Author's Note: This story was inspired by Brave, though you will see little relation between the movie and the story. Even though the movie is a hodgepodge of several centuries of Scottish History (I only know that thanks to my sisters' half hour rant on it) it captivated me and I wanted to explore it more. This story will be the same hodgepodge, with some items from the modern era within it, healthy doses of fantasy, some sci-fi and a big dollop of imagination.

The story doesn't focus on Shepard and Garrus exclusively. You will see other couples, some original characters. If you don't like same-sex couples or sex scenes, other scenes as real as possible, then this isn't the story for you. If you're like my sister and want a historically accurate story, then this definitely isn't for you.

In the end, I hope you enjoy it. This is the first story I hope to complete, and do a sequel for. It's been a long time since I've been motivated to write, my style is rusty and I tend to ramble a la Tolkien.

Constructive criticism is welcome to help me grow.

So we will open with a prologue and the beginning of a legend…

Authors Note II: Stuck at work during Hurricane Sandy and it's terribly slooow so I've gone back and added some to the story. Hope it helps with the story and explaining some things that will come later.

Spiorad Foraois

Prologue – Giant's Teeth

By Claret Amazon

c. AD 214

Usually these stories started with a dark and stormy night. Wild thunder and the blinding strikes of lightning spearing through the coursing cold ran. Wind that lashed the leafless tree branches into clawing hands, moaning through the crags like shrill screams of the dead. They came in these stories to murder and maim, to pillage and rape. Monsters all of them with thick furs, beady eyes, swords like dragons teeth and spitting fire. Chaos was left in their wake, nurtured by tears of sorrow and the shock of brutality.

Reality was far different. Armies marched under cloudless skies, blood spilled on fresh spring grass. There was still maiming, pillaging and rape, yet like death, such things never waited for the proper setting or time.

And wars, or a collision of people, could be started by a seemingly innocent action in the wrong place and time.

That's where this story begins.

The place of her choosing was deep in the forests where mist was constant and little light pierced the thick canopy in the height of summer. It was a circle of stones that stood twice, thrice, as high as the tallest man, carved thick and rough. Their bases were plunged into the moist earth with little care like dice from the hands of a drunken man. None but she dared go near the Giant's Teeth, for many legends rang out of dangerous spirits in the standing stones' shadows.

Every legend was different, every person's reaction to their magic just different enough. Some spoke of large beasts with eyes like fire, others of azure water spirits wreathed in blue flame. In such an age when the corners of the maps had not been filled in and vast water was filled with monsters that ate ships, those that lived near the Giant's Teeth avoided them. To trespass there was to be cursed.

The enchantress feared not the old legends. Here was the strongest magicks, useful in the spell she wished to cast. Her Queen desired the potent spells of luck for their men leaving for war. A chase across water and land to the home of those that had invaded the Lowlands of her Caledonia. The spell was weaved with the motion of her hands, the song of her voice. Try as she might, sadistic glee could not be kept from tainting her magick. These invaders would finally pay for their transactions.

As she spun her spell, the shadows danced. A voice mirrored her own, deep and primal, words unlike any language they had. The pulse of her dance began to match that whisper, tearing at the borders of her world. Her feet fell faster on the sod, crushing what little grass thrived as their voices reached crescendo in unison, heart beating faster and faster and breath aching in her lungs. The power tasted like freedom, her soul free from its mortal prison.

Air flickered in purple tones, glimpses of an alien world peeking into hers as the strands of power from both sides reached for each other. They brushed, caressed against each other. Wisps sought purchase in the material worlds to lace together like a bridge over the cold gap of nothingness between soils.

This nothingness was the source of magick for every layer of the realms, for from the darkness was born the elements, the Spirits and other creatures. It belonged to no one world, and no world belonged to it. The void had been there before Humans, before the others, and would remain long after their existence became a fogged memory.

Each plane fought against the other, unwilling to be brought together. A snap resounded through the emptiness and the friction recoiled in a wave down the conduits, seeking the ones that tore the fabric of the worlds. It found the pathways and tore through them with the last breaths of their work.

The final beat of her spell brought a strike of pain ripping through her body. The witch fell to her knees, panting as she clutched her stomach. The passing agony was a memory now yet her eyes still watered in pain and worry. Her palms rubbed over the swell of her stomach, looking for a sign of life from her babe. A small push against those questing fingers, the flare of her soul-light, eased the mother's worry. Her magicks would have to cease now lest harm come to her daughter.

She pushed herself to her feet, hands unwilling to leave her stomach for too long now. The incantation was fading from the air, no sign of the merging to be seen. Duty done, Hannah left the circle to report to her Queen and rest.

Had she had looked back she would have seen the faint tear by one of the stones, rimmed purple and pulsing with light.

If she saw it and peeked through she would see a creature of living armor, swollen also with child, limping away from a similar set of standing stones.

As years passed that tear would grow and grow until Caledonia would be changed forever. For now it was only a seed, a beginning of a collision of more than just two worlds and two souls.