Day 17 of Midwinter, Nightfall

Uisneach, Tech Duinn

Annwn

“You are a Battlesmith?” Goibhniu asked, sounding surprised. He had improved enough to sit up on his own, but still looked like death warmed over.

“Yes…” I said, “But your reaction makes me feel a little self-conscious about it now.”

“I’m also a Battlesmith,” he announced. He looked me up and down as if considering. "But I have none of your energy boons.”

I was surprised to meet another Battlesmith, but less surprised to find out that we manifested our power differently. In my travels around Annwn, I had only met one other person with similar boons. That person was the other half of my duality, my brother.

“So, you can sharpen and repair weapons with little or no tools?” I asked. It wasn’t clear to me exactly how this domain classification worked, and I found myself filled with hope that Goibhniu might be willing to teach me.

The smith chuckled, the sound weak but filled with genuine mirth. “We are capable of so much more than that, child of the Cold Moon.” He pointed at my shillelagh. “Is that weapon made of Lustrum?”

“An alloy,” I said. “But when it fell into the urn over there, I was given an option to ‘unbind’ it… whatever that means.”

Goibhniu nodded like this was nothing new to him. “Lustrum comes from Duinnite ore, the same as Silverwhite. It contains some of the other magical properties that Silverwhite possesses.”

“What does that mean?” I asked. I was sure the ins and outs of the metals and alloys of Annwn would have been something I’d have enjoyed learning about, if I had any time between surviving the various things set on killing me.

The smith reached a shaking hand to the shillelagh, his touch reverent. “It means this weapon is bound to a soul, much like the weapons of the first King’s Guard. Much like…” He paused and met my eyes before continuing. “Much like the Four Treasures.”

My confusion must have shown on my face, because the smith continued.

“I studied the Treasures for years before growing my first Silverwhite blade. I didn’t have the quantity of Neartór necessary to supply the King’s Guard with satisfactory weapons, so I found a metal with similar properties.”

“Silverwhite,” I interrupted, suddenly understanding. “You used the Duinnite here, inside of Tech Duinn, to create the Silverwhite of the Ellyllon?”

“I did,” he affirmed. “May I?” he asked. After a brief moment of hesitation, I handed him the shillelagh. He turned it in his hands, studying it closely in the light of the molten rock around us.

“This is…an interesting design. You said it gave you the option to unbind it?”

“Yes, but only when it was submerged in the urn there.” I pointed at the urn the smith leaned up against, and he promptly turned to dunk the end of the staff into the water. When he paused, I could tell that he was analyzing his own magical prompts. He didn’t turn to look at me, but kept his gaze locked on the staff.

“Would you mind, child of the Cold Moon, if we discovered what sort of secrets this weapon is hiding? I have never seen anything like it before.”

I shrugged, and Goibhniu went to work again, interacting with his own boons.A vibration emanated from the shillelagh, rattling out into the walls of the room and causing Goibhniu to drop the staff to the floor.

We watched, rapt, as delicate fingers, then hands, began to poke their way from inside the shillelagh. Hands gave way to pale arms and finally a feminine head and shoulders.

A petite woman gasped in a lungful of air before frantically pulling herself the rest of the way out of the impossibly narrow staff. When she had finished the process, both she and the staff lay on the stone floor.

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“I think that shillelagh just had a baby,” I said to no one in particular.

The smith didn’t respond, clearly mesmerized.

The panting woman looked up at us from the floor, then down at her hands with a panicked look in her eyes.

“It’s okay,” I said to her, moving slowly and cautiously to kneel next to her. “We aren’t going to hurt you.” I held my hands up, showing the lack of weapons in them.

“But what if I hurt you?” she said in a strange language that my imbas boon had to work to translate. I had understood some of what she said without the boon, but other words were unknown to me until it kicked in with the translation.

“Maybe try not to do that,” I responded, extending my hand to help her sit up. “So… were you the reason the staff was possessed?”

“It wasn’t possessed,” Goibhniu interrupted. “She had bound herself to it.”

“Right,” I acknowledged. “What he said.”

“I could perceive and interact with the world in a limited capacity,” she began, then paused. A worried expression quickly overtook her face. “Tell me what happened to the others… to the other Síorláidir.”

I glanced over to Goibhniu, who was studying the woman intently. She was lovely in her own way. Like Brigid, her face was youthful and pretty, but unlike the former Fiery Queen, she had a more innocent set to her lips. Her striking bone-white hair was set in thick braids, giving her an ethereal look.

“What is your name?” Goibhniu finally asked.

“Eiocha.”

“Hey!” I said, thinking back on my time in Tir fo Thuinn with Lir. “I think I was in your armory!”

She turned her attention to me, looking me up and down. “That armor belonged to Taranis. But where is the rest of it?”

“I wasn’t strong enough to wear it,” I admitted, thinking I should try the straps and sternum disc armor again at some point.

She nodded, her expression pleased. “If he left his armor behind, then he was successful.”

“Successful at what?” I asked. Goibhniu sat quietly, taking in each word that the woman said.

“I was the…prototype,” she said, my language boon again needing a moment to correctly translate her words. “I was the first to attempt to bind myself to a weapon in an attempt to avoid the corruption.”

“You certainly succeeded with the binding,” I said, with a laugh, thinking about how the weapon had literally dragged me out of danger on the side of the mountain.

“What do you mean by 'the corruption'?” Goibhniu interrupted.

The woman looked at her hands with remembered fear. “Do you see it?” she asked, her voice high and panicked. “Has the blackness set upon my skin?”

There was nothing on her skin, save for the dirt and ash from the dirty floor.

“No,” Goibhniu said, his voice calm and gentle. “We see no affliction upon your skin.”

The woman breathed a sigh of relief. “Then, perhaps the binding was successful in cleansing the corruption from me.”

“Hold on,” I said, not understanding. “You bound yourself to the staff because you wanted to stop some sort of corruption, and there are others who did the same?”

She nodded. “Yes… There are likely four others.”

Goibhniu and I looked at each other, realization dawning on us at the same time. Four others… Four Treasures. She was the prototype. I looked down at my belt. They likely had access to Neartór. The disc armor set was made of Neartór.

She continued, “Of those who had not yet been corrupted, there was Taranis of the sky. Teutates the Protector, Camulos the warrior, and Arianrhod of the moon.”

“And what of those who had been corrupted?” I asked, thinking of the fear in her voice when she asked about the blackness. I remembered all too well my own fear as the blackness on the woman from Hy-Brasil had wrapped around me.

“Maponos of the summer court, Caileach of the winter court, Belenus of the sun, and…” she paused, tears forming in her eyes. “And Donn, despite all his love. He did it all for her. We all did.”

Okay, that was a lot of information, most of which I didn’t understand, though I did recognize some of the Old God names…the Old Gods who had apparently turned themselves into the Four Treasures. I wracked my mind for everything I had heard about them.

Manny had briefly mentioned Teutates the Protector when I first met him. I wore Taranis’ armor. I also knew that Donn was both the father of the Tuatha and the god of Death.

I looked at the grief-stricken woman on the floor. What had she meant, they did it “all for her?” There was only one additional old power that I knew of that she hadn’t mentioned.

“For who? Mother Danu?” I asked, unable to contain my question any longer. “What exactly did you do for her?”

Eiocha kept her eyes fixed on the stone ground in front of her. “We changed the pool. We sculpted the channels of living water here in Uisneach with our tools and with our magic… All according to the will of Danu. She was with child then.” Her voice shook as if she were admitting to a terrible sin.

“It…changed us all, and it changed the very land that we now stand upon. Each of us was tainted by the desecration of the sacred water… each of us, but for her.”

The prehistory of Annwn was slowly becoming clear to me, everything from the disappearance of the Old Gods to the creation of the Four Treasures. I wondered if the child Danu had been carrying then had been Bres, if it had been in those brief years before the Síorláidir had disappeared and the Tuatha had risen to power.

I had plenty of unanswered questions, like what had happened to the corrupted gods, and where Danu fit into all of this, and why what I now knew were two of the Old Powers had been chasing me from the first moment I saw the weave… the Bodach and the Cailleach Bhéara.