Chapter 2

989 AD

Ireