Day 16 of Midwinter, Midday

  The Deep Realm

  Annwn

  I sat on the edge of my bed looking at the object in my hand. I had pulled it directly from the ancient wreckage of Neit’s ship, simply by reaching through the portal. It was the same portal he had used over four thousand years ago. In crossing into Annwn, the magic changed his body. It had changed his sword, Cathscian, and there were rumors that other items he had brought from ériu were also transformed that day.

  Looking down, I rubbed my finger along the simple metal object. It was a brooch in the shape of a bull’s head. The horns curved around and down in front of the bull’s snout. Using my Advanced Identification boon, I could see a silver aura emanating from the item. The glow had been there even before I pulled it through the portal. Is it possible it had absorbed the magic of Annwn just being that close to the portal for thousands of years?

  I smiled. Something about being the first person to hold this object since the former king made me proud, and a bit nostalgic. But it was in seeing the magical properties of the object that I began to chuckle. And as always, when I laughed or coughed, sneezed, or even moved too quickly, the permanent wounds on my back and side burned me to the core.

  Something had to be done about the Life Leak curse. It was distracting, painful, and slowly killing me. My conversation with Bren came back to me about his ability to engage in a fairy trance. I remembered my failed attempt back on top of the lighthouse. Instinctively, I placed the brooch on the bed beside me and closed my eyes.

  With my eyes closed, I could still see the haze around my body that represented future disharmony, but slowly I managed to look through the haze and focus on the energy moving around and through me. The energy on my side appeared black and pulsed as it leaked with each heartbeat.

  The passing of time had no meaning. I became hypnotized by the individual pieces of what Bren called energy particles. I had always thought of them as a part of the weave. I followed them in their cycle through the environment and my body. When we came to my wounds, the particles stopped and the blackness of their energy invaded my consciousness.

  I was in a different place. It was after sunset, but even in the darkness, I could feel the green mosses and grasses that littered the hills. It was wet, and I could smell the fragrances the rain unlocked in the earth around me. I realized that what I was seeing wasn’t real, that I was trapped in a memory. But I knew that place. It was a place that I once called home. Hy-Brasil.

  The vision spread out around me, and I could see Bren to my right. I had just kicked him through a double-wide entrance of a mound. It was our mound, I remembered. We had spent many moons building it, and that night we had placed the keystone above the opening.

  Bren disappeared in front of me, as he faded into the darkness of the mound. I now knew that to mean that he had been transported to the site of all geneses, the Heart-shaped Pool.

  Pain flared in my side as the blackness of the energy in my wound became the blackness of the woman standing before me in my memory. Bren had told me this tale in the very room my body resided in. I was seeing what came after.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  A coldness pierced my body and spread out into all parts of me. I could feel coldness in the follicles of hair on my arms and to the tips of my toes. I could see the faces around me, a woman and a man, who were running down a nearby hill toward us, becoming more foreign and strange to me. I realized that I was forgetting their names. I had forgotten everything in the pain that racked my body that night. But now, inside the memory of my trance, the information was coming back to me.

  I knew the woman and the man. They were our mother and father. Their names swirled around just outside my ability to recall them, but I gritted my teeth and focused. I could feel the burnt ends of my mind waking up as I fed energy into them.

  Briomhaith was my mother’s name, and one I realized I recognized. She had dark hair and piercing green eyes. Her pouty lips were a prominent feature on an otherwise warm face. But in that scene, all of the warmth had been replaced by the fierceness of a protective mother. She towered over my father as they ran, and between the size and the body structure that I had become so familiar with, I recognized her as a Fomorian.

  The man beside her, my father, glowed with an inner color that reminded me of tarnished bronze. A sleeve of chainmail appeared on his arms and chest, and a staff adorned with a circular head appeared in his hand. He cried out a single word and a beam of light shot from the staff into the female figure who was wrapping black extensions of herself into me.

  A spasm of pain flooded my senses and the darkness receded from me. The sensation was sweet relief, but the sheer intensity of what had happened, made the vision flutter in and out of my mind. When the light hit her, we both stumbled back, she to the side, and me toward the entrance of the mound.

  The rest of the memory slowed down from that point. Everything happened very, very slowly. I saw the lightning flashes behind the green hills that took two or three seconds. Each giant stride of my mother felt like an eternity. But my father appeared to move outside the laws of time and space. He looked through the memory and into my real body. I saw him remove himself from the vision and smile. I knew him then, his real name.

  My father, the father of Harmony and Chaos, was himself a Síorláidir. Called “Dark One,” by those who are brave enough to speak about him. He is the one who causes the ground to shake and the one who makes mountains erupt in fire. He is the keeper of the dead and general of the Bánánach. My father was Donn, the god of death.

  I watched, outside of myself, and saw my body fall into the mound. I saw the blackness of the attacking woman dissolve in the light of my father’s magic. I saw my mother reach the doorway where my body disappeared, tears filling her eyes. And I saw a girl appear over the rise of a mound in the distance. She was silhouetted by the flash of lightning, but even at a distance, I could see the green of her eyes. They were the eyes of her mother, my mother. They were the eyes of my sister.

  My eyes popped open then. I sat in my real room, back in the Deep Realm. Neit’s brooch rested on the bed next to me. I felt rejuvenated, and the pain in my side was gone, only temporarily, I knew. The scars would never leave me, and neither would the curse, but it appeared that I had found a way to temporarily stave off the pain.

  I thought about the vision that had come flooding back to me in the trance. I now knew that our mother’s name was Briomhaith. I knew that she was a Fomorian, and shared a name with the lost daughter of Prince Elatha. I knew that made me a Fomorian too, not just an adopted son. It made Bren a Fomorian, and it made our sister a Fomorian.

  My mind whirled with this new information. What did it mean for my family, for the Fomorians? What was the god of death doing in Hy-Brasil? Who was the woman in black, and why was she attacking Bren and me? There were so many unanswered questions.

  Seeking some sort of relief in the present, I tried to ground myself back in the goings-on of the Deep Realm. I remembered, then, what day it was, and I saw the thick tendrils of the haze surrounding my body. There would be no relief in the present. It was time for Tethra’s duel with Corb.

  Children of the Cold Moon is out now in paperback, ebook, and in audiobook format!