Michael Darkpool O'Scathatch
Mountains loom below me. Their snow capped peaks reaching for my soaring form.
I circle again, spying, spotting, searching.
She is not here.
I think back, to a time when life was not as it is for me today. Back to when I was nothing. Back to when I was inconsequential. Back to when I was mundane. When I had no mission.
I am a child.
Mom and dad are freshly spilt from divorce. His late nights at work, her infidelities. It was ugly, she was ruthless to him, in the end I wound up with her, seeing dad on weekends.
She had cheated. Betrayed him, betrayed me, ruined our family. I had to live with her. The judge decided that because he worked two jobs, didn’t make much of an income, and a whole list of other crap mom convinced her of, he wasn’t a suitable father for me.
I wondered why it had all happened. At my age, it was unusual for folks to get divorced at that time. Sure, nowadays single parents, divorces, hell, even gay parents are all common now. But not back then.
I just chalked it up to bad luck.
I look back, further.
I am not inconsequential. I am not nothing. I am not mundane.
I am a Sidhe.
I sit onto a craggy cliff, looking down into the valley below. The army gathers there. Their bodies covered in human and animal pelts, armed with sticks and crude weapons. They are an army of evil, or darkness, chaos and utter death.
They are the enemy.
From my perch high above, I spy, I watch. Counting their numbers, their arms, weaknesses, and movements.
Behind me, I hear stones, pebbles actually, crunching and rolling along down the cliff. My hand on my sword, I turn and draw when the interloper is within my striking distance.
It is a wolf. A large, black, dire wolf, with green eerie eyes. The beast cocks his head at me, and begins to transform. The man he became is tall, wiry, with hair as black as the hearts of the enemy, and a thick beard. His tattoos and glyphs and scars, each a trophy of his deeds and actions. His clothing is that of the people who live in the woods below, the ones who remain far from the townspeople and their fears.
He addresses me in the tongue of our shared land.
“Dubh-lynn, Alpha’s await us. I have seen the enemy to the west, what say you of the enemy here?” he asked. For one born as a beast, he’d certainly learned to speak the tongue of man well.
“Over 1,000. Twisted and ready to take our blood, my friend. I fear your mystics were right.”
“The west holds worse, Dubh-lynn. And they are strong as well.” His reply was without fear, “We should tell them to expect the worst. Our deaths will bring us untold honor and glorious tales to be sung until the End.”
I smile. They were brave to a fault. That is what made them so terrifying. Howls of Silver was ready to fight and die for nothing more than respect, a battle he knew would be lost. And, he and his brethren would fight ferociously, the only way they understood how to fight.
But, his readiness to sacrifice all was premature.
“Their far column, the middle rank, Howls, is weak. They filled it with their youngest, least experienced warriors. Their newest converts. They can be exploited, and from there, we can break them. The day will be ours, friend.”
I am 14.
Junior High School. I am a quiet boy, I keep to myself, most of the time. No one bothers me, either. They leave me be. Except the girls. They all think they can ‘tame’ me or ‘help’ me, or ‘reach’ me. I don’t get it. I really just want to be left alone.
The jocks are tormenting the weaker kids again. I spot Sikes as he knocks the poor bastards books out of his hands. The kid thinks about fighting back, but he knows it’s a losing battle. He’s out numbered, and out classed.
I turn the corner. Seems I remember Sikes dropped a 4x4 on his foot in shop a while back. I wonder if it’s healed properly.
The geek thanks me, as I am being dragged off to the Dean’s office, again.
Dad would be pissed at me.
If he wasn’t stuck in a bottle, he would be.
His life after divorce wasn’t pretty. He worked, but he would lose his job because of his ‘obsession’ with mom: they would tell him he needed help, and to come back when he got his life in order. He would date, but the women would leave him: they would tell him he was stuck in the past, they were sick of being compared to Molly.
And, there was the fact that Mom would do whatever she could to keep him from seeing me. Despite what I wanted.
So he drank. I guess he did it to escape his life. To go live in a painless, beautiful, fantasy world.
Something bugs me about it, beyond that fact that dad is sinking into alcoholism.
Something about it seems all too familiar, but I can’t put my finger on it.
