How do you cope with learning that your mother was murdered before you were born, your father is a fairy hitman, and you wield the power to raise an army of devoted love slaves... except you haven't the least idea how to control it?
Tom Corwen's di...
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Blue moonlight filtered through leafy oaken limbs above a small, forest glade where the Veil thickened, where a cloaked woman walked alone, her thoughts weighed down with the irony of a decision.
She paced through damp autumn leaves, dew seeping through the soles of her doeskin boots, and brushed back the long, thick locks of her honeyed hair, looking to the sky. Through gaps where the trees had shed their fiery coiffure, the stars affirmed her augury. She had come to the correct place on the proper night, and the only task left to her was to wait—a skill she had never mastered.
She did not doubt the choice she had made, but pondered its cost. At best, her Queen would be furious. The woman's life, and the lives of those she loved, were forfeit if she could not protect them, and that is what brought her among the trees, to fall upon the mercy of a mortal enemy on the last night of harvest.
All began with a promise, but not to the Queen. She had been trusted by no virtue either possessed, but by a mutual lust for power and a selfish disdain for those that walked beneath them. She valued nothing beyond the perimeter of her own skin, or so they both believed, and for centuries it had been an reasonable substitute for trust.
Then she was sent to kill Cionaodh.
Cion, a mere mortal, had shown her that life, like love, was not a jewel to be hoarded, but a flowing river that grew as it united with others. It stung the remains of her pride that something so fleeting and fragile could bind her as utterly as she had once tethered her prey. The first and hardest thing she had sacrificed was her pride. It had not been burned away so much as starved into an impotent specter, protesting weakly from within. That pride lived on only as a memory of her past, of the person she could become again if she allowed it.
The fall was painful but not without grace, and it changed her less than she would have thought. Her dignity remained and would until the day they tore it from her—along with her beating heart—but she was not a goddess, as many had believed, as she had almost come to believe herself. She was a woman, and to her very great surprise, she discovered it was enough.
Clearly, she lacked the wisdom of a goddess, she reflected, having been drawn out of hiding because of a rumor without the least assurance she would meet the one she wished to see. The conditions were right, and now she walked only to pass the time with what hope she dared embrace.
Without warning, something vast crashed through the growth behind her, but she did not startle. Divine or not, she had power. Woman or not, she would not hesitate to wield its considerable might in her defense. The thing drew up short of trampling her, stamping its hooves into the cold ground as she turned slowly to greet it. Ivory and silver ornaments hung several feet above her head, suspended from the moss-covered antlers of an enormous, black elk. On its back rode a little girl.
"What is your purpose in my wood, devil?" came the voice of a child—no, not a child, a fully grown woman, though small, with brilliant, red hair, dressed in a short, white gown, and barefoot. Two hulking fomorians, which the people called firbolgs, lumbered forward on either side. They moved slowly, but were immensely strong and notoriously difficult to harm. From behind, a thuggish fachan stumped into the glade on unwieldy, ill-shaped limbs. Underestimating its speed or dexterity, or the alacrity of its single, glaring eye, would be a fatal mistake. A dozen more creatures stirred just out of sight, surrounding the humble clearing.
