed as something else entirely: ink mixed with blood, perhaps, or tears, substances that carry memory in ways his scholarly training never acknowledged. His hands shake as he pulls it closer, and the formation resolves into words he knows, phrases he’s translated a hundred times in other contexts, but here arranged in patterns that invert everything he thought he understood about the ritual structure.
Not a psalter. Never a psalter.
A warning.
The script shifts between Latin and Old Irish with the fluid inconsistency of someone writing in desperate haste, and he recognizes the hand now. The same formation as the inscriptions on the sealed doorways, the same trembling urgency in the strokes. Written by someone who knew what was coming, who understood the massacre wasn’t random violence but calculated preparation, who tried to leave instructions for undoing what had been done and failed, failed as Séamus is failing now, the knowledge arriving too late to matter.
The words swim before his vision: The boundary requires balance. What passes through must pass back. The living anchor the dead. To release one, bind another. He has inverted the exchange.
Donnchadh’s counter-sigils weren’t meant to trap their ghosts after the ritual completed. They were designed to substitute the living for the dead in the moment of transition, to offer fresh anchors for the massacre’s victims while selling the newly freed spirits to his buyers. The ritual would have worked, Aisling would have been released, but only by binding Séamus himself in her place, and Bríd, and Muireann, and Cináed, their living souls trapped as eternal servants while their bodies became empty vessels for the vengeful dead.
He crawls toward it through the chaos, spectral bodies passing through his torso with ice-burn cold that makes his lungs seize, his ink-stained fingers (those permanent marks of scholarship that separated him from his peasant origins, proof of years spent in scriptoriums while others worked the fields) reaching for the page even as he hears Bríd scream his name from somewhere in the maelstrom. The choice between his companions and this revelation tears him in two, but something in the handwriting’s uncertain loops pulls him forward with terrible recognition, a familiarity that precedes conscious thought.
The formation is crude, unpracticed, a child’s careful mimicry of his own hand, and he knows it instantly because he taught those letterforms himself, sitting by the river on summer afternoons when the work could wait, Aisling’s tongue poking from the corner of her mouth in fierce concentration as she traced ogham and Latin both, her small fingers gripping the charcoal too tightly. The date inscribed at the top is the morning of the day she drowned, which means she wrote this knowing, which means everything he’s believed about that day is wrong, has always been wrong.
The script is crude, unpracticed (a child’s careful mimicry of his own hand) and recognition hits him like drowning, because he taught those letterforms himself, sitting by the river on summer afternoons when the harvest could wait, Aisling’s tongue poking from the corner of her mouth in that fierce concentration she brought to everything, her small fingers gripping the charcoal too tightly as she traced ogham and Latin both, determined to follow her brother into the world of letters. The date inscribed at the top stops his heart: the morning of the day she died. Which means she wrote this knowing. Which means she went to the river understanding what would come. Which means everything he’s believed about that day, every assumption, every memory, every foundation of his guilt, is wrong, has always been wrong.
The parchment blurs through tears he hasn’t shed in years, salt-sting and shame, because she chose and he made her choice meaningless, transformed her gift into chains, wore her death like a hair-shirt to prove his unworthiness when she’d wanted the opposite (wanted him whole, wanted him happy) and the betrayal isn’t hers but his, five years of refusing what she died to give him.
The page tears beneath his grip, ink bleeding across his palms like prophecy. And through the surge of howling dead he sees her, Aisling’s translucent form stretched between worlds, mouth open in a soundless cry that might be his name or condemnation. Her eyes meet his across the impossible distance, and in them he reads not the forgiveness he’d sought but something far more devastating: pity for the brother who loved his own guilt more than her gift of life, who built a shrine of suffering where she’d planted hope.
The manuscript slips from his nerveless fingers, pages scattering across stone slick with spectral mist, and Séamus crawls forward on hands and knees to gather them with shaking hands: not to preserve them but to see her words again, to trace the careful loops and uncertain strokes of letters she’d practiced so diligently during those stolen afternoons by the river.
His vision blurs. The ghost-light catches on each page, illuminating ink that had seemed merely water-stained, revealing layer upon layer of her attempts. She’d written it three times, four, scratching out words and beginning again, determined to get the message right. Live for both of us. The letters wobble where her hand had cramped, where she’d pressed too hard in her earnestness.
She’d been twelve years old. Twelve, and already braver than he’d ever been.
The chamber spins around him, or perhaps he’s the one spinning, his breath coming in ragged gasps that echo off ancient stone. All those nights he’d lain awake cataloguing his failures: how he should have seen the current’s strength, should have been the stronger swimmer, should have died in her place. All those days he’d denied himself comfort, companionship, any moment of peace, building a monument to his unworthiness from the bones of his grief.
And she’d known. She’d known the river was treacherous that day, had seen him slip on the bank, had chosen in that crystalline instant to dive after him rather than run for help. Not because she thought him more valuable, not because she believed he deserved saving more than she deserved living, but because love doesn’t calculate worth. Love simply acts.
His fingers close around the page, crumpling it against his chest. The ink smears against his tunic, marking him with her words, and something inside him, something that has been clenched tight as a fist for five years, begins, finally, to unfurl.
“You knew,” he whispers to the ghost-light, to the chaos, to the sister-shaped absence that has defined him for five years. The words scrape his throat raw, tasting of salt and iron and the river water he’d coughed up while she sank beneath the surface. “You knew and you did it anyway.”
His voice breaks on the last word. How many meals had he choked down while telling himself he didn’t deserve to eat? How many nights had he denied himself sleep, warmth, human touch. Building his penance one deprivation at a time? He’d thought himself noble in his suffering, thought he was honoring her sacrifice by refusing joy.
But she’d written live. Not survive. Not endure. Live.
The manuscript trembles in his grip. He’d been so certain her ghost appeared in accusation, that her drowned face and reaching hands meant she blamed him, wanted him to join her in death. Five years of interpreting her presence as condemnation when she’d been trying, all along, to remind him of her final gift.
She’d chosen his life. And he’d been refusing it.
The ghost-flood parts around her translucent form like water around stone. Aisling stands motionless now, her drowned face peaceful rather than anguished, and he sees that her hands have always been extended in blessing, not accusation. Each manifestation he’d interpreted as a demand for ritual release had been her trying to push him forward, toward Bríd’s warmth, toward Muireann’s fierce protection, toward Cináed’s quiet understanding. She’d been haunting him not because she couldn’t rest, but because he wouldn’t.
The recognition splits him open: his sister had never needed saving. He was the one drowning, and she’d been trying to pull him to shore for five years.
The manuscripts scatter from nerveless fingers, Navigatio, De Situ Albanie, his precious salvaged folios, all those desperate miles of searching reduced to what they’d always been: elaborate monuments to avoidance. He’d wrapped his cowardice in scholarship’s dignity, transformed her drowning into an academic problem with solutions hidden in ogham and Latin, because grief could be studied but love’s terrible generosity demanded only that he accept it.
The words tear from somewhere deeper than his lungs, raw and unformed, shaped by the ghost-light that makes Aisling’s script shimmer like something holy. “I’m sorry,” he gasps, and the apology fractures into pieces. Sorry for the years spent excavating tombs instead of living, sorry for transforming her drowning into his thesis, sorry for making her final act of love into his eternal penance. His throat closes around the truth: she’d chosen his future, and he’d spent it building her a mausoleum.
The realization doesn’t come gently. It crashes through her like the wave that took them. Her spear point drops, trembling, as ghost after ghost flows past her searching gaze. Wrong eyes. Wrong hands. Wrong voices in their keening. She’s memorized every detail of her family’s faces, carried them like relics in the shrine of her skull, and not one of these spirits matches. Not one.
The chamber spins, or perhaps she does. Five years of tracking rumors, following whispers, interpreting every supernatural occurrence as a sign that Cormac and Orlaith and little Fiachra were still out there, still suffering, still needing her. Five years of telling herself that her rage had purpose, that her violence was devotion, that she couldn’t rest because they couldn’t rest.
But they had. They’d rested that first night, probably, released into whatever gentle dark awaited those who died loving and beloved. While she’d been binding herself to vengeance like a penitent to a stone, they’d already gone somewhere she couldn’t follow with a spear.
“You’re not here,” she whispers, and the words taste like drowning. “You were never here.”
The ghosts continue their circuit, indifferent to her revelation. They have their own griefs, their own unfinished business. None of it involves her. None of it ever did.
Her knees want to buckle but she locks them, warrior’s instinct overriding the weakness. The spear shaft bites into her palm. She’s gripping it hard enough to splinter wood. That pain, at least, is real. Present. Not another phantom she’s conjured to avoid the unbearable truth: that she’s been hunting Donnchadh not because her family needs vengeance, but because she needs a reason not to face the empty house of her own survival.
