End of the World (Champion of the Sidhe urban fantasy series) (4 page)

“All-Mother…” he breathed. The dread stabbed him like a knife to the heart. Danu was in peril. And so were the Mounds.

Jhaer raised his hands, fingers curled as if clutching something invisible. The cacophony from the crumbling rock slowed to the rumbling roll of distant thunder. The ceiling caved in elsewhere, the echoes reached them across the expanse of the Mounds, but Jhaer’s mastery held the rock above them together. The Unseelie trembled with great personal strain. Sweat beaded along his skin and made his black hair glisten.

“Help Danu! NOW! I can’t… hold it up… much longer!”

Cursing the magic that prevented him from teleporting, Lugh found his feet before Jhaer finished speaking. The rock wall Jhaer erected before the castle broke into chunks that slumped without Jhaer’s will binding its shape. Lugh bound over the debris and raced into the castle, even as all others scrambled to flee it. He dodged great chunks of falling plaster as it crashed from the buttresses arching high above the rotunda and grand staircase. The rubble shattered on the marble stairs. Plaster dust floated on the air currents like mist as Lugh cut through. Screams echoed from everywhere. Lesser fey scrambled to and fro, but Lugh paid no heed to any of them. He saw no Sidhe. Not one.

Heart pounding, he used the handrail to catapult himself as he raced up the long, curving stairwell to the second level. No one need tell him where to find the All-Mother. All fey connected to the Mounds possessed a sense of her. No guards manned the watch outside the throne chamber. No bodies strewn about to explain their absence. No blood. No dropped weapons. Fear for friends and lovers kindled behind the greater dread that brought him to a sliding stop on the dust-covered floor just inside the chamber.

In the center of the oval chamber… a lone woman curled onto her side on the floor. The fine layer of debris dulled the shine of the blond hair draped about her. Her slender back, decorated with premium fey brocade and lace, faced him. Like a finely crafted statue, she remained stone still. Unalive.

“No,” Lugh exhaled. Utter shock drained the strength right out of him. His spear clattered to the floor with hardly a notice that he’d dropped it. If not for the quake that pitched the building and lurched him forward, he might not ever have broken the paralysis of shock. “Danu…”

Lugh scrambled forward as the very world gave a shudder. The Mounds were crumbling. Dying.

As the All-Mother was dying.

Lugh gathered the tall, thin frame of the Sidhe All-Mother into his arms, rolling her body as he lifted. The handle of a silver dagger gleamed, driven to the decorative hilt in the very heart of Danu. Twice again as ancient as Lugh, Danu’s delicate beauty remained unchanged from the innocence of grace she possessed at seventeen. Not even the pallor of bloodlessness could rob her of her Sidhe perfection.

The Creatix of the Mounds… The All-Mother of the Tuatha de Dannan… The people of Danu… The Sidhe… The single unbreakable tie binding together all magic in this fey realm…

Stabbed in the heart.

“No!” Lugh rose to his feet even as the light and illusions beyond the balcony flickered and crashed down from the sky. Her hair and the drape of her long skirt spilled from Lugh’s arms and reached the floor. Embracing her limp body tight to him, Lugh rushed to the back of the throne room, to the great crystal globe balanced on a pedestal and throbbing with centuries of magicraft. Lugh kicked the globe, driving it from the pedestal. It crashed down onto the floor and shattered into flakes of enchantment like a pile of snow. The barrier against Glamour and teleportation disintegrated.

Jhaer’s strength finally faltered. The precious minutes the Unseelie bought Lugh were spent. A great crack and rumble shook the building as the ceiling of the Mounds gave way to the tons of rocks and earth above. It hit the rotunda, which stalled its descent only a fraction of a second. The Mounds came down with crushing force just as Lugh teleported Danu away.

Chapter Two

The only way to preserve what might yet survive of the crumbling Mounds was to save Danu. Lugh knew this as certainly as he knew his sole purpose now was to save her, their home and their people. The magic of his teleportation brought Lugh to the grand receiving hall of Danu’s temple in the heart of Ireland. Far above the Mounds secreted below the ground.

“Assist me!” Lugh bellowed, his voice echoing into the temple and bringing an immediate rush of lesser fey servants, mostly Brownies and fairies from the look of them. Over the screams and weeping at the sight of their mistress’ bloody body, one Scribe urged Lugh to convey the All-Mother to her chamber. The room turned out not to be a bedroom as he anticipated, but a private magicraft workshop. Lugh arranged Danu upon the altar, the knife handle rising like a beacon of death from her chest. The silver would slowly poison her, but if he pulled out the blade unprepared, she would bleed out in seconds.

“The Mounds are crumbling. We must act with swift diligence.” Lugh pressed a hand against the wound on her cooling, blood-soaked chest.

The Scribe touched the All-Mother’s neck and then met Lugh’s eyes. As lesser fey went, Scribes always had the tendency to appear grave in expression. Large eyes that perpetually worried. Thin, short bodies hedging on underfed and spindly. Pasty, green-tinged skin on faces that rarely left the library or archive long enough to have a passing familiarity with sunlight. Even for a Scribe, this one’s mournful expression spoke volumes.

Growling, Lugh shouted, “She has lived many thousands of years. No mere blade shall be the death of her! Fetch a healer!”

“There is nothing to be done,” the Scribe whispered.

Lugh reached across Danu’s body and snatched the Scribe by the front of his pressed white shirt, staining it with blood. “You lie! Bring the healer!”

“I am the healer, Sire.” The Scribe covered Lugh’s hand with both of his, not to pry but to let the magic flow from his fingertips and prove his credentials. Lugh snatched back his hand as all evidence confirmed the Scribe’s claims.

“She can’t be dead.” Lugh stumbled back from the altar, his arms held away from his body, now uselessly holding nothing. The All-Mother’s blood soaked his clothing and dripped from his fingertips. The horror-shock numbed him like an unexpected punch as he staggered back from her lifeless body. Lugh walked, then jogged, then ran to the portico that overlooked the hills that gave the Mounds their name. Two great hills should have risen before him as high as the hill where Danu’s temple perched. Through magic, the entirety of the expanse of the Mounds existed within the belly of those two hills.

The hills beneath which the Mounds were buried crumbled in on themselves. Deflated as the hollow caverns beneath lost stability. A cloud of dust and debris billowed out as the hills sunk down, turning instead into a crater.

Lugh gaped at it, dumbfounded. The other fey about him wept and screamed in their terror.

Homes… Family… Friends… Lives… Culture… History…

Everything…

Lost…

Just… Just…

Gone.

Lugh dropped to his knees. The strength drained from his arms and they slumped to his thighs. The lesser fey wept about him, but Lugh could not even reach past the shock to begin to comprehend grief. Pain, though… Pain cut right through him. His heart ached as if the silver dagger had been planted in his chest, rather than in the All-Mother’s. His head dropped back as his pain screamed out to the heavens above. The magic bond to the All-Mother, and to the magic of the Mounds, severed like a dirk sliced through it. Lugh clutched at his heart. Everything he was, was linked to the Mounds, to the magic, to his people.

The world had ended. And he, the Champion of the Sidhe, hadn’t been able to save it.

Chapter Three

How exactly the world could come to an end and life go on, Lugh didn’t know. He felt like a sleepwalker. He’d bathed and changed from his bloodied clothing, as he’d done after hundreds of battles before. The routine carried him through where thoughts failed him. The lesser fey handled the preparations for the corpse. Lugh oversaw, more to have another Sidhe present rather than to truly assist. The All-Mother deserved so much more, but Lugh had nothing left to give.

Her body was cleaned and dressed in glittering white. Her gloved hands were joined together over her stomach, holding the hilt of the silver dagger that slew her. The blade rested between her breasts. The silver did not touch the skin and so would not damage the body further. Danu would not decay. She would just slowly fade away.

All fey were partially physical and partially magic. Without the constant and renewing breath of magic coming into her, Danu would eventually become less corporeal, becoming as a ghost until finally she vanished into nothingness.

Lugh helped to lift the glass cover into place over the velvet pallet that served as the All-Mother’s final bed. His tears finally began their silent spill to burn down his cheeks as the procession began into the undercroft deep beneath the temple. The fey scattered a carpet of flowers before them. Fairy lights twinkled in the dark passageway to the deepest chamber, haphazardly strung along the route at irregular heights. A few of the dwarves had carved a fine stone pedestal for the glass casket to rest upon. Lugh ensured its perfect alignment before setting down the burden.

He knelt before the All-Mother, in her final slumber. His forehead rested against the glass side. Eyes closed.

