An Fómhar || Autumn

A long time ago -- fadó, fadó --

peace brought upon us a bloodbath.

It was never the first,

and would not be the last.

One

An arrow whipped by through the mist.

Footsteps, deft and running, darted past the treeline.

The forest provided cover from the emptiness of the rock-scattered, moonlit moors; between them, tufts of grass waved with no wind, and in the open paced two cloaked figures. Their green capes and hoods were turned to black where shadows pooled in the fabric-folds, and silver where the moon touched them. Faceless from this great distance, they held their bows at the ready.

Their quarry crouched low, then lower, among the bushes, heaving gasps of air, and each breath set her throat aflame. She hid, adrenaline setting a bright, burning course through her veins, the urge to do something, anything, buzzing in her fingertips. Heat sparked and fizzled against her cheek, the lower half of her face exposed beneath a mask worn not for protection, but for anonymity. She reached up, swiping from her freckled cheek to her jaw.

Her hand came away smeared with red, glistening in the glow of the full moon.

They’d hit her.

“Curses be upon you,” she growled, and were she not fleeing for her life, her voice would be music, each word rolling from her lips and ending with a lilt. Now, she forced them out, the high of flight giving way to fury. It shoved aside the flimsy little rational thought that said: That’s what you get for trespassing.

And she found herself sliding an arrow from her quill. She placed it against her bowstring with grace turned lethal, and with reverence -- fear, even -- for what she hoped and willed it to do. Its head bore a terrible weight, both physical and imbued with the knowledge that it was made to bring death, beyond any scrap of a doubt, upon one’s enemy. This weapon was not an ordinary one. It would be too heavy from this distance to reach its mark, so she must approach, closer to the promise of danger and the threat of her own death. And even then, only the one arrow would leave her with one more hunter to kill, who would draw power from vengeance, power enough to match hers.

But rage made her brave.

Fueled by the wound to her pride, she stalked them, flipping the balance between hunters and prey. Crossing into the heart of enemy territory was the smallest price of all to pay for what lay within -- what she must reach.

Look closer, she urged herself.

Her sight sharpened to crystal.

She saw her surroundings as if they were drawn in ink, a spread in a tome of instruction that laid out nature’s grand designs with strokes precise, color absolute. The blur of the treetops above splintered into individual shades; each twig and vine and bramble was outlined to perfection even in the midnight dark; every possible path toward her pursuers thrummed with the magic innate to this land. It laced the woods like cobwebs, winding from tree to tree in gossamer, glittering strands. Some of them began deep belowground, in a womb of soil and warmth; others fluttered to and fro in the sky; still more tangled in plants and around rocks, caught upon themselves. Every single one cast a white light that danced against the backdrop of the forest, ghostly. They were a phenomenon visible only when one reached this state: Soiléireacht. Clarity.

As she followed the thickest strand, she picked her way across stones so that her walk was as near to undetectable as could be. Within minutes, she was taking bounding leaps, and all pretense of stealth had fallen into nothingness. All but her footfalls made not a sound -- anything not critical to whatever had triggered the need for Clarity receded to the outer fog of consciousness. Breathing was no longer agony, but energy, carrying her ever closer to her targets. Her enemies.

A twig snapped beneath her boot.

The hunters spun on their heels, poised to fire.

At close range, she fired first.

Her iron arrow missed.

Shit.

She was too near to run, too far to wield her knife, wrought also from deadly iron, and so she waited. The second it took for them to lunge at her felt simultaneously like a fraction of itself and like a looped repetition. Again and again she saw them. Cloaks trailing as they jumped. A blade gleaming mercury-bright. Soiléireacht showed her the intricacies of their movements from one angle to another to the next. Its strings pulled her hand into her own actions. She blocked that shining blow with a slap of her leather sleeve against her assailant’s wrist. All else was silent.

In the state of her focus, she knew that the other hunter stood behind her. He was about to slash from the back of her neck to the side -- across the vein that carried her heartblood, not an instant wasted in killing her. She twisted out of his path, hair unfurling from beneath her mask in a raven curtain and drifting in her wake. With no sharpened vision to guide them, the hunters stumbled. His dagger embedded itself in the moorland moss. His partner, whom he’d missed by moments, hissed.

She didn’t hear the hiss, but saw it in curled lips, slitted eyes, bared fangs. And she raised her knife.

The female hunter’s snarl of an expression faltered; she tensed, as though fighting to stand in a storm against gusts that screamed louder, louder, louder each time she attempted to keep her balance. The knife, it seemed, repelled her.

Their quarry grinned a wolf’s grin.

And then she heard the howl.

Triumph snapped to razor-cold fear. The hunters’ danger had called the hounds. Soiléireacht shattered. A torrent of noise slammed and broke into pieces by the thousands against her ears -- rasping breath, shouted insults, whipping winds on which peals of their laughter rose and were carried into the nighttime air to rain back down and shatter, too. It was chaos.

Among it, the thundering of paws.

Worst was the barking. They were dogs, but not dogs, and their bark was different. Their bark was cavernous, existing at the very deepest depths of sound, shaking her bones like parchment, sinking into the ground and crushing the last strands of magic.

“You’ll face me again,” she spat in the tongue of these lands, which just as her voice, should flow like lyrics, but the words were rendered rough and ugly and cruel.

With that, she fled.

Her footfalls kicked up dirt and moss, and with each landing pulsed a word in her mind: Clarity, Clarity, Clarity!

It wouldn’t come.

The hounds’ paws thudded along behind her, and the distance between them and her diminished quicker than she could create it. She ran, breath searing once more, acid pain flooding up her legs and engulfing her until her body was nothing but pain, a symphony of it. By now, the clack of their teeth in their slavering mouths echoed across the field.

Her side had their hate and stealth and trickery, yes.

But their side had the hounds.

And it was then that she realized: she was running into their territory. The thought brought hope bursting in her chest -- the candle-flame sort of hope that flickered against hurricanes of certain doom. She chanced a look over her shoulder.

They were dogs.

But not dogs.

She saw only masses of shadow, shaped vaguely like something canine, with green fire there one instant, gone the next, licking out from where their muzzles should be. Their forms rolled and rippled as they chased her. And their eyes, their not-eyes, were pinpricks, yellow dots of light that didn’t look at her as prey, but as a life to steal for themselves, with which to do whatever it was they wanted.

The overwhelming wrongness of the sight spurred her onward. She hurried, faster than she ever remembered hurrying before. The woods streamed past.

There came a rush of air behind her.

A pressure around her ankle.

If there was an opposite of Soiléireacht, it was this: dullness, darkness. She would not have been able to process what had happened, even if she’d tried, and she didn’t. There was something immensely defeating about the hound’s maw clamping down on her limb, which of course she didn’t know. She knew only that she had ended.

Just like that. She hadn’t even come close to her goal. Everything had ended. The hounds had started to lift her onto their backs, so that they could carry her away.

There then came something warm, wet, trickling from her body to... somewhere. If she’d been awake, she’d have seen her own blood vanishing into apparent nonexistence. She’d have seen something else, like a gouge, sputtering out flecks of glowing white as it began to open. And open it did.

She flashed to awareness. Her ankle -- she couldn’t feel it. But she could watch the light yawn from empty air, her blood being tugged toward its presence and strengthening it, pulling it wider. What sounded like a gasp was actually wind as the portal sucked it through to whatever lay beyond.

The portal. She’d made it. She hadn’t ended. Yet.

In one final attempt, she swept her arm forward, throwing out a spray of red, grasping onto the energy inside; among the hounds’ outraged yelping, it yanked her through.