The spear clatters against stone, the sound impossibly loud in the chamber’s spectral cacophony. Her hands: these hands that have killed, that have tracked, that have held weapons more tenderly than they ever held her children in those final months when she was already halfway gone to grief. Hang empty at her sides.
She’s been wearing their deaths like a second skin, stitching her identity from the fabric of loss until she couldn’t remember who Muireann was before the massacre. The warrior, the hunter, the instrument of righteous vengeance. All of it constructed to avoid the simple, devastating truth: she’s alive and they’re not, and no amount of blood will balance that equation.
The vulnerability of it threatens to split her open. Without rage, without purpose, without the hunt: what remains? Just a woman who survived when her family didn’t. Just a mother whose children sleep somewhere beyond her reach, in a peace she’s been too afraid to imagine because imagining their peace means accepting that they don’t need her anymore.
They never needed her vengeance. Only she did.
The weapon that has been her constant companion, her purpose made manifest in ash wood and iron, becomes nothing more than dead weight. Her fingers loosen. The spear slides through her grip with a whisper of wood against callused palm, and she watches it fall as though from a great distance. This extension of her will, this instrument of promised justice, tumbling end over end until the point strikes stone with a sharp crack that echoes through the chamber.
The ghosts continue their wailing, but she no longer hears them as accusation. They are simply the dead, crying out for release she cannot give them. Her family’s silence speaks louder than all their keening: We are not here. We never were.
The weight of it breaks something fundamental in her chest. This recognition that vengeance has been her hiding place, her way of never having to answer the unbearable question: who is Muireann without war? Donnchadh’s throat beneath her blade won’t resurrect her children’s laughter or her husband’s warmth. Only the terrifying vulnerability of choosing life over death-in-living can do that, and she’s been too much a coward to try.
The ghosts press close but do not touch her: they never could, for they are not hers to carry. Her family sleeps in earth consecrated by love, not trapped in this threshold of violence. She has been punishing herself with a quest that was always hollow, filling the void where healing should have grown with the familiar comfort of fury, because grief without purpose felt like drowning.
The parchment feels impossibly fragile between his calloused fingers, as though the years have made it gossamer-thin, ready to dissolve at a breath. Cináed’s vision swims. Not from the supernatural mist that fills this cursed chamber, but from the salt-sting of tears he hasn’t allowed himself to shed since he rode away from the burning keep with ash in his lungs and failure carved into his bones.
Do not waste the life we bought with ours.
The words strike like hammer-blows against the fortress of his guilt. He has been doing precisely that. Wandering in deliberate aimlessness, seeking death in every skirmish, sleeping in ditches when warm beds were offered, scraping away his own heraldry as though he could erase himself entirely. Five years of penance, five years of carrying their deaths like stones in his chest, and she had released him before the flames even touched her skin.
His lady’s ghost tilts her head in that familiar gesture: the one she’d used when he’d made some tactical error in their endless games of fidchell, patient disappointment mixed with affection. Her lips move soundlessly, forming words he suddenly understands though no voice carries them: Stubborn fool. Always so determined to shoulder every burden alone.
The letter crumples slightly as his hands shake. He forces himself to smooth it, to read the final lines he’d missed through his tears: “Tell Cináed he was the best of us, and we were honored to call him friend. Tell him his lord commanded, commanded, that he survive, that he carry our memory forward not as a weight but as a light.”
A command. His lord’s final order, sealed and witnessed and utterly disobeyed for five long years of self-imposed exile.
Around him the ghost-flood swirls with dozens of faces from that terrible day, the guards who died at their posts, the servants who perished in the smoke, his lord himself with sword still raised, and none of them reach for him with grasping hands or scream condemnation. They simply watch, waiting, as though they’ve been waiting five years for him to finally break the seal and read what was always meant for him.
Young Fiachra, who’d been learning swordwork under his tutelage. Old Gormlaith, who’d mended his cloak each winter without being asked. The steward who’d shared whiskey with him on cold nights, discussing philosophy and the weight of duty. Each face carries not accusation but something far more devastating: patience. Understanding. A gentle insistence that he finally see what they’ve been trying to show him through the veil between worlds.
They are not chains binding him to the past. They are witnesses to his liberation, gathered here at this threshold where the boundaries thin, where truth can finally pierce through the armor of self-hatred he’s worn like penance. The letter trembles in his grip. Not from weakness, but from the terrible strength required to accept forgiveness he never thought he deserved.
The ghost-tide parts around them both, lord and lady united even in death, and their expressions hold no disappointment. Only a profound sadness that he has suffered so long beneath a burden they’d tried to lift from his shoulders. His lord’s mouth moves, forming words Cináed cannot hear but suddenly understands with perfect clarity: You were always more than a sword. You were our friend.
The weight of that truth is staggering. He’d reduced himself to a failed weapon, when they’d valued him as something infinitely more precious. The letter wasn’t duty. It was love. And he’d been too wrapped in self-loathing to recognize the difference.
The parchment trembles in his calloused hands, edges softening where his tears fall. They had known him: known the shape of his loyalty, the depth of his devotion, the terrible way he would turn both inward like a blade. This letter was their shield against his own nature. His suffering hasn’t preserved their memory; it has defied their final wish, made their sacrifice meaningless through his refusal to accept what they’d freely given.
The ghosts regard him with expressions no longer frozen in their death-agonies but soft with recognition, with release. His lord’s wife, Lady Gráinne, who’d taught him to read poetry, who’d laughed at his clumsy attempts at courtly manners, smiles as she used to when he finally understood a difficult verse. Her husband stands beside her, hand on her shoulder, and the forgiveness in their fading forms unmakes the prison Cináed has inhabited since flame consumed their hall.
The child’s form wavers like candlelight in a draft, and Bríd feels the careful architecture of her identity crumbling. All those years of telling herself she was different, chosen, marked by something greater: when truly she’d been hiding behind the dead because they couldn’t reject her the way her mother had, eyes full of fear and crossed fingers whenever Bríd entered a room. The way her father had sent her to the monastery not for education but for fixing, as though her sight were a sickness to be purged through prayer.
She’d convinced herself that documenting the lost, preserving their stories, was noble work. And perhaps it was: but she’d also used it as a wall, keeping everyone at arm’s length. Even Séamus, whose grey eyes understood her hauntings because he carried his own. Especially Séamus, because he’d looked at her not with fear or pity but with recognition, and that terrified her more than any ghost ever had.
“You’ve been so kind to me,” Tadhg says, his voice carrying the weight of years he never lived to see, “but kindness isn’t the same as letting go.”
The words settle in her chest like stones in deep water. She thinks of all the times she’d turned away from connection, from community, from the possibility of being known. How she’d clutched her strangeness like a talisman, proof that she didn’t need what others needed, love, belonging, the simple grace of being seen and accepted anyway.
But Tadhg had never needed her guidance. His mother’s spirit had been waiting in the Otherworld all along, patient as tide pools. He’d stayed because Bríd needed him, needed the validation of his presence, needed evidence that her isolation meant something more than cowardice dressed in purpose.
“I was so afraid,” she whispers, and the admission feels like pulling a knife from a wound: the kind that bleeds clean once the foreign object is finally removed. Her voice cracks on the words, raw as scraped parchment. “Afraid that if you left, I’d have to face the world without proof that I’m not mad, that this sight means something.”
The mist presses close around them, cold and salt-thick. Her fingers dig into the moss-covered stone beneath her knees.
“That my loneliness serves a purpose,” she continues, the words tumbling now like water through a broken dam. “That being cast out, being feared, being sent away: that it all meant something more than just being unwanted.”
Tadhg’s ghost tilts his head with a child’s terrible clarity, and she sees herself reflected in his ancient young eyes. Not a guardian or guide, not the noble preserver of lost souls she’d painted herself to be, but another lost soul clinging to the dead because the living had hurt her, rejected her, made her feel like something wrong that needed fixing. Something to be hidden away in monasteries and margins, kept at arm’s length with crossed fingers and averted gazes.
She thinks of Séamus: how they’d circled each other like two moths drawn to the same cold flame, finding comfort in shared haunting. She’d called it love, and perhaps it was, but twisted: she’d been using him as another tether, another justification. If we’re both broken in the same way, neither of us has to mend. If they were both devoted to the dead, both searching backward instead of forward, then neither had to risk the terrifying vulnerability of actually living, of wanting things that might be taken away, of loving someone who might someday leave not through death but through choice. The realization makes her stomach twist with shame because she does love him, desperately, achingly, but she’d been loving him wrong, loving him as a fellow ghost rather than as a man with warm hands and a beating heart.
“Your mother is waiting,” Bríd whispers, each word a stone dropped into still water. “And I’ve been selfish. Keeping you tethered because I was too frightened to be alone with myself.” Her throat constricts. “Too cowardly to face what it means to choose the living over the dead, to want things that breathe and change and might leave me.” The child’s translucent fingers brush her cheek like cool mist, and in that touch she feels not accusation but gentle absolution: he’d been waiting for her permission all along, waiting for her to stop needing him as proof of her own significance, waiting for her to understand that being truly seen by the living matters infinitely more than being validated by the dead.
She closes her eyes against the weight of it: the years of clinging to his small cold hand as justification for her isolation, her difference, her refusal to risk the vulnerability of being truly known. “Go to her, Tadhg,” she whispers, voice breaking on each syllable. “Go to your mother and be at peace. I release you from my need. I release myself from this excuse for hiding.” The words taste of salt and surrender, of foundations crumbling beneath her feet.
The realization crashes through him like the drowning he’d always half-wished for. Her hands move in sharp, insistent gestures: toward Bríd standing beyond the collapsed stone, toward the world outside these death-soaked ruins, toward everything he’d been systematically destroying in the name of honoring her memory.
Five years. Five years of interpreting her presence as condemnation when she’d been trying to shake him awake. Every midnight visitation he’d received as punishment had been her desperate attempt to reach through his self-flagellation. Every dream that led him here hadn’t been about finding some arcane ritual of release: it had been about forcing him to finally see what he’d been doing to himself, to Bríd, to the gift she’d given him when she’d pulled him from the current and gone under herself.
The worst of it settles in his chest like river water in drowning lungs: she isn’t trapped by some cosmic injustice or unfinished druidic business. She’s trapped because he won’t let her go. His guilt has been a chain wrapped around her wrist, dragging her back every time she might have drifted toward whatever peace awaits the dead. He’d thought himself the haunted one, but he’s been the anchor, the weight, the thing that drowns.
Aisling’s face contorts with something between love and rage. She points at Bríd again, more forcefully, and the gesture contains everything she can’t speak: You absolute fool. I didn’t die so you could follow me. I died so you could LIVE.
The manuscripts, the quest, the scholarly obsession. All of it a monument to his cowardice, dressed up as devotion.
“I’m sorry,” he chokes out, and the words aren’t for Aisling: not this time. They’re for Bríd, standing beyond the collapsed stone with her ink-stained hands pressed against the barrier between them. Sorry for the years he’d made her walk beside his ghost instead of beside him, for every conversation he’d ended to commune with the dead, for every touch he’d pulled away from because allowing himself warmth felt like betraying the cold river that had taken his sister. Sorry for the nights he’d given to manuscripts and guilt instead of to the woman who’d somehow loved him anyway, who’d carried her own haunting with such grace while he’d made his into a shrine. Sorry for refusing to imagine a future because imagining it felt like betraying Aisling’s memory, when the real betrayal, the one that makes his throat close with shame, was making her death the center of his existence instead of honoring the gift she’d given: his life, his continuation, the chance to become something more than the guilty boy frozen forever at the river’s edge.
The satchel of manuscripts slips from his shoulder, all those salvaged texts scattering across wet stone.
She mouths words he’d been too consumed by guilt to hear before: thank you for living. The phrase strikes like a blow to the chest. Five years of dreams, five years of her translucent form hovering at his shoulder, and she’d been speaking this benediction while he’d heard only accusation. He realizes with sickening clarity that his haunting was never her curse on him but his curse on her. His refusal to honor her choice by making a choice of his own, his insistence on dragging her spirit back night after night to witness his self-destruction. She’d drowned once in the river. He’d been drowning her again and again in his guilt, forcing her to watch him waste the life she’d died to preserve.
The revelation crashes through him like cold seawater. He’d mistaken her companionship for complicity, her love for validation of his suffering. She’d never needed him broken; she’d needed him whole. All those nights copying manuscripts side by side, her fingers brushing his, she’d been offering not shared haunting but shared living, and he’d been too enamored with his own tragedy to accept it.
“Bríd!” Her name tears from his throat raw and new, stripped of the elegiac weight he’d wrapped around every word for five years. He reaches across the crumbling stone not as a penitent seeking absolution but as a man choosing the living warmth of her hand over the cold comfort of his guilt. Behind him, Aisling’s translucent form softens into something like relief, like permission, like goodbye.
The ghost-flood rises through the fractured floor like breath through water, and Séamus sees himself drowning in reverse. A woman’s face surfaces from the silver-grey torrent with his exact expression of surrender, the same way he’d stopped fighting the current of his guilt years ago. Her mouth opens in a scream that never breaks the surface. His own throat closes in recognition.
Across the splintering chamber, Muireann stumbles backward from a warrior-ghost whose scar mirrors her own, blade rising and falling in an endless killing stroke that never lands, never finishes, never brings peace. The rage in those spectral eyes is her rage, perfected and eternal, and she understands with sudden horror that she has been rehearsing this same futile violence against herself for years, cutting deeper than any raider’s sword.
Cináed’s knees buckle as he meets the eyes of a guard-ghost who stands at eternal attention before a door that no longer exists, protecting nothing, serving no one, bound by an oath that outlived its purpose. The specter’s shoulders curve exactly like his own, bent under armor that has become a cage rather than protection.
And Bríd. The ghost’s careful solitude is her own, the way she’d wrapped herself in purpose to avoid the risk of being known, of being left, of mattering to someone who might one day become another loss to carry.
The temple shudders. Stone grinds against stone. The floor tilts and they are all falling, but in the moment before gravity claims them, each understands: they have been their own hauntings, their own curses, their own prisons. The ghosts they served were only mirrors they’d mistaken for chains.
The understanding crashes through Séamus like a wave breaking. Every time he thought she beckoned toward death, she was pushing him toward the living. The drowning he sees in her face is his own refusal to surface.
Muireann’s breath catches as the warrior-ghosts surrounding her shift their stance. They never demanded blood. They asked only that she stop bleeding with them, stop dying the same death over and over in her mind. Her family sleeps peacefully in earth that has long since accepted them; only she remains on the battlefield.
Cináed hears it now: the whispered absolution his lord gasped with that final breath, words he’d buried under the sound of his own condemnation. Forgiveness offered freely, refused absolutely.
And Bríd sees Tadhg’s mother waiting beyond the veil, arms open. The child stayed not because he was lost, but because she needed someone whose presence demanded nothing, who couldn’t abandon her. She made him her anchor when he longed to be free.
The hauntings were never chains. They were keys they’d refused to turn.
The ghosts unravel like mist touched by morning sun. Aisling’s translucent form, forever caught in that terrible descent, suddenly reverses its motion, rising through water that exists only in Séamus’s perception, her face breaking an invisible surface with an expression not of terror but release. Around Muireann, the warrior-dead lower spears that were never truly raised in accusation, their bloodied forms turning away as if dismissed from a duty they never sought. Cináed’s fallen guards straighten from their eternal dying, stand at attention one last time with the precision of living men, offer a final salute, and fade like breath on cold air. Tadhg’s small fingers slip from Bríd’s hand without desperation, his spectral face transformed from lost to found, from trapped to choosing departure.
The recognition tears through Séamus like a blade through water, his sister never drowning but ascending, never accusing but releasing, and the temple responds as if it has been listening all along, as if the stones themselves were held in place by the architecture of their shared guilt. The walls crack with sounds like bones breaking, ancient mortar crumbling between blocks that have stood for centuries on nothing but the weight of unforgiven hearts.
The floor opens like a mouth beneath them. Séamus’s fingers brush Bríd’s, warm, ink-stained, alive, as gravity claims him. He sees Muireann catch Cináed’s wrist, the warrior and the knight falling together toward the dark. Behind them all, the ghosts dissolve into mist, their work complete. The living fall, but they fall reaching for each other, and that changes everything.
The spiral fracture races outward from the central stone like lightning frozen in rock, each crack singing with a high, crystalline note that harmonizes into an unbearable chord, the sound of a place remembering its destruction, the massacre replaying in stone, and Séamus recognizes it from his dreams, the moment the druids died, the temple’s foundation drinking their blood and storing their death like a battery that has finally discharged.
His sister’s ghost turns toward him, mouth open in a scream he cannot hear over the stone’s shrieking, and he sees in her translucent face not warning but recognition: she knows what comes next, has always known, has been trying to tell him through five years of silent haunting that this moment was inevitable, that he would fall as she fell, that water would claim him as it claimed her.
The floor beneath his feet shudders. Dust rises in columns between the cracks, ancient and grey as cremation ash. He tries to step backward but his legs have forgotten how to obey, locked in place by the same paralysis that gripped him when he was eight years old and watched his sister’s head slip beneath the river’s surface, her hand reaching up one final time before the current took her down.
The sanctuary floor drops away in sections, great slabs of stone tilting and sliding into the darkness below. Séamus sees the black mouth of the crypt yawning open, hears the rush of water: the sacred spring, freed from its ancient channels, pouring into the void with the voice of a river in flood. His stomach lurches as the stone beneath him tips, and then he is falling, the grey sky wheeling overhead, Aisling’s ghost diving after him with arms outstretched, her fingers passing through his reaching hand like mist, like memory, like everything he has ever failed to hold.
His scream becomes a wet gurgle, blood vessels bursting in his eyes as the pressure mounts, and Donnchadh’s fine merchant’s clothing tears as he thrashes, revealing the soft pale flesh beneath, unmarked by labor or hardship, a body that has never known consequence until this moment when all consequences arrive at once.
The grey void behind him pulses with each beat of his failing heart, and in its depths Séamus glimpses faces: the families Donnchadh betrayed, the raiders’ victims, all the dead his greed has made, reaching from the Otherworld with hands that remember their murders. They do not pull him through. They wait, patient as stones, for him to cross the threshold completely.
But his mother’s ghost holds him precisely at the boundary, her grip tightening with supernatural strength that no longer requires the weakness of mortal flesh. Her face, visible now in the doorway’s frame, wears an expression of infinite patience and infinite cruelty. The look of someone who has waited years for this justice and will savor every moment of its eternal duration.
Donnchadh’s fingers scrabble at the doorframe, nails splitting against ancient stone.
The threshold devours him incrementally: first the waist, then ribs, each breath drawing him deeper into the grey void that tastes of salt and regret. His torso twists at an angle impossible for living flesh, spine bending backward as if the Otherworld itself rejects his entry while refusing his escape. His mother’s spectral form spreads like frost across the doorframe, her substance becoming the boundary’s architecture, the very stones remembering her murdered body and holding her son in perpetual suspension. His mouth opens in a scream that produces no sound, caught between the world of breath and the realm of silence. Neither the living nor the dead will claim him. He exists now only as consequence made flesh, frozen in the crystallized moment when all debts come due, when the threshold itself becomes his eternal prison, and justice wears his mother’s patient, terrible face.
The stone beneath Séamus fractures with the sound of breaking teeth, and his stomach lurches as the fragment tilts vertical. Bríd screams his name (the first time he’s heard her voice break) while Muireann’s hand claws empty air where Cináed stood a heartbeat before. The crypt exhales cold breath upward through widening fissures, and gravity becomes a predator, patient and absolute, waiting for the stone to finish its betrayal.
The stone drops. His hand, ink-stained fingers that have traced a thousand dead words, stretches toward living flesh, toward Bríd’s reaching palm that has held his in darkness, toward the future he’s finally chosen. Aisling’s translucent form dissolves at his shoulder, her expression not betrayed but released. His fingertips brush Bríd’s, one heartbeat of warmth, then the crypt swallows him, her scream following him down into cold and stone and water.
The manuscript case tumbles end over end, its leather darkened by centuries of handling, and Séamus’s world narrows to that single object: not because of what it contains, though the illuminated pages within are irreplaceable, but because in this suspended moment it represents every choice he’s made since Aisling drowned, every word copied when he should have lived, every ghost pursued when he should have loved the living.
His fingers close on the strap.
The stone beneath him doesn’t crack: it simply ceases to exist, twelve hundred years of weathering and water-seepage choosing this precise instant to surrender. The sensation is dreamlike, almost gentle: the world rotating around him as up becomes down, the dim light of the crypt-mouth wheeling overhead like a dying star. He has time to notice details with terrible clarity: a fragment of ogham script on a falling stone, the way mist curls through the collapse like reaching fingers, Bríd’s face above framed in the failing structure, her mouth open in a shape that might be his name.
Then the altar rises to meet him, or he falls to meet it: the distinction seems philosophical, a problem for scholars who aren’t about to die.
The impact is a white flash behind his eyes, a sound like a door slamming in an empty house, and then a strange softness as his body continues its descent into water that tastes of salt and iron and something older than memory. The manuscript case is still clutched against his chest, its weight dragging him down, and somewhere in the roaring darkness he thinks he hears Aisling’s voice: not the silent specter that has haunted him, but her living laugh from before the river took her, bright and whole and impossibly distant.
The water closes over his face like a blessing, or a burial.
The leather strap burns across his palm as his fingers close, and for one suspended heartbeat Séamus experiences the peculiar clarity of the doomed: he sees the case’s brass clasps catching what little light penetrates the crypt, sees the way his own shadow precedes him into the darkness below, elongated and strange. His body twists instinctively, the movement born not of training but of pure animal panic, trying to orient himself away from the pale mass of the altar that rises from the flooded chamber like a drowned god’s table.
The air rushing past him carries voices, whether memory or prophecy he cannot say, a chorus of drowned monks chanting in Latin, Aisling’s childhood songs, Bríd’s careful pronunciation of ancient words. He pulls the manuscript case tighter against his ribs, a futile shield, and in the final instant before impact understands with perfect certainty that he has always been falling toward this moment, that every choice since the river has been a slow descent toward dark water and unforgiving stone.
Then the altar’s edge finds his temple, and thought becomes light becomes nothing.
The manuscript case strikes first, leather slapping water with a sound like a gasp, and then Séamus follows, shoulder, hip, knee, his body folding wrong as momentum carries him sideways into the altar’s waiting edge. The stone meets his skull with geometric precision, that specific angle where temple bone is thinnest, where the old druids knew to trepan for visions.
Something inside him breaks with a wet crack that he hears from within, a sound that travels through bone rather than air. The crypt tilts, spins, fragments into overlapping images: water rushing up to embrace him, Aisling’s face hovering above, the ogham inscriptions bleeding into incomprehensible spirals. Then the spring water closes over his head, surprisingly warm, tasting of copper and salt and the deep earth’s dreaming, and Séamus Mac Lir surrenders to the dark.
The granite drinks the sound, that terrible organic percussion of skull meeting stone, and transforms it into something worse: a resonance that travels through water and bone and the thin places between worlds, a frequency that makes the standing stones above hum in sympathetic vibration, as though the temple itself recognizes this offering of blood and consciousness at its oldest altar.
The spring water accepts him with ancient indifference, closing over his slack mouth and nostrils, filling the space where breath should be. His body settles against the altar’s base like a discarded offering, limbs arranging themselves in the current’s gentle insistence: a parody of ritual positioning, as though the temple itself were composing him for sacrifice, preparing him for the threshold crossing he’d sought but never imagined like this.
The ghost burns with a luminescence that sears the threshold between worlds. No longer the faint, translucent presence that had haunted Séamus’s peripheral vision for five years, but something terrible and magnificent, a beacon of anguish so profound it tears through the fabric of mortality itself. Even Muireann, who has never seen the dead, stumbles backward with a warrior’s instinct for danger, her hand flying to her spear. Even Cináed, who has trained himself to see only what can be fought with steel, crosses himself with trembling fingers.
Aisling hovers above her brother’s floating form, her hair drifting upward in spectral currents that mirror the water below, each strand moving with the memory of drowning, with the eternal repetition of that moment when the river closed over her head. Her hands reach downward, again, again, always again, fingers stretching toward Séamus’s pale face beneath the rising water, toward his slack mouth and closed eyes, toward the brother she died saving now dying in the exact manner of her own death.
But there is no substance to her touch. Her palms pass through his cheek like breath through gauze, like prayer through indifferent stone. The gesture repeats, compulsive and futile: reaching, passing through, withdrawing, reaching again. Her features contort with each failed attempt: mouth wrenched open in a scream that produces no sound in the mortal realm, only a pressure that makes the living want to cover their ears against silence, only a cold that radiates outward in waves of grief so concentrated it feels like drowning in air.
She is trapped in the perpetual present of her own death, forced to watch it reflected and reversed in the brother she saved, unable to save him again, unable to do anything but witness and burn and reach and fail, forever reaching, forever failing.
The water level rises with unnatural speed, fed by the spring now flowing in torrents through cracks in the ancient stone. Each surge seems to pulse in rhythm with Aisling’s flickering form, as though the flood itself responds to her anguish. Her mouth opens and closes in silent screams that create no sound but somehow pull at the very air, distorting it, making it heavy and cold and wrong.
Ripples of freezing air radiate outward from Séamus’s floating body in concentric circles, each wave carrying the temperature of drowning, the precise cold of river water in early spring when she went under. The living feel it as pressure against their chests, as the phantom sensation of lungs filling with water, as the terrible intimacy of another’s death made manifest.
Aisling’s form flickers between states. Now the girl of twelve she was when she died, now something older, aged by five years of haunting, now something neither living nor dead but caught between, stretched across time like a wound that will not close. Her hair drifts upward in spectral currents that exactly mirror the water below, each strand moving with the memory of drowning.
The blood spreads in patterns that should not exist. Geometric spirals following invisible currents, forming shapes that echo the ogham inscriptions carved above, as though the sacred spring remembers its purpose and writes its own terrible script. Aisling’s luminescence pulses in rhythm with each bloom of crimson, her form brightening to painful intensity then dimming to near-invisibility, a lighthouse signal of grief that illuminates nothing, saves no one. Her spectral fingers pass through the water again and again, each futile attempt leaving trails of frost that crystallize momentarily before melting, and in those crystalline patterns appear the faces of other drowned souls, other siblings, other failures, the spring’s long memory of loss made briefly visible.
The stones fall like judgment through her translucent shoulders, each impact she cannot feel a fresh torment. She presses closer, her spectral forehead touching his submerged crown, and her mouth shapes words no living ear can hear: the same desperate prayer she spoke as the lake closed over her own face, when their positions were reversed, when she chose this eternal watching, this five-year vigil that ends now in perfect, unbearable repetition.
The luminescence intensifies, spreading from Aisling’s form into the water itself. Not the cold phosphorescence of decay but something warmer, almost alive. The spring begins to move against its nature, currents swirling counterclockwise around Séamus’s unconscious body, lifting rather than dragging, as though the water remembers an older purpose than drowning, when sacred springs healed rather than claimed the dead.
Muireann’s warrior instincts scream against the recklessness, but her body moves before thought. She lunges toward the gaping hole where Séamus disappeared, boots skidding on crumbling stone. The edge crumbles beneath her weight, ancient mortar turning to dust, and for one suspended heartbeat she’s falling forward into that luminous darkness.
Cináed’s hand clamps around her forearm with iron strength, yanking her back from the edge as more rubble cascades into the flooded darkness below. She hits the ground hard, shoulder striking stone, but she’s already twisting in his grip, pointing with her free hand to where Séamus’s dark cloak spreads like a stain across the glowing spring. “He’s there. Face down in the water!”
The words tear from her throat raw and desperate, and she hates the sound of them, hates the fear that makes her voice crack. She’s watched men die before. Good men. Her brothers. Her father. She learned long ago that sometimes you can’t save them, that reaching for the drowning only pulls you under too.
But Séamus isn’t a warrior who knew the risks. He’s just a haunted scholar with ink-stained fingers and eyes that see too much, and something in her chest refuses to let him become another ghost she carries.
“Let me go,” she growls at Cináed, but the old knight’s grip doesn’t waver. His other hand points downward, where the water swirls in patterns that defy nature, where Aisling’s ghost burns like a beacon over her brother’s body.
“Look,” Cináed says, his voice carrying the calm of someone who has stared at death enough to recognize when it hesitates. “The water moves strangely. Something holds him.”
Muireann follows his gaze and sees it. The currents spiraling around Séamus, lifting rather than dragging, as though the spring itself has become uncertain whether to claim or release its offering.
Bríd doesn’t speak, doesn’t hesitate. Her manuscript case strikes stone with a hollow finality that reverberates through the shattered sanctuary: the sound of everything she’s preserved, abandoned. Her fingers work the clasps of her heavy robe with practiced efficiency, muscle memory from countless river crossings, from nights when wet fabric meant death from cold. The wool falls away like shed skin, and she’s already moving, already calculating angles and weight distribution across the treacherous slope of collapsed masonry and splintered timber.
Above her, Aisling’s ghost burns brighter, a lighthouse for the drowning, and Bríd feels the familiar thinness in the air that means the veil is gossamer-thin here, that the dead can almost touch the living. Her bare feet find holds that shouldn’t exist, toes gripping stone slick with centuries of moisture and newer blood. She doesn’t think about the water temperature, about what happens if the floor collapses further, about whether her own ghost will join the others haunting this cursed place.
She thinks only of Séamus, face-down in the glowing dark, and descends.
Tadhg appears beside her mid-descent, his translucent form flickering with urgency that transcends death. The child-ghost darts ahead through spaces too narrow for the living, his small hand pointing, always pointing, toward the deepest pool where spring water churns with currents that have nothing to do with natural flow. Séamus lies there, submerged, motionless, his dark hair spreading like ink in water.
Bríd follows. Her feet find purchase on stones that should send her tumbling, as though invisible hands steady each step. She feels them. The dead, pressing close in this thin place, lending substance to her desperate descent. Tadhg’s guidance becomes her map through the flooded dark, his pointing finger a compass needle aimed at drowning.
The water closes over Bríd’s shoulders with shocking cold that drives the breath from her lungs in silver bubbles. She pushes forward through luminescent spring-water that tastes of copper and old magic, arms sweeping wide until her fingers brush homespun wool, then grip with desperate strength. Séamus is impossibly heavy. Waterlogged flesh, sodden clothing, dead weight already sinking toward stones that have swallowed offerings for a thousand years. She plants her feet against submerged rock, pulls with everything her scribe’s body possesses, and his face breaks surface pale as drowned moonlight.
His weight pulls her down: waterlogged wool and sodden flesh heavier than any manuscript chest she’s ever lifted. Her lungs burn. The child-ghost’s luminous form darts through the water ahead, illuminating where Séamus’s face lies pressed against submerged stone, lips parted, grey eyes open and unseeing. She plants her feet, wraps both arms around his chest, and kicks upward with everything her scribe’s body possesses.
The water closes over her head like a tomb sealing. Cold drives through wool and linen, through skin, into bone. The kind of cold that stops thought, that makes the body forget its own rhythms. But Bríd has lived with ghosts for seven years, has felt the chill of the dead against her skin every night, and this is merely water, merely the physical world asserting itself.
Her eyes open beneath the surface. The child-ghost’s luminescence transforms the flooded crypt into something from illuminated manuscript margins. All shifting shadows and pale light, stone columns rising like the legs of giants. Séamus floats suspended in the murk, his dark hair drifting like seaweed, his body slack in the terrible way of the drowned or dying.
She reaches. Her fingers (trained to precision, to the delicate handling of vellum and quill) sweep through water thick with silt and something older, something that tastes of ritual and sacrifice. They find his sleeve first, the rough homespun she’s mended a dozen times. Then his shoulder, solid and real beneath her palm. Then the neck of his tunic, and she closes her fist around it with a scribe’s grip, the same strength that holds a pen steady through hours of copying.
His body turns toward her touch, face emerging from shadow. His grey eyes are open, staring at nothing, and for one crystalline moment of horror she thinks she’s too late, that she’ll be hauling up a corpse, that she’ll join the ranks of those who loved Séamus Mac Lir and couldn’t save him.
But the child-ghost circles them both, urgent, insistent, and the water’s resistance shifts. She wraps her other arm across his chest, feeling for the heartbeat she cannot hear, and drives her legs downward against stone, against the spring’s claim, against the weight of all the dead who would keep him.
She kicks upward, dragging his dead weight through water that fights her with the malice of something sentient. The spring doesn’t merely resist: it pulls, currents wrapping around their legs like spectral hands, and she understands with sudden clarity that the sacred waters have been drinking death for centuries, that they’ve developed a taste for it. But she’s held a ghost-child’s hand through seven years of wandering, has learned that the dead respect nothing so much as stubborn refusal to yield.
“Séamus. The water releases them with a shudder she feels in her bones.
Muireann is already wading in, spear abandoned on stone, warrior’s pragmatism overriding everything else. Her scarred hands close on Séamus’s other arm with bruising strength. “Move, scribe. Move.” Not cruelty but necessity, the voice of someone who’s carried wounded from battlefields, who knows the difference between haste and panic.
Together they struggle toward the rubble slope, water churning around their thighs, each step a negotiation with stone made treacherous by moss and centuries. Bríd’s shoulders burn as she pushes from behind, taking Séamus’s full weight when Muireann must release one hand to grip an outcropping. The warrior’s breath comes in controlled bursts. Not winded but managing effort, calculating angles and leverage with the same precision she’d apply to combat. Then Cináed is there, silver hair plastered dark against his skull, and his strong hands find purchase under Séamus’s arms. He hauls the limp body up onto stone barely above the rising waterline with a grunt that speaks of old wounds protesting, muscles remembering younger days.
Water gushes from Séamus’s mouth with the third compression, and Bríd’s hands fly to turn his head as his body convulses weakly. Cináed doesn’t stop: the rhythm must hold, fifteen more, steady as a heartbeat he’s trying to restart. His scarred knuckles white against Séamus’s sternum, pressing life back into ribs that feel too fragile, too still beneath his palms.
“Breathe, curse you. Cináed pauses the compressions, his own breath ragged, seals his mouth over Séamus’s blue lips, forces air past the cold barrier of drowned flesh. Once. Twice. The chest rises, falls with terrible passivity. Back to compressions: fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. Bríd counts beneath her breath, each number a prayer against the silence, against the grey dawn that threatens to claim him.
The price manifests in Séamus’s stillness, three breaths, four, five, before his body convulses with violent grace, spine arching against the stone as if lightning has found its path through flesh. Water erupts from his mouth in a torrent, spring-pure and salt-bitter, splashing across the broken stones where ancient ogham marks drink it in like parched earth. The liquid glows faintly with residual Otherworld energy, each droplet luminescent as it traces the carved channels in the floor, illuminating patterns that haven’t seen light since the druids walked these halls. The glow pulses once, twice, then fades to ordinary brine, leaving only darkness and the sound of Séamus gasping.
His chest heaves with desperate, rattling breaths. The sound of a man learning to breathe again, each inhalation a small violence against the water still trapped in his lungs. His fingers claw at the stone beneath him, nails scraping grooves in moss and lichen as though he might anchor himself to this world through sheer will. The trembling starts in his hands and spreads through his limbs, his body remembering the cold of the spring, the weight of water pressing down, the terrible moment of surrender.
Cináed’s hands hover above him, bloodied knuckles still clenched, ready to resume compressions if this fragile breathing fails. Bríd’s counting has stopped, replaced by a single whispered prayer that might be gratitude or plea or both. The dawn light filtering through the ruined sanctuary catches the water on Séamus’s face. Whether spring-born or tear-born, impossible to say.
And in that suspended moment between drowning and salvation, between the world he left and the world that pulled him back, something shifts in the air around him. The veil trembles. Thins. Prepares to reveal what death has briefly shown him.
His grey eyes open, unfocused and distant, pupils dilated wide as twin wells reflecting not the ruined sanctuary above but something deeper, older, more true. The irises seem to shift between grey and silver, catching light that has no source in this mortal chamber. His gaze moves through the present moment as though it were merely one layer of parchment laid over countless others, all visible at once: the temple as it stands now in ruin, as it stood in druidic glory, as it exists in the Otherworld where boundaries dissolve.
His lips part, trembling with cold and revelation both, forming words in a language that predates Gaelic, that predates even the Ogham carved into these stones. The syllables fall from his mouth like water, like prayer, like the first words spoken when the world was young and the druids walked between realms as easily as crossing thresholds. The sounds carry weight, each one pressing against the veil until the fabric of reality ripples, thins, becomes translucent as morning mist.
The air around him shimmers. Something is coming through. Someone.
Her form solidifies in the threshold light, features no longer wavering through the distortion of his shame but sharp, clear, heartbreakingly real. The translucent girl becomes the young woman she would have been. Auburn hair unbound, grey eyes mirror-bright with his own, freckles scattered across her nose like the stars she taught him to name. Not the blue-lipped corpse dragged from the lough, not the accusing specter his guilt conjured, but Aisling herself, whole and luminous and free of the narrative he’d written over her sacrifice.
She reaches toward him with fingers that catch the strange light, and in her expression he reads not forgiveness, which would imply transgression, but simple, eternal love untainted by his five years of self-flagellation.
The words settle into him like stones finding their place in still water, each syllable dismantling the architecture of his guilt. Seven. Twelve. The numbers that defined their tragedy, now stripped of the weight he’d given them. She chose, and her choosing was love, not his failing. The distinction cracks something fundamental in his chest, and he understands at last: he’d been mourning himself, not honoring her.
Her hand passes through his cheek, cold, weightless, the texture of mist over water, and Séamus gasps. Not with pain, but with the sudden, devastating relief of a man who has carried a corpse across his shoulders for five years and only now remembers what it means to stand upright. Tears cut clean tracks through the grime on his face, washing him new.
The sound that tears from Séamus is not quite human. A keening that belongs to the wind over barren headlands, to the sea claiming what it loves. His fingers claw at the stone beneath him, seeking purchase in a world that has shifted beneath his feet. The manuscripts in his satchel press against his ribs, suddenly weightless compared to what he has carried these five years.
Bríd does not speak. Her hand moves in slow circles between his shoulder blades, the gesture older than words, older than the temple itself. She has seen him bent over texts until his eyes bled, watched him wake screaming from dreams of drowning, but never this: this breaking open, this terrible flowering of grief finally allowed its season.
The sobs come in waves, each one dragging him under and spitting him back. His sister’s name shapes itself on his lips between gasps: Aisling, Aisling, Aisling. A prayer, an apology, a farewell spoken too late and somehow still in time. The stones beneath his palms are wet with more than mist now, dark with salt water that might be tears or might be the sea itself weeping through him.
His ink-stained fingers spread flat against the ancient rock, and he feels it: the temple breathing, the earth’s slow pulse beneath the ruin. The weight that has hunched his shoulders since he was twenty-three begins to lift, not vanishing but transforming into something he might learn to carry differently. The ghost-space at his shoulder where Aisling hovered for so long aches with absence, but it is a clean ache now, honest as a wound washed in salt water.
When the shaking finally begins to subside, he remains folded over himself, forehead nearly touching stone, breathing like a man who has surfaced from impossible depths.
Muireann turns from watching the fading impressions of the massacre victims, her scarred face drawn tight as bowstring. The spear in her hand trembles. Not from weakness but from the effort of holding something back, some howl that mirrors Séamus’s keening. Her green eyes find Cináed across the sanctuary, and what passes between them needs no words: the weight of breathing when others cannot, the guilt that comes with dawn after night, the way survival feels like theft from the dead.
The silver-haired knight’s hand rests on his sword hilt, not in threat but in something like prayer. His shoulders straighten slightly, as though he has remembered what it means to stand upright. The scraped-away heraldry on his armor catches the strengthening light, and for a moment he looks less like a man fleeing shame and more like one who might carry it forward into something resembling purpose.
Muireann’s grip on her spear loosens. She does not smile but something in her stance shifts, settles. They have witnessed. They have survived. They will walk from this place together, and perhaps that is its own kind of victory.
Bríd’s ink-stained fingers pressed against her chest where the spectral child’s hand had rested for so many years, the absence a hollow ache more profound than the haunting had ever been. She knelt among the standing stones, her auburn hair loose and tangled with mist, watching the last shimmer of Tadhg’s presence scatter like morning dew beneath strengthening sun. The relief came in waves, breath returning to lungs that had forgotten their rhythm, but the loss cut deeper still, for she had grown accustomed to his small cold hand, his whispered questions, his need. Now only silence remained where his voice had been, and she wept for the weight lifted and the companion lost, both griefs equally true, equally necessary.
The silver-haired knight moved through the aftermath like a penitent among relics, gathering scattered manuscripts from where the ritual’s fury had flung them. His scarred fingers, hands that had failed his lord, that had trembled with shame for years, now smoothed vellum with unexpected tenderness, each salvaged page a small defiance against oblivion. He stacked them carefully, choosing preservation over destruction, carrying forward rather than burning. The simple act steadied something broken inside him.
The mist withdraws like a held breath finally released, revealing heather-clad slopes and the serpentine path descending toward grey waters. Séamus becomes conscious of his lungs filling, emptying. Simple mechanics of survival he’d forgotten to notice. Beside him, Muireann’s hand unclenches from her spear. Cináed’s shoulders drop. Bríd exhales. Four hearts beating in the thinning dawn, mortal and insistent, demanding they choose life again.
Séamus lifts his head from his hands, salt water and tears mingling on his face, and meets Bríd’s eyes with a clarity that has been absent for years. The haunted distance finally gone, replaced by raw presence. The grey of his gaze no longer looks through her toward some spectral horizon, but sees her, truly sees her, perhaps for the first time since they met on that rain-soaked road three months past. She helps him to his feet, their fingers interlacing naturally, and for the first time neither flinches from the touch, the ghosts that stood between them finally laid to rest.
Her hand is warm. Solid. Real in a way that makes his chest ache with something other than grief.
“I can breathe,” he says, and the words emerge hoarse, wondering. Not a metaphor but a recognition: his lungs expand without the familiar constriction, without Aisling’s drowned weight pressing against his ribs. The guilt remains, will always remain, but it no longer threatens to drag him beneath dark waters. It has become something he can carry rather than something that carries him.
Bríd’s thumb traces the ink stains on his fingers, those permanent marks of his calling. “You came back,” she whispers, and he understands she means not from the pool but from the grey country where he’d been dwelling these five years, that shadowland between living and dead.
“You pulled me back.” He touches her face with his free hand, tentative, asking permission. “All of you did.”
The manuscripts lie scattered near Cináed’s careful hands, salvaged words waiting to be preserved. The path winds down toward settlements and futures uncertain. But here, in this moment between catastrophe and continuation, Séamus stands upright beneath the weight of his own life, choosing to bear it, choosing to remain.
Muireann turns from the sea to face the others, her spear planted in the earth like a staff rather than a weapon, and the morning light catches the wetness on her scarred cheek: tears she doesn’t bother to hide or explain. The fury that has animated her these three years sits differently now, no longer a consuming fire but banked coals that might yet warm rather than destroy. She opens her mouth as if to speak, closes it again, then simply nods once, acknowledging something wordless that has shifted in her chest where the burning coal of vengeance once lived.