All of the fey would Fade now, as the All-Mother’s body did. Mourning her, he mourned his people, his home, his own life. Time would not extend before him endlessly, as it always had in the past. Without Danu, there were no Mounds. Without the Mounds, there was no source of fey magic. The flow and renewal of the magic that fed into each fey and powered their magic came from the Mounds.

“Why would anyone do this? Did they not know?”

A hand softly rested upon his shoulder. Lugh ignored it. Only when the hand squeezed did he finally lift his gaze.

The Scribe offered him a sorrowful smile. During the preparations someone spoke the Scribe’s name. Lugh searched his emotion-torn memory. Willem. The Scribe’s name was Willem.

“All may not be lost, Champion.” Willem nodded meaningfully across the chamber. All of the other fey had wandered away, dealing with grief in their own ways. The loss of the All-Mother devastated. More than just this, though, all lost family and friends in the collapse as well.

The fairy lights barely illuminated the mural on the wall that the Scribe indicated. Lugh rose and crossed before the faded images. His skin began to glow with the warmth of predawn, filling the chamber with enough light to see by.

“What is this?” He studied the circle drawn around the figure of the All-Mother. She appeared to be floating in the air. Small objects circled her.

“It depicts the story of how Danu created the Mounds.”

Lugh snapped his head sharply toward Willem, his slightly pointed elfin ears prickling he listened with such intensity. “Continue. Tell your tale, Scribe.”

“Few survived the collapse of the First Fey realm. The realm from which all fey creatures first arose. Unlike the Mounds, it was a true and separate realm of existence. Danu was one of the Sidhe who escaped. It was not long before the Fade began to set in.”

Lugh knew this much. And knew they faced the same peril now.

“She gathered together artifacts that survived the collapse. Items that were imprinted with the magic signature of the first realm.” Willem brushed his hand reverently across the image on the wall, painted with the practiced and skilled hand of a master fey artist. “She used them to create a surrogate realm, the Mounds, in a pocket of magic beneath the earth.”

“Like a womb,” Lugh agreed. Which was how the Sidhe whose focus of magic was procreation would manifest such a realm. “As she was the Creatrix of the realm, and tied to it, all who linked to the Mounds became tied to her. Becoming as her children.” Lugh moved closer to the images. “Do these artifacts still exist? Could this magicraft be performed once more?”

Next to Lugh, who towered well over six feet in height, the Scribe’s four-and-three-quarters feet seemed even more diminutive. With Lugh’s inquiry put to him, Willem fidgeted, scratching at his pointed ear. “The All-Mother left a journal, which we of her order have studied in as great a detail as we are capable of. There are unclear passages, which might become clear once the artifacts are collected. The artifacts she used were consumed in the creation of the Mounds. However, others still exist. Lost. Hidden. Stolen. Passed down from father to son. Put away and forgotten like all other bits and bobs. Their importance forgotten as they became misplaced.”

“Then how might we discover them?”

“There are ways.”

The faint ray of hope broke through the black depths of defeat and death, no matter how slim the chance or how impossible the task. Lugh leveled the full force of his determination at the Scribe. “Then let us begin anew.”

###

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Champion of the Fey

The enchanted gold dust spiraled in a vortex as if a miniature tornado spun within the vial. The glass container itself was not much longer or wider than Lugh’s index finger. Magic twinkled off the dust, as though chips of stars mixed with the gold.

Lugh glanced up from the vial to the row of terraced houses. They had the architectural appeal of bay windows and artistic brickwork. Even still, this neighborhood in Bristol appeared unremarkable compared to most other modern, middle class neighborhoods in England. If not for the reaction of the gold dust in the vial, Lugh would not have guessed that one of the artifacts might have found its way to such an unassuming place. Somewhere in the heart of this mundane humanity, seemingly devoid of even the faintest spark of magic, lay a fragment of the ancient realm of fey.

Even this bit of magic in his hand, this vial of enchantment, seemed ridiculously insignificant in the hands of a Sidhe. And yet held within its simple magicraft it harbored the fragile hope that might save what little survived of the fey. The notion was laughable. The likelihood of success so slim as to be the width of a fairy’s eyelash from total impossibility. Fool’s errand this might be, what else had he? Accept defeat and surrender to the Fade with noble stoicism?

For most of the morning, Lugh watched the house from his perch on the top of a stone garden wall just across the narrow lane. Secure in the belief that his Glamour rendered him invisible to the eyes of mortals, Lugh debated his options. Direct assault? Not his usual strategy, but not beneath him, either. The double-paned, wood-framed windows likely would shatter beneath a precise kick. Then there was the consideration of someone summoning the constables and that was always a needless hassle.

