“Now this was heavy stuff”, Niall thought in a Marty McFly sounding voice in his head. What she was showing him was horrible. He flew above the land, the horrible scenes rushing by underneath him. Fire everywhere, bodies piled on all sides, the land splitting in two, the smell of burning flesh and sulfur. This couldn’t be anything to do with him. There was no way. The fate of two worlds was at stake and he was just a regular teenager whose voice hadn’t even fully broken yet. How was he ever supposed to stop Lugh, a literal Celtic god, from setting fire to a tree and setting off the end of their worlds? He couldn’t. Lugh was three times his size and infinitely stronger than him. It was impossible.
The woman in black pulled him back to her side in this vision. The strain of it hurt, like being strapped too tightly into a harness as you jumped out of a plane. It almost winded him. His head slotted back into her hand as he arrived back. Her long, black, claw-like nails almost pierced his skin as he moved towards her. Her skin was ice cold and sent a chill down his spine when he made contact with it. Everything about her seemed to have been designed to make her uncomfortable to be around. Her presence made Donn seem cheerful. Niall could feel her eyes looking down at him, burning a hole in the side of his head. It was like she hated him, without ever having met him before, like she wanted him to suffer for, as far as he could see, no reason.
Her voice ceased to be disembodied as she spoke to him now. Her tone was less aggressive, less hateful. It was like she was only telling him facts. She bent down to his ear, his head unable to turn to face her, and she whispered to him.
“You see Niall, I’m not just any angry spirit with a vendetta against the state of our worlds. I’m the Morrígan, the Celtic Goddess of war and death, and I am not to be trifled with. And you might be wondering, ‘why is she telling me all of this?’ You’ll learn it all soon enough anyway. I just thought that I should be the one to break the news to you about your role in all of this”, her ethereal voice explained.
As he floated in the sky above the vision that she had brought them to, Niall’s skin began to feel cold. Hovering there, above the world of these Celtic gods and goddesses, he felt completely out of his depth, which he felt was understandable. He had just been told that he had the weight of not one, but two worlds on his shoulders. At this rate, he would have preferred to be back with Brigid and Lugh. He just wanted to go back home. The Junior Cert was surely less stressful than all of this.
She started again, “I have a vision for the reshaping of the world, and nothing is going to get in my way, not you, not Brigid, not Lugh or anyone else who would try to stop me! You see, while you may be the key to stopping my plan, you’re also the one that’s going to set it all in motion, and you won’t even realise that you’re doing it. Just now, this little chat we’re having, is setting you on the path that leads us to my utopia.”
“You’re insane!”, he shouted, ripping away from her hand. Niall was now floating above the world with her but by his own volition. He didn’t notice that though, he was busy being shocked by the madness of what this Morrígan was saying. “This is comic book villain stuff you’re talking about! I know the world isn’t ideal, but it can’t be that bad. There are good people there, my family’s there and they’re pretty good. Your world looks pretty great too. There’s magic and gods, enchanted nature and all kinds of stuff that I wish we had. You’re happy to destroy all of that?”, he argued in disbelief at her ideas.
“My world is dying Niall”, she said morosely. “Brigid, Lugh and all of the others can’t see it. They don’t even know that it’s happening. But an Dagda and I…we can see it. We can see that parts of our world are already crumbling. We can see that our seas are drying up. We can see that our forests are dying. We can see that there are no new gods or heroes anymore, no one to pass on power or responsibilities to. Our world is fading away. He says that it’s natural, that all worlds must make way for new ones, and he’s right. I’m not interested in waiting around for it though.”
“We can save them though, surely it’s not too late?” Niall pleaded. “We can-“
“Ciúnas!” she yelled. Her voice became demonic and sounded like more than one voice as she levitated above him. “These worlds we have now are too spoiled for a guardian like me, there’s nothing here for me to protect anymore. But the new world, the one that I can protect, that I can keep safe from the mistakes of our two worlds, that world will stay good.” Her eyes began to glow, and her feathery cape shifted and sprouted a pair of huge black wings. Niall couldn’t reason with her; he could only look on in terror.
“Your people drove us out of the world and made your homes in it. In the new world, that won’t happen again. You were the denizens that took everything from us. Waged war after war until we had to go into hiding and eventually make a new world all our own. I won’t let that happen again”, she promised. Then in the blink of an eye, her wings enveloped her, spun around and a huge black crow flew straight at him. Everything went black.
By Owen Coyne
Taken to the Corner 