Life with mom sucks. Her new husband, “Eddie” tries to be my dad, but he just shouts orders, slaps me and mom around, and fucks around on her. She wouldn’t listen to me, about the phone calls, the letters he stuff’s in the trash when he comes home late, the time I saw him necking his new secretary in the diner. For Christ’s sake, her did it to her when she was his secretary.
I considered running away from my mother, Eddie, the whole thing. I wanted to go to dad, and take him away with me. Get him clean, find him a new lady.
It would never happen.
The river, soaring downstream, keeping ever vigilant, she is not here.
This drives me. Finding them. All of them. Making them pay for what has happened.
She is the last one. She will tell me why. Why her motley declared war on me.
Perhaps the city is where they will be.
The battle raged for hours. The enemy was fading, our tacticians having used the weakness I had spotted.
Howls of Silver swings his huge silver sword at the foul beasts, cleaving them in two with his massive swings.
I slay another disgusting creature. Filth and disease spread from their very weapons, our Allies have a natural resistance to their plagues, but we must be careful not to become infected.
I turn to see Howls, he slaughters another foe, but a sickly woman, who snuck up behind him, stabs him in the back. Her wailing cackle came when she plunged her silver dagger into my friend’s lungs, again and again. Howls crumbles, and the mighty warrior beast that was left behind only the body of a dying wolf.
I took flight. Landing behind the woman, my blood and ichor soaked blade held high, she turned.
As my blade sunk into her neck, he final wail let forth. He body lowered to the ground. And I saw what my anger had blinded me from.
She was just a child. A girl, not much older then a Childling. Her body was deformed and twisted, but it was her face, her angelic, childlike face, that betrayed her true age.
I watched as the life seeped from her before I waded into the fray again.
I wouldn’t leave until we were victorious.
The city. I sail over the skyline, obscured from the view of mortals by the dark of night. My ‘informant’ came through. He’d said she might be holed up here, in a run down tavern for those of us who’d rather not be found, she knew I was coming for her.
I pay him his dross, and the Boggan leaves.
I find the address, and I land atop the building.
I am 18.
Eddie left Mom when I was a senior in High School. He told her he was going out for cigarettes, and he never came back.
She still would not listen to me, even when I told her the ‘going out for cigarettes’ line was as old and cliché as a dude sleeping with his beautiful young secretary. Even when I showed her the receipt I found in the trash for two one way tickets to Cancun. She was blind.
She sat there, every night, at the door. Waiting for him to come home. Every night for two years. I thought it would never end.
But, it did.
This bar, in the back room. She is in there. Another rung on the on the ladder, leading up to the one who did this.
The last of her compatriots told me she’d made all the deals. She was the face woman for the motley. He also told me that they were just making something for themselves, work for hire sort of thing. “Business, ya know? Nothin’ personal ‘gainst you!”
Ruining my life was their business. No reason I should take it personally.
But I did.
The mystic piled the rocks carefully into a large mound. Upon each rock, he carved a set of distinct sigils.
I watched, from a distance. The fierce ones did not like strangers on their holy sites. Some made an exception for us. The seer knew that his nephew and I were friends.
“This one.” He held a fist-sized stone up to me. Four sigils carved into the stone by his own claw. “This is for Howls With Silver. My nephew and my packmate.”
I nodded solemnly. “My friend, and my shield brother.” Was all I could add.
I sat and watched with other Fair Folk, as the Fianna performed their dances and wild revels to honor their fallen brothers, as well as ours. We drank, danced, and sang the night away to excise our pain and loss.
There would be many such nights, after bloody battles, celebrating victory and escaping our losses.
That night, I would spread my wings and soar. The once pure white wings had now turned the darkest black.
As I walk in, the bartender, a Clurichaun, doesn’t even notice me. Too busy working on undoing the sarong on a rather exotic looking Eshu with his charm and talk. I make my way over to the door to the private room. The Redcap sitting next to the door, probably the guard. He might be trouble. No way to sneak around him.
I walk towards him, he spots me, and stands up, grabbing a large baseball bat studded with spikes and nails, and wrapped in barbed wire.
I pick up a cue stick from a pool table. The Troll who was about to use it could only stare at me and exclaim “Hey!!?”
The redcap laughs as I approach. “HAW! Lemme guess! Yer gonna tell me to move aside befo-“
-CRACK!-
The cue stick striking his jaw shuts him up.
To be continued...