Without having seen inside the building, Lugh could not merely teleport into the house. How ignoble of him to contemplate peeping through the window like a tomcat. Still, if it brought him the prize he sought, then nicety must give way to necessity.

As Lugh debated his options, a young blonde woman emerged from the house. Her loose hair fell in unkempt locks down her back and shoulders. The patchwork peasant skirt flattered her lovely, long legs. The skirt had a gypsy look to it, as did the odd choices of tops. The long, pale blue sleeves flared around delicate forearms, and a dark, tight-fitting top covered it, so the elbow-length sleeves contoured to her thin arms and the feminine curves of her chest.

A seductive grin tugged at his lips. Now charming beautiful women was one of his specialties.

The woman scanned the street with a cursory glance. Lugh remained perfectly still. As her gaze flicked by him he thought, for almost a fraction of a second, she made eye contact.

No mundane human possessed the magic to detect him. And yet her eyes met his. Of this he felt certain.

She flipped her hair back over her shoulder and strolled at a good pace away from him. Lugh dropped down off the garden wall to trail her, his Glamour still tight to him. Her skirt swished in the most fascinating way as it brushed against the maiden’s lovely bum. With casual curiosity, Lugh studied the movement of the cloth as he strolled along behind her, learning the shape of her with each whispered hint of the fabric, a rounded handful that promised a soft surrender.

With each step her skirt swished, giving an impression of the way her hips flared from her narrow waist. The dressmakers of the Seelie Court would encase a figure like hers in lengths of satin that glinted in the light as it drew the eye reverently over every feminine secret. The ladies of the court rarely bothered with a corset, as Sidhe beauty required no augmentation. This woman was no Sidhe, but truly compared to many of the other fair races of fey.

Thinking of the ladies of the court brought back the visions so familiar to him that he could recall every detail perfectly. Rhiannon’s dark grace. Leannan’s shy poise. Kaitlin’s perchance for mischief. Melancholy threatened, as memories stirred of Sidhe lovers who surely perished in the Collapse of the Mounds. Depression would only serve to quicken the Fade. Only after he accomplished his mission to restore the power of the fey would he indulge in bittersweet mourning.

Returning to the lovely distraction before him, Lugh firmly silenced that part of his mind for now. Rather, he surrendered to the legionary appreciation of beauty that had his friends teasingly suggesting that his nickname should be changed from The Shining One to The Cad.

He trailed her a mere few blocks before the road ended, spilling into a more populated boulevard lined with shops, cafes, and autos. The Glamour cloaked Lugh in invisibility but did not render him incorporeal. With the grace of the fey as brilliant to witness in dance as in battle, Lugh wove between the passersby without brushing against them. His height, well over six feet, enabled him to keep sight of his quarry.

The woman slowed as she approached the display carts of a flower vender that impinged upon the walkway. Lugh’s strides shortened as he watched her maneuver around the wooden pushcart. A brightly colored canvas created a shading roof suspended above the cart by planks rising from either side of the platform. The effect was of that of a window. The woman turned to examine the flowers, so she faced Lugh. The cart’s design created a frame around her, a suspended bed of flowers between them. As Lugh crossed to stand on the other side of the cart, the woman paused.

Slowly, her eyes lifted from the flowers. Even though the Glamour should have shielded him completely, making him invisible to her, the woman’s gaze lifted. To his chest. Then higher. Until, at last, her winter blue eyes found his.

There was no mistaking the impact of her intake of breath. “You see me,” Lugh’s resonant voice murmured, so no other than the woman could hear him.

###

~We hope you enjoyed the sample of~

Champion of the Fey

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Glossary and Name Pronunciation Guide

Sidhe names and their pronunciations

Aoife:
pronounced ‘A-oaf-E’

Danu:
pronounced ‘Dan-oo’

Jhaer:
pronounced ‘Ja-hair’

Lugh:
pronounced ‘Loo’

Leannan:
pronounced ‘Lee-an-nan’

Manannan:
pronounced ‘Ma-nan-an’

Tethor:
pronounced ‘Tee-thor’

Glossary

All-Mother:
A title given to Danu respectfully acknowledging her connection to all fey connected to the Mounds.

Beltaine:
Pronounced ‘Bell-tane’. Celtic festival celebrated on the first day of May, and marks the beginning of summer.