Donnchadh still breathes somewhere beyond these ruins. That truth hasn’t changed. But the urgency has transmuted into something more patient, more deliberate. She will find him, this she knows with the certainty of tides, but she will not let the hunt hollow her further. The ghosts taught her that much: the dead want the living to live, not to join them prematurely in their grey country.
“We go together,” she says finally, her voice rough from salt air and unshed grief. “However far the road takes us. We go together.”
He looks toward Séamus, who still kneels beside Bríd, and something passes between them. An understanding forged in shared failure and survival. They are none of them redeemed, not truly. The scales do not balance so neatly. But they have witnessed each other’s wounds and found them bearable, which is perhaps its own form of grace.
“I failed my lord’s family,” Cináed says quietly, the words no longer an accusation but a statement of fact. “That truth remains. But I need not fail everyone.” He secures the pack with deliberate care, each motion a small ritual of purpose reclaimed. “There are manuscripts to preserve. Stories to carry forward. And companions who might yet have need of an old sword.”
The admission costs him something, but less than it would have yesterday.
The mist parts briefly as they move through chambers where spectral voices once echoed. Muireann’s fingers trace ogham marks she cannot read but somehow understands now, protection, threshold, passage. Séamus pauses where Aisling last appeared, his chest tight but no longer crushing. Cináed steadies a wobbling pillar one final time, the warrior’s instinct still present. They are marking farewells, acknowledging what this place gave them despite its cost.
The vellum accepts her ink with the thirst of something alive, each letter forming with the precision of ritual. She whispers the names as she writes them, Aisling, Tadhg, the nameless many, her breath misting in the cold morning air. The stone she chooses feels warm beneath her palm, as though the earth itself approves this testament, this proof that grief witnessed becomes memory rather than haunting.
Muireann stands apart from the others, methodically checking her weapons with movements that should be familiar but feel foreign to her now. The spear’s weight remains unchanged, the sword’s balance perfect as always, yet her hands hold them differently: without the coiled fury that has guided every strike for three years. She tests the edge of her blade against her thumb, drawing a thin line of blood, and feels nothing. Not satisfaction, not purpose, not even the ghost of rage. The scar on her face aches in the cold, a phantom pain to match the phantom purpose that has abandoned her. She knows Donnchadh’s name, knows he still breathes somewhere beyond these ruins, yet the knowledge sits inert in her chest where once it would have ignited into action. Without the fire of vengeance to define her movements, she must relearn the simple act of standing, of walking, of existing as something other than a weapon pointed at a single target.
Cináed wraps his palms carefully, the linen strips darkening where they touch the ritual wounds that seep despite his efforts. The marks run deep, carved by his own grip on the blade when he held it steady for the others, when he chose to anchor the ritual with his flesh rather than let it fail. He flexes his fingers experimentally and winces. The cuts cross every line of his palms, ensuring that every grasp, every gesture will reopen them slightly. His sword hand will never again close without pain, without remembrance. Perhaps that is fitting. He has sought penance through exile, through protection of others, through the slow accumulation of worthy deeds, but these scars offer something different: a permanent record written in his own skin, a price paid in the present rather than the past.
Bríd kneels beside her waterproof case, reaching for the familiar weight of her writing materials with hands that no longer answer to her will. The case slips through her fingers once, twice, clattering against stone as her treacherous hands spasm and release. She stares at them: these instruments that have served her since childhood, that have copied sacred texts with perfect precision, that have created beauty from ink and vellum. Now betraying her with tremors she cannot control. The connection that once allowed her to perceive Tadhg, to navigate the thin spaces between worlds with scribal grace, has been rewired into something raw and unpredictable. She attempts again to secure the leather straps, watching her fingers shake like leaves in wind, and a cold certainty settles in her chest: she may never illuminate another manuscript without this persistent tremor bleeding through her lines, transforming her gift into a curse. The ink stains on her skin seem suddenly like brands, marking what she has lost rather than what she has mastered. She closes her eyes against tears, clutching the case to her chest with both arms since her hands will no longer suffice.
Muireann stands apart from the others, spear held loosely in hands that once gripped it with murderous certainty. She stares at nothing as the fury that has animated her every breath since the massacre drains away like water through sand. The emptiness it leaves behind is vast and terrible. For five years, vengeance has been her compass, her purpose, the star by which she has navigated every waking moment. Now that star has been extinguished. Not through Donnchadh’s death, but through something more profound: the realization that killing him would change nothing, restore nothing, heal nothing. She is hollow. A warrior without a war. A hunter without prey. The spear weighs nothing in her trembling hands, and she does not know who she is without rage to define her.
Cináed binds his palms with strips torn from his cloak, wrapping methodically despite the tremor in his fingers. The ritual blade’s cuts refuse to close cleanly, the flesh puckered and strange as though the weapon that opened them belonged to some older world where wounds carried meaning beyond pain. He recognizes these marks as the price of redemption, permanent, visible, honest in their refusal to fade into comfortable forgetting.
Muireann stands apart from the others, her spear planted in the earth like a grave marker, staring at hands that once knew only violence and now comprehend only emptiness. The fury that sustained her through seasons of hunting has guttered out, leaving her hollow as a burned cottage. She touches the scar on her face, her last connection to the woman she was, and finds she cannot remember what purpose feels like without hatred’s architecture to give it shape.
Séamus kneels beside the scattered manuscripts, his movements deliberate despite the tremor in his hands. Dawn light filters through the broken roof, illuminating water-damaged pages as he sorts them with a scholar’s precision: this one too far gone, this one salvageable if dried carefully, this one miraculously intact. The ghost of Aisling no longer hovers at his shoulder, and the absence feels less like amputation now, more like a wound beginning its long closure.
“We cannot undo what was done,” he says, his voice rough from seawater and screaming but steady with hard-won understanding. “We can only witness it, honor it, and choose what we carry forward.”
The words settle over them like a benediction, or perhaps like the mist that has finally begun to lift. Bríd looks up from where she crouches near the crypt entrance, her ink-stained fingers clutching the journal where she has spent the night transcribing every name from the walls below. Forty-seven souls who died in the massacre, their identities rescued from oblivion’s hungry mouth. Her eyes are red-rimmed but clear, and when she meets his gaze, something passes between them that has no need of speech.
Cináed stands at the sanctuary’s edge, his scraped-clean armor catching the new light. He has cleaned his sword and sheathed it, and for the first time since Séamus met him, the exile’s shoulders do not carry the stoop of shame. The old knight watches the horizon where sea meets sky, and his expression holds something that might, in time, become peace.
The manuscripts Séamus gathers are incomplete, water-stained, fragmentary: but they are real. The names Bríd has written will not bring the dead back, but they will travel forward into a future that might otherwise have forgotten them entirely. This is the work of the living: not to resurrect, but to remember. Not to erase grief, but to transform it into testimony.
Muireann pauses in coiling rope, her scarred hands stilling over the hemp. Her gaze fixes on the manuscript Bríd holds open, where names march down the page in careful script. The warrior’s jaw works as though chewing words too difficult to swallow.
“My family’s names.”They should be written too. Not here, but somewhere. So someone remembers they lived before they died.”
The admission costs her. Séamus can see it in the rigid set of her shoulders, the way her fingers tighten on the rope until the hemp bites into callused palms. This woman who has carried rage like a banner now offers something more fragile: the simple desire for remembrance.
Bríd rises immediately, already reaching for fresh parchment from her waterproof case. Her movements hold the gentle certainty of someone who understands the weight of what is being asked. “Tell me their names,” she says quietly. “Tell me who they were.”
And Muireann does. Haltingly at first, then with gathering strength, she speaks the names of the dead while Bríd’s pen transforms breath into permanence, grief into testimony, loss into the only immortality the living can offer.
Cináed’s hands tremble, barely perceptible, but Séamus notices, as the knight unwraps oiled cloth from something he has carried close to his body through all his wandering. The family seal emerges: bronze worked with intricate knotwork, the heraldry he scraped from his armor now revealed in miniature. For a long moment, Cináed simply holds it, and Séamus sees him not as the exile he has become but as the sworn protector he once was, before failure carved him hollow.
“The dead deserve their stories told completely,” Cináed says, his voice rough with exhaustion and something like relief. “Even the stories that shame us. Especially those.”
He places the seal deliberately among the manuscripts. Not hidden, not discarded, but offered. A conscious choice to let his past become part of the record rather than a burden carried in silence.
Séamus accepts it with reverence, understanding it as both confession and offering, and wraps it carefully in fresh linen alongside the names of the massacre victims.
