It had to be bad. Niall didn’t know what was wrong with him. He felt fine, if not a little confused after the whole incident with the faerie, but now he couldn’t hear anything. He tried to speak to them. “What’s going on? What’s going on? What’s wrong with me?”, he yelled in distress. They were still looking extremely concerned at him but neither of them answered him. He asked them again. Still no answer. He kept asking. They were looking at him, trying to listen, but they couldn’t hear anything. Every time he spoke, he could hear himself, but Brigid and Lugh couldn’t hear a thing he said. They could clearly hear each other; they just couldn’t hear Niall, and he couldn’t hear them. How could he just suddenly become deaf and mute? Had the faerie done this? He began to panic, he was shaking and jittering uncontrollably, and his heart was racing. Brigid and Lugh were trying to figure what form of spell, curse, or hex this was. She could see that Niall was struggling to breathe and panicking. She put her hand to his cheek. It was warm. It reminded him of his mother doing the same thing when he was little. As soon as she touched him, he lay down on the log he had been sitting on and fell into a deep sleep.
Niall opened his eyes to find he was lying on the ground now. He was face down in some kind of grey, pebbly sand. He felt very groggy, like he had hit his head really hard. Slowly, he raised himself up onto his knees, making sure to take deep breaths as he did so. Sitting back onto his feet, he tried to start taking in his surroundings. The only problem was there didn’t seem to be much of a surrounding to take in. A dense, black fog had made a circle immediately around him which was impossible to see through. He listened to try and hear something. He could hear the breeze and a faint flapping every so often. Focusing his hearing as best he could, he tried to follow the flapping sound to its source. It was definitely the sound of wings that, Niall assumed, belonged to a bird of some sort. He staggered through the darkness, its thick, inky blackness almost as dangerous as a physical obstacle that he could fall over. There could’ve been anything waiting for him on the ground to do damage to him. He slowed himself down when he had this thought, he was a little cavalier in his investigation into the flapping sound.
The flapping was getting louder now. Every step made the gravel crunch under his feet. All he really had here was sound to guide him, as he was basically blind in this black fog or smog or whatever it was. Squinting, closing one eye, nothing seemed to be making things easier in terms of what he could see. Then, “THUD!” He bumped into what he thought was a tree but was actually a fairly sizeable branch that had to have been dragged here from somewhere else. Following the branch up, he found the source of this damned flapping noise that had been tormenting him. Sat at the highest point of the branch was a jet-black crow, its beady eyes staring back at him. It made its way down to him in three jumps between different offshoots of the branch. Perching itself at eye level with him, Niall couldn’t help but feel anxious; he had never been a fan of birds. “CAW! CAW!” the crow blurted at him. It wasn’t the most subtle creature, that was for sure. “CAW”, again, like it was trying to talk to him. Niall tried to watch its eyes. It was obviously trying to communicate with him, he just had no idea what it was trying to say. Suddenly, the crow spread its wings and took off, disappearing from Niall’s sight, as if it had never been there in the first place. Looking around, Niall couldn’t see it through the black fog. He looked up, staying focused on the cone of vision in the black fog that seemed to have opened up around him. There, in the clear circle in the sky above him, he could see the crow circling.
He watched the circling motion, 1 time, 2 times, 3 times. It was hypnotic. He could easily have started to get dizzy from the motions. Suddenly, the crow darted to the right. Niall looked at the empty space for a second, just trying to figure out if he really wanted to follow or not. The last thing he needed was another bad dream that seemed far too realistic. Given that nothing seemed to be happening the longer he waited, he decided to head to the right and see about following this bird that was, surely, only going to cause him problems. As he walked, he kept checking above to see if he could spot the crow. Eventually the crow came back into view, hovering above him, looking more than a little miffed. Niall didn’t even know that crows could express emotions, but here was this crow, looking fairly annoyed at him. The crow turned and, again, headed to the right, a bit slower this time so that Niall could keep up.
The bird kept going, leading Niall on what felt like an endless trek to nowhere. After about ten minutes of following this figure above him, Niall noticed the smell of grass or some kind of grass like crop on the breeze. He looked down every so often to check he wasn’t going to walk into anything. Sure enough, the one time he looked back up at the crow a stone wall decided to punch him in the gut. On the other side of it, the black fog dissipated, and Niall could see a field of barley with what looked like a hazel tree in the middle of it.
By Owen Coyne
Taken to the Corner 