Day 16 of Midwinter, Midday

The Deep Realm

Annwn

I sat on the edge of my bed. Shellshocked, I turned the object over in my hands. Had I really just reached through the portal and pulled it directly from the ancient wreckage of Neit’s ship?

Over four thousand years ago, Neit had used this same portal to cross into Annwn, where the magic changed his body. It had changed his sword, Cathscian, too. There were rumors that other items he had brought from Ériu had also been transformed that day.

Thinking, I rubbed my finger along the simple metal shape. Horns curved around and down in front of the metal bull’s snout. It would have been easy to think that it was my Advanced Identification boon that allowed me to see the silver aura emanating from the brooch, but the glow had been there even before I had pulled it through the portal. Was it possible it had absorbed the magic of Annwn simply by being so close to the portal for thousands of years?

I smiled, feeling a lightening of my grief. Something about being the first person to hold this object since the former king made me proud, and I couldn’t help but chuckle to think what Neit would have said if he could see me now.

And as always, when I laughed, coughed, sneezed, or even moved too quickly, sharp pain ripped from the permanent wounds on my back and side. Something had to be done about the Life Leak curse. It was distracting, painful…and slowly killing me. I thought back to my conversation with Bren about his ability to engage in a fairy trance and my failed attempt on top of the lighthouse.

Instinctively, I placed the brooch on the bed beside me and closed my eyes. Even with my eyes closed, I could see the haze around my body that represented future disharmony. Slowly and carefully, I sifted through the haze, bringing my focus to the energy that moved around and through me. Along my rib cage, the energy was a black, pulsing mass. The dark coils of energy leaked from me with every painful heartbeat.

My breath slowed as I sunk into the trance, losing all sense of time. I found myself hypnotized by the movement of the energy particles, which I had always thought of as part of the weave, as they cycled through my body and the environment around me. When the particles reached my wounds, the particles paused. The blackness of their energy invaded my consciousness, and I found myself slipping into another time and place.

Unafraid, I looked around. It was after sunset, but even in the darkness, I knew this place. Home. Hy-Brasil. Green mosses and grasses littered the hills. The air was damp, and I could smell the fragrances the rain unlocked in the earth around me. I realized then that I was seeing one of my own memories.

The vision spread out around me. I could see Bren to my right. I had just kicked him through a double-wide entrance of a mound. It was our mound, I remembered. We had spent many moons building it, and that night we had finally placed the keystone above the opening.

I watched as Bren disappeared in front of me, falling into the darkness of the mound. I now knew that he had been transported to the site of all geneses, the Heart-shaped Pool.

Pain flared in my side as the blackness of the energy in my wound became the blackness of the woman standing before me in my memory. Bren had told me this tale in the very room my body resided in. I was seeing what came after what he remembered.

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A bitter cold seemed to stab into my body, before spreading out into all parts of me, even into the follicles of hair on my arms and the tips of my toes. In my vision, I stood, frozen, before the woman. Black extensions emanated from her. They wrapped around me, bringing spasms of pain.

I watched as a man and woman sprinted down a nearby hill toward me. Their faces seemed foreign and strange to me, but I knew I should know their names. The pain that wracked my body had overwhelmed everything that night. But now, inside the memory of my trance, the information came back to me.

I knew them now. They were our mother and father. I gritted my teeth, trying to grasp the names that swirled just outside my ability to recall them. I focused harder, feeding energy into the burnt ends of my mind, feeling it slowly wake up.

Briomhaith was my mother’s name, and one I realized I recognized. Her dark hair swirled around a normally warm face that would have been unremarkable but for her full mouth and piercing green eyes. Now all her motherly warmth had been replaced by fierceness. She towered over my father as they ran, and between the size and the body structure that I had become so familiar with, I knew her to be a Fomorian.

The man beside her, my father, seemed to emanate a tarnished bronze glow from within. As he ran, a sleeve of chainmail appeared on his arms and chest. A staff adorned with a circular head appeared suddenly in his hand. He shouted a single word, causing a beam of light to shoot from the staff into the dark woman in front of me.

The vision fluttered in and out of my mind. As the bright beam struck the woman, she stumbled to the side. The agonizing black cords loosened, bringing sweet relief. Shocked at the sudden sensation, I swayed, toppling toward the entrance of the mound.

Time slowed in the memory. The lightning flashes behind the green hills seemed to take two or three seconds. Each long stride of my mother felt like an eternity. Only my father appeared to move outside the laws of time and space. He looked through the memory and into my real body. I saw him remove himself from the vision and smile. I knew him then, his real name, and more importantly, who he was.

My father, the father of Harmony and Chaos, was himself a Síorláidir. He was called “Dark One” by those brave enough to speak of him. He was the one who caused the ground to shake and the one who made mountains erupt in fire. He was the keeper of the dead and general of the Bánánach. Donn, the god of death.

I watched, outside of myself, as my limp body fell into the mound, disappearing. The blackness of the attacking woman dissolved in the nearly blinding light of my father’s magic. My mother stood, tears in her eyes, in front of the doorway I had disappeared into. She trembled in her grief and anger.

In the distance, I saw a girl appear over the rise of a faraway mound. She was silhouetted by the flash of lightning, but even at a distance, I could see the green of her eyes. They were the eyes of her mother, my mother. The eyes of my sister.

My eyes snapped open, the vision ending. I sat in my real room, back in the Deep Realm. Neit’s brooch rested on the bed next to me. I felt rejuvenated. The pain in my side was gone, though I knew it would return. The scars would never leave me, and neither would the curse, but I was relieved to know I had found a way to at least temporarily stave off the pain.

I thought about the vision…no, the memory that had come flooding back to me during the trance. Our mother’s name was Briomhaith. I knew now that she was a Fomorian, just as I knew that she shared a name with the lost daughter of Prince Elatha.

I realized that made me a Fomorian too, and not merely an adopted son. It made Bren a Fomorian, and it made our sister a Fomorian.

My mind whirled with this new information. What did it mean for my family? For the Fomorians? What had the god of death been doing in Hy-Brasil? Who was the woman in black, and why had she attacked Bren and me? There were so many unanswered questions.

I took a deep breath, trying to ground myself back in the present, in the goings-on of the Deep Realm. I opened my eyes, only to see thick tendrils of haze surrounding my body. I remembered suddenly what day it was.

There would be no relief in the present. It was time for the duel between Tethra and Corb.