‘Such ancient strength…’ The Enkindled’s eyes blazed with a hungering light. Srengbolga clanged upon the slope. ‘How I always wondered…’
‘No…’ Náith shuffled forth, felt something tug on the rocks as it slipped from the rent in his belly.
‘It’s Earthblood,’ Aodhamar cried, ‘all Earthblood! Give it to me!’
‘No! Aodhamar, no!’
Aodhamar bit down on the Stormheart, gnawing at it like a rat at a sack of grain. The Enkindled King’s teeth cracked, splintered down to the gums, until his hands and the Stormheart both ran with blood and broken teeth. Still, he chewed. A shaft of lightning exploded from the Stormheart and scourged the sky, thick as a thousand-year oak as it fed power to Tárchan and his storm. Engulfed, a frail shadow at its heart, Aodhamar crumbled like dry ash and spiralled into the storm above.
He was gone. The Enkindled King – ripped from the earth by Tárchan’s fury.
All was lost.
Náith sagged, what little strength he’d held onto yielding to the pain, the emptiness of defeat. I always told you the Earthblood would kill you in the end, brother. He rolled onto his side, a blur wavering at the edges of his vision, pressing further with every slow blink. A blast of lightning struck nearby, showered him with stinging sparks and splintered rock, and yet in that moment it all seemed so distant. The pain, the storm scouring Luah Fáil. All that crept through it was the loss, the desolation of failure. His fading eyes found that fool, Luw, still crawling toward Síle’s body.
What an ending we’ve made of it, you and I, Náith thought dimly. Who could have imagined it… both of us… dying upon the horns of the Hunter. Síle’s face defied the murk narrowing his vision, her raw beauty perfect even in death. He reached toward her. My love… my dear-heart…
White light swallowed all beyond Náith’s shaking fingers. The storm fell silent at last.
*
Náith’s shadow dissolved into ashes within the lightning’s fang, twisting skyward through its abysmal pillar. The glare faded between Luw’s splayed fingers, molten stone and flame all that was left in the bolt’s wake.
A moment’s numbness, cold shock – the singularity of his hatred reduced to nothing in a heartbeat, straw upon the pyre – and Luw fell back upon the slope laughing. Náith was dead. Dead and gone.
‘I win… I win, Náith! You die! I live! She’s mine!’
A raw fit of coughing smothered his mirth. He swallowed the tang of blood, shifted against the horn buried between his snapped ribs. He could feel its curved point, digging at his insides with every breath. Lung-stuck by his own antler… there’d be no coming back from this.
The storm’s fury dragged his stare over Moírdhan’s peak. Falling lightning forested the sky from a jagged, blazing canopy. Distant forks scraped the island, cutting through the storm’s darkling pall, a sea of flames rippling across every horizon Luw could see.
Be no coming back from that, either.
It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. He was wounded, Luah Fáil was burning, but Náith was dead. Luw laughed again, fell quickly to coughing, his mouth filling with blood. He could feel it, welling in his chest, squeezing the air out of him. ‘No bother,’ he chuckled. ‘I’m still here… she’s mine, Náith.’ Luw rolled onto his side and crawled on.
‘Síle…’ He reached her body, tried to sit up beside her and howled – the broken antler digging deeper into his side. He gripped its bloody shaft, fingers hooked about a crusted branch, and tore it free with a scream. Luw forced himself to sit through the agony, the dizziness, shuddering as a scalding wave of blood cascaded down his side. There was no time for self-pity.
Síle was still warm as he pulled her into his lap, her broken body lying limp against him. Her eyes stared, empty but full of the lightning above them, stained with the shadow of the life he’d loved. Luw pushed hair from her face. ‘Root of my soul…’ He took her hand in his unmaimed one and followed her stare to the sky.
A mesh of lightning spread its net over Luah Fáil, spanning the sky. Tárchan’s face twisted and shifted through it, every jagged line wrought through with pain. The winds were swelling, laced with malice, with sorrow. The beast was being consumed by his own storm. Luw chuckled again.
‘And I outlive even you.’
Luw cradled Síle’s face against his own. ‘It’s just us, now.’ As it once was, as it always should have been. And here, now, as Luah Fáil was devoured, it was again. No matter the fire and storm of the end – no matter the wounds, the blood and pain. They would cross the bridge of blades together as one. He’d won.
He held Síle close, clinging to the last embers of her warmth. He saw the bolt’s root take shape over the peak and buried his face in her hair, swamped his mind in a memory of them together.
A summer’s morn… the air aflutter with butterflies and droning bees, flower and bud roaring into bloom. Síle, singing for him among the beauty of her garden whilst Bann sunbathed at their feet, a lazy ear cocked to her voice.
They would live forever there, in that moment’s finality.
White light took them. Silence crushed the storm.
Epilogue
An Age of Silence
In the shadow of the Sisters, rain dripped from leaf and bough, red-golden in the eve’s dying sun. The wind carried the final dregs of an old storm’s chill, sweeping clean over an empty and silent land.
A distant squalling shattered the island’s harmony.
Ancu’s head lifted at the sound.
It rose, head tilting, listening. Standing beneath the twisted limbs of a slumbering oak, it stepped from the shadows, became shadow and bled toward the mountains, slow as grave moss. The squalling… it was an infant’s cry. So tiny, and yet it shook the island as if a wounded giant bellowed. Ancu paused at the mouth of the Sisters’ valley, a darker stain among the shadows. The clamour rattled from the mountainsides, smashing apart the tender peace coiled about Luah Fáil. Ancu bled toward the sound through fold and foothill. The once-bawling children of the earth were but the memory of starlight in a forgotten sky. This was an age of silence, of sorrowful rain and quiet things: a time for wounds to heal, scars to fade.
It did not belong.
A shady fold in the land, the mountain’s grey slope piercing green earth. A bed of rock-clinging liverwort and dripping fern was nestled in a gloomy crevice. A child writhed in its depths, swaddled by fronds. Ancu rose from the shadows and watched.
It twisted like a lost maggot among the leaves, keened like a pup ripped from the teat. Long, wriggling, twisted thing. Bent, black-mottled and crooked. Limbs squirmed like tentacles, clawed and boneless. No eyes, just bloody holes in a warped skull. Ancu knelt, slipped its talons through the leaflitter and gently scooped it up.
Do not cry, Ancu whispered to it. Sleep. The thing’s writhing slowed, its colicky screams giving way to fitful repose. Ancu gazed upon the bruised sky. The winds whispered their languid mysteries among themselves, clouds yielding to the first light of stars. The Earthblood murmured, deep below.
The world had changed. The silence would remain shattered.
Ancu turned its gaze back to the little thing in its claws as it kicked and whinged. Sleep, great one. You will not be alone for long. Let us take you home, Corrom Dun.
Ancu pressed a hand to the mountain’s grey flesh. Stone ran, poured like liquid, a black archway opening up before them. It stepped through and carried the child into the deep of the earth.
Horns of the Hunter: Tales of Luah Fáil Book 1 Page 23
