An Angel Called Eternity

Faetales and Forgotten Stories - A Promise Fulfilled: Cairn Mist

Gráigdeireadh, Eastern Aurinsay, the Brythonic Isles.
The Seventeenth Day of the Ninth Moon, 610 AD.

Months turned into years. Memories faded. People moved on.
She didn't. Couldn't.
He should have been hers. He would be hers, as soon as he returned.
She'd stopped questioning the other boys about what had happened that night almost a year ago. They'd never answered her questions anyway.
Boys. They were still boys, even after all the happened. Not men. They were far too immature for that, no matter what the coming-of-age ceremony said. And of course, being boys, they were stupid.
The forest itself was rarely travelled now. The strange happenings made few hunters care to tread its paths, and any foolish enough to try wouldn't have found it worth their while; what had once been a wealth of wildlife had been depleted, and the few animals still lived amongst those trees were anaemic and sickly, with hardly enough meat on their bones to feed a bairn.
It was as though the life was being sucked out of the forest.

The harvests suffered too; a few years ago they had been blessed by the Jay, that most magnanimous of fertility goddesses, for their devotion to love and to live, but now the crops had begun to wither in their fields. How fitting, she thought, that a goddess of love would turn her back on us after one of the most kind-hearted people in the village was abandoned by his brothers in the woods.
And it was abandonment, of that she had little doubt. The other boys were supposed to be a part of his Waryouth band, a brotherhood that would be forged in hunting and battle. If they had stuck to their oaths to their band, they would have at the very least brought his body back with them.

But no. Nothing. Not even his bones to bury.

The poachers and woodsmen that came from other villages were the only people who she could glean anything from these days, but they all said the same thing.
There was a Siabhne in the woods.
She'd been warned about these creatures in fae-tales when she was a child; they were spirits doomed to linger beyond death, not of this world but tethered just enough to be able to watch as the world continued on without them. Unable to walk amongst the living, and yet unable to truly pass on.
As was the norm for such legends, the stories and myths were so splintered that they agreed on very little regarding these creatures. Some legends claimed they glowed a baleful green in the moonlight, others said their skin turned the blue and black of rot and decay, more still claimed a deathly pallor would colour them.
There was one common thread to the tales, however. All the stories she knew agreed on one thing: the tether.

The tether of a Siabhne was always yearning. Yearning of another for the spirit, the yearning of the spirit for another, both, it mattered not. It bound them here.
She wasn't stupid. She could put two and two together.
They had yearned for each other for so long, yearned for the life they would share together, yearned for fate to change the hands they were dealt.
Maybe the fates had listened for once?
Despite the absurdity of the situation she allowed herself a moment of hope, and an almost conspiratorial smile. The Brythonian isles remembered much of what the rest of the world had forgotten, and though no human could hope to harness the mystical energies that saturated the isles in any meaningful capacity everyone who lived within the embrace of the Corvids knew the truth well; these isles were moulded by magic, and the effects still lingered. Oh, for sure, no one knew who had dragged these isles from the sea, nor who had erected the Greystones at their heart. They did not know who, or what, or when, or even just why. But even so, the effects lingered. Mystical phenomena would occasionally sprout up across the isles, and to her understanding it was much like... how best to explain...
She pondered for a moment, thinking back to the tales she'd been told as a child, some by Old Kerwyn, others by Arwel himself.
The Greystones acted as a sort of metaphorical bowl, and magic like water. As with a bowl, if one dripped in water gradually but never emptied it, it would fill. So too with the Greystones. Over time the bowl had grown completely full, and with no-one alive who knew how to drink from the vitae contained within it would occasionally spill, like droplets of water slowly falling to stain the earth momentarily before evaporating into nothing.
Magical phenomena worked much the same.
Strange weather here, strange activity from an Umbra there, the possibilities were... well, wide, to say the least.
And yet even so, the thought of a shade lingering past death really felt like something she should have been more concerned about. She shrugged. Far be it from her to deny her one chance at answers, at moving on. If that meant accepting that Siabhne was tethered to her and able to be seen in the flesh then that was fine by her.