They work in companionable silence as the mist begins to lift, hands moving with practiced coordination. The pattern of their movements speaks to transformation: no longer four separate souls bound by circumstance, but witnesses to each other’s becoming, scribes of shared catastrophe who have learned that survival means carrying forward not just knowledge, but each other.
The oiled leather gleams dully in the strengthening light, and Séamus finds his throat tightening: not with the familiar stranglehold of guilt, but with something gentler, more bearable. Recognition, perhaps. Or gratitude. “Stories,” he echoes, his ink-stained fingers brushing hers where they rest on the scroll. “Yes. Not chains binding us to what we failed to prevent, but bridges carrying forward what must not be lost.” The mist retreats toward the sea, and for the first time in five years, he can breathe.
Bríd steps forward then, her scribe’s case already open in her hands. From it she draws a small vial of ink, precious, carefully preserved, and a fine brush. While the others watch, she kneels beside Cináed’s carved warning and begins to illuminate the first letter of each inscription with delicate spirals and interlaced patterns. The work is painstaking, each stroke deliberate, transforming stark warning into something beautiful without diminishing its gravity. Her fingers, permanently stained with a thousand other texts, move with the sureness of ritual.
“Words carved in stone endure,” she murmurs, “but beauty makes them remembered. Makes them seen.” The child-ghost of Tadhg no longer clings to her hem, he dissolved into morning light hours ago, but she works as though he still watches, as though this final act of preservation honors all the small spirits who deserved better than they received.
Séamus joins her after a moment’s hesitation, producing from his satchel a piece of charcoal and a scrap of parchment. He makes a rubbing of the inscriptions, capturing the texture of stone and the depth of carved letters. Documentation. Evidence. Truth preserved in multiple forms, as his training taught him. But his hands shake less than they have in years, and when he looks up at the others, something in his grey eyes has finally focused on the present moment.
They work together in the strengthening dawn, warrior, knight, scribe, and scholar, each adding their mark to the threshold. Not claiming the space, but honoring it. Protecting it. The temple behind them stands silent, its secrets intact, its dead finally at rest. The warning stone faces outward toward the treacherous coastal path, toward all who might come seeking easy answers to hard questions.
When they finish, no one speaks. There is nothing left to say that stone and ink have not already declared.
Muireann watches them work in silence, her spear planted beside her like a sentinel standing guard over the threshold. The morning light catches the jagged scar along her jaw, making it seem to pulse with old pain. When Séamus steps back to examine his rubbing, she moves forward without ceremony or explanation, her blade already drawn. The scrape of iron against stone rings out sharp in the valley’s hush. Not the sound of violence, but of deliberate inscription.
She carves a simple symbol beside Cináed’s words: crossed spears, the warrior’s farewell, the same mark she once carved on her family’s grave cairn with shaking hands and a heart full of ash. Her jaw tightens as she works, muscle jumping beneath skin, but her hand never wavers. The blade moves with the precision of someone who knows exactly how deep to cut.
“They were warriors too,” she says quietly, not looking at the others, her voice rough as the stone beneath her fingers. “The ones who died here. They fought. They bled. They deserve to be remembered as such, not just as victims of massacre.”
Bríd kneels beside the carved stone, her movements deliberate as prayer. From her satchel she withdraws a piece of charcoal salvaged from last night’s fire, still faintly warm against her palm. The protective sigils flow from her hand like remembered songs: spirals within spirals, interlocking curves that speak of boundaries and thresholds, wards she copied from manuscripts so old the vellum crumbled at her touch.
“These won’t endure like your carvings,” she murmurs, filling the spaces between Cináed’s Latin and Muireann’s crossed spears. “But they’ll seed themselves. Moss follows these patterns. Lichen remembers.”
Séamus crouches beside her without being asked, his ink-stained fingers hovering until she guides them to trace the curves she’s establishing. Their hands move together, synchronized through months of shared work, completing each other’s gestures. The charcoal smudges their skin like a covenant written in ash.
They gather stones from the collapsed sections, not the carved pieces, those remain sacred, but plain grey rocks worn smooth by centuries of salt wind. Séamus and Cináed carry the heavier pieces, muscles straining, while Bríd and Muireann position each stone with careful consideration, building a cairn that mimics the island’s natural formations. The work is slow, deliberate. Sweat mingles with mist on their faces. The crypt entrance disappears beneath their labor, hidden from those who would plunder, accessible only to those who truly seek.
The mist parts momentarily, revealing the grey expanse of ocean beyond the valley’s mouth. Salt wind catches at their cloaks, pulling them forward. Séamus feels the absence at his shoulder and the emptiness is both relief and ache. He squeezes Bríd’s hand. She returns the pressure, understanding without words what has been gained and what, even in release, must always be mourned.
The wind shifts as they navigate the treacherous descent, carrying voices that might be seabirds or might be something older, something that remembers when these paths were pilgrimage routes worn smooth by countless feet seeking absolution. Séamus’s boots slip on wet stone and both his companions tighten their grip. The knight’s touch is surprisingly gentle for hands so scarred by warfare, and Séamus realizes with a strange pang that this man who failed to save his lord’s family is determined not to fail again.
“Careful here,” Cináed murmurs, his voice carrying the authority of someone accustomed to leading men through danger. “The rock’s deceptive: looks solid but crumbles.”
They edge past the treacherous section, and Séamus feels his sister’s absence like a phantom limb. For five years she had been his constant shadow, her drowned face a reminder of his unworthiness to live. Now the space beside him holds only wind and mist, and he cannot tell if the lightness in his chest is freedom or a different kind of grief. The sorrow of letting go rather than the torture of holding on.
Bríd’s thumb traces circles on the back of his hand, a small gesture that anchors him to the present. He glances at her profile and something in his chest shifts. Without Aisling’s ghost between them, without the constant reminder of his guilt, he can finally see clearly what has been there all along: this woman who chose to walk beside him, who copied his desperate translations by candlelight, who pulled him from drowning when he would have let the water take him.
“Thank you,” he says, so quietly the wind nearly steals it.
She understands. She always does.
Halfway down the cliff path, Muireann stops so abruptly that Cináed nearly collides with her back. Her scarred hand grips the rock face, knuckles white, as she stares westward at the endless grey water. The wind whips her copper braids across her face, but she doesn’t move to push them back.
For a long moment no one speaks. They understand: she is seeing not the present sea but the past, her family’s blood spreading across wooden floors, Donnchadh’s ship disappearing into fog, all the futures that drowned with them. The vengeance that has sustained her for three years suddenly seems both more urgent and more impossible against that vast indifferent ocean.
Then Séamus shifts his satchel, the leather creaking, and says quietly, “The manuscripts mention a monastery two days north. They keep records of merchant ships, routes, destinations, cargo manifests.” He pauses, choosing his words with a scholar’s precision. “Men like Donnchadh leave trails in ledgers.”
It is not comfort, but it is possibility. Something concrete to pursue, a direction for all that fury.
Muireann’s shoulders straighten. She nods once, sharp as a blade, and continues walking.
The mist tears apart like rotting cloth, and the sudden brilliance of unfiltered sky strikes them with physical force. They halt as one, hands rising to shield eyes grown accustomed to grey half-light and shadow. The world beyond the temple’s influence blazes with ordinary color and the strangeness of it catches in Séamus’s throat like grief inverted.
Bríd laughs first, a sound bright and bewildered as birdsong, and the shock of hearing joy from her lips breaks something in Cináed’s careful composure. His scarred mouth curves upward, tentative and unpracticed. They stand blinking in honest sunlight, four souls who descended as haunted fragments and climbed out as something fragile but deliberate: not healed, never that, but no longer bleeding. The dead have become memory rather than chains, and the difference weighs less than air, more than worlds.
The settlement appears in the distance as afternoon light slants golden across the coastal grasslands: a cluster of roundhouses with smoke rising from cooking fires, the ordinary architecture of continuing life. Séamus feels Bríd’s ink-stained fingers tighten around his, and realizes with a scholar’s precision that this is fear of a different kind: not of death or ghosts or failure, but of hope, of the terrifying possibility that there might be a place in the world for people like them. People who have walked through the threshold and returned. People who carry their particular burdens and hard-won wisdom like manuscripts too precious to abandon, too heavy to bear alone.
At the final rise before the settlement, they pause by unspoken agreement and look back toward the valley where the temple lies hidden in returning mist. It is already becoming story, already transforming from raw experience into something that can be carried, told, perhaps even understood. Muireann adjusts her scavenged armor with hands that no longer shake with rage alone. Cináed’s fingers rest on his sword hilt with new purpose rather than old shame, the weight familiar but its meaning changed. Séamus and Bríd stand close enough that their shoulders touch, their ink-stained hands finding each other in the space between: four people who know what it means to be haunted, and who have learned, finally, how to lay the dead to rest without forgetting them. The wind carries salt and the distant promise of voices, of community, of the terrifying ordinary work of living on.