The crows watch him from the rooftops and gutters of the night clothed Dublin. His coal smeared skin and dim rags aid the shadows in cloaking him as he slides in and out of the dull glow of oil lamps along the cobbled sraíd. Drunkards and gutter waifs are the only mortal souls about in the witching hour, and Sedric is a member of the latter. However he is an honorary member, if such a thing exists. Though dirt is a second skin to him he carries himself with a determined gate, the tortured battle marred soldier. He could have made the choice to crawl forth from the pit of the city’s underbelly and the tribulations it brought, but instead Sedric learned the euphoria of numbness and ignorance.
He typically spent the solitude interviewing himself trying to decipher his metaphysic riddle. Why am I here? What is my purpose in this dirty decrepit city? He contemplates through the din of the crows. He knows they are mocking him, slandering him.
He knows their secret. He has since he was a child. He heard first in myths and legends of his boyhood, and then as a young man when they and their leaders exposed themselves and ripped his father from his side in battle.
War is the thing with feathers. She was once worshipped alongside deities of plenty, rivers, and fertility. Now she is forgotten as a goddess along with her sisters. Her legacy preserved in standing stones and legends.
He thought of his situation, under the thumb of a trio of sadistic goddesses’ soldiers, and chuckled at the absurdity of it all.
He figures the sisters want something from him, more than naught his life. Their species’ popular nickname “Fair Folk” is ludicrous to him. “Soulless She-devils” is more precise.
As if she heard his mental musings and took offense, one of the Ilchruthach caws and swoops down to perch on his shoulder. Her talons dig into his lean and sinewy flesh but he grits his teeth and carries on his stride.
“Sedric, gnó is le plé. Tá sí ag fanacht. Tá a fhios agat an láithreán” We have business. She is waiting. You know where. She hisses her native language in his ear in her snakelike but sickeningly human trill then takes off ahead of him into the dark.
This abrupt confrontation by one of the Ilchruthach has not shaken him. He predicted it, and he was already headed to the place instructed. The courtyard of a large abandoned flat. It was where his parents married back before the war, back before the flats were abandoned. He returns there somewhat often, it being a perfect place for brooding.
The place is void of human life as it has been for years. Shapes of destruction are burnt into the stone walls. They cannot be clearly seen by the moonlight with its veiling shadows but he knows they are there. He was there when they happened.
The Ilchruthach are in great numbers here. They fly and flail themselves back and forth from corners to rooftops, through shattered windows and out of the clear black sky. A swarm of desolation and mayhem. A smug grin creeps across his face when he sees Frenzy in a window conducting her cousins in the storm. Her husband Neít has his arm around her waist. He smiles cruelly at the birds smashing themselves into the walls as only a war god and husband of a battle fury can.
“Nemhain! Stopadh tú leathcheann!” Stop you idiot the voice of the messenger crow rings out harshly from behind him to berate her younger sister. Instantly the storm of feathered energies abates and resumes a watchful perch. Nemhain fires her sister a venomous glare from the window. She turns away to her husband, roots a hand in his long dark hair, and her mouth proceeds to perform a vicious and sensuous dance with his.
Sedric turns to see Badbh, the middle sister of the deadly trio of war goddesses. She is clad in a full length dress the color of rust, fitted with a loose vest and leather belt that highlights a slim waste. Her signature red cloak is latched over her shoulders. She pulls the large hood down to reveal a heavily layered cascade of auburn hair. The moonlight decorates the angles of her face and lights up her yellow eyes framed by a thick yet graceful brow.
“Nemhain is young, but she is the most ruthless of us all.” The goddess proclaimed, now in English, dropping all formality. She jerks her head to look at her sister, fashions a gruesome snarl out of her pretty features, and gives her audacious sibling an avian roar to put her in her place. The sound knocks Sedric off his feet. Nemhain separates herself from her mate and flings herself at the window, eyes flashing, hands partially formed into talons thrown against the glass. Her face forms into a haunting smirk.
“Maighdean!” Virgin she teases.
Badbh rolls her eyes and turns back to Sedric, placid. “Get up.”
He hops to his feet barely fast enough to catch up with the goddess before she disappears into the building where her sister lurks.
The ceilings of the room are high; it had been a common room. Badbh leans against the wall behind Sedric; and on the window seat by which they had been standing prior Nemhain sits draped across the lap of her husband, nuzzling him and hanging on him like a strange garment. Neít’s cruel smile lingers and Sedric decides, unsurprised, that this unsettling expression is the one the god always wears.
Dusty beams stretch between walls, and on one of these beams sits the Mórrígan, the Phantom Queen currently in the form of a raven. War is her game. She keeps the sport interesting by bringing terror and destruction to her own warriors.
There is a sound of flapping and a swirl of shadows, ash, and ebony feathers around the deity. The moonlight vaguely illuminates the lounging form of a woman, shrouded in a cloak of oily obsidian feathers that shine olive when struck with the cold pale light. Only her deep red, creamy lips and a patch of death pale skin are visible. Their movement is mesmerizing as she speaks.
“Sedric,” she lingers on his name, tasting it, savoring the phonetics like a fine wine, “as you know, we have brought you here in need of a favor. My sisters and I are growing bored with your race’s silent peace, and we need assistance in instigating a much needed conflict.” She pauses shortly, “Now don’t think us weak. We are not weak. If you declare us such my sisters will break every bone in your body then rip the flesh off your mangled form by the fistful while I sit here with a lovely glass of your blood to sip on throughout the entertainment.” She gives the threat like it is nothing, but this is the Mórrígan and Sedric knows that every letter of the threat is an iron truth; “Anyhow, the male sex among the humans grows increasingly dense and arrogant with time and is thus slowly making it very difficult for me to influence their decisions. You being a youthful member of this cult of masculinity in addition to being familiar with the way my sister’s and I work makes you ideal for the position of our middleman.” She pauses and angles her head to look Sedric in the eye. The young man does not move. He maintains a stare with the Mórrígan even though he cannot see her eyes. After a few beats of silence she continues, “We are not asking you to start a full-fledged war, Sedric. At least for now,” The Phantom Queen and her sisters snicker, “we are just requesting you to supply that extra push toward a certain degree of feuding and maybe, if we are lucky, chaos. You will be richly rewarded, I assure you.” She yawns and waits for a response.
Sedric takes out a deep slow sigh that holds more irritation than unease as he finally breaks eye contact. As his gaze peruses the weary state of the flooring he simply says, “How many will die?” then he waits, not looking up.
“Well...we cannot exactly say. Every war is bloodier than the last. There will be no one you know among the fallen if that gives you any comfort.” The sisters snicker again at the knowledge of their hand in the deaths of many of Sedric’s kinsmen, including his father.
Sedric had lost his compassion over the years, but was his distaste with the world so strong as to aid the Mórrígan in instigating more massacre and destruction?
The complacent crooked smirk found its way back onto Sedric’s face. “Hmm…what is the payment?” He inquires.
The Mórrígan’s ruby lips contort into a wicked smile. Like an onyx mine blast the goddess throws herself from the beam, landing nimbly on her feet, yet making the building shiver and groan with her impact. Her hood falls and bares her face with its high cheekbones and pointed chin framed with a smoke of deep russet curls washed with a slight twinge of red like rich earth soaked with men’s blood. Her brow is thick like her sisters’ and wings of thick inky lashes frame her eyes and make them look large and innocent. However, the eyes themselves betray that attempted innocence. Sedric can see the ruin, the devastation, all who have died in battle within those eyes. They are a rusted bordeaux. The color of dried blood, old blood, and he cannot help but see beauty in them.
The goddess approaches him slowly, swaying her hips. She places a hand on his shoulder and pulls him close to her. She gives him an enticing glance and pulls him down so she can speak in his ear. “Immortality,” her voice was breathy and seductive. She grabs his hand and wraps it around the widest part of her hip and adds to her proposal, “and me.”
She coils an arm around him and with a blurred flick of the wrist unlatches the feathered cloak with the other hand. The garment rustles like dead leaves as it collapses to the floor. Sedric finds himself taking in the swell of her pale breasts rising out of the shining black satin gown that gathers and billows like a tar sea in a hurricane around her. He slides his hand higher to prove to himself the existence of the sharp concave of her waist forcefully molded to a disproportionate slimness by a black leather corset engraved with crude, unsettling depictions of battle, death, and crows.
“Imagine it, Sedric. Remaining forever youthful with a godly beauty and allure. Becoming one with the Sí, free to spoil in their indulgences and only have to return to this dull and damned place for entertainment.” She reaches up and touches his face lightly in the way that feels like crawling insects or spider webs. He meets her bloody gaze and holds it as she continues, “Imagine the eternal ecstasy and stimulation of immortality with me.” She pauses and her smirk becomes a cage of secrets about to be opened, “I know you love me, Sedric. I know you are enamored by me, by the way I live, what I am capable of.”
Sedric’s smile grows, but not with joy, with self-righteousness and satisfaction at his bluffs being called. He has been figured out. The metaphysic riddle has been deciphered.
“And what would happen if I rejected your generous offer?” Sedric prospects with the goddess purely in jest.
The Mórrígan, amused by his coyness, enlightens him, “Well…” she draws it out, teasing, “there may be a little pain.” she drags a sharpened thumbnail along his collarbone, drawing a thin line of blood. Her toy does not flinch so she proceeds with a kiss, the same savage dance of two mouths her sister had performed, however the Mórrígan adds a twist in the choreography; she slightly lowers her mouth, and as she leans in, quick as a whip she splits Sedric’s bottom lip with her teeth. She suckles the crimson nectar a moment before pulling away. The boy looks surprised, but the goddess sees the cryptic desire flickering behind the expression.
She swipes a spot of his blood from the corner of her mouth. “What I can assure you, Sedric, is that there will be blood,” she discards the substance by wiping it over her breast, leaving a scarlet smear, “dregs and dregs of blood.”
Sedric kisses her then, and they both taste the iron salt of his blood. After he pulls away he proclaims, in the goddesses’ native Gaeilge, “Tá.” Yes.
The Mórrígan beams with sickening delight. She grasps his arms, “Go. Take some of the Ilchruthach and leave nothing but turmoil in your wake. Frenzy, Fury, and The Phantom Queen follow you. Be valiant! Be cruel! Show them no mercy!”
With a final malicious smile, nod, and kiss for his goddess Sedric bids adieu for the time being. He reenters the courtyard bearing the fearsome smile, and continues back out to the moonlit Dublin sraíd. In the night sky just behind him his own personal torrent of Ilchruthach flap about in a twisting mass awaiting his bidding. They follow him closely as he walks with purpose through the shadows and into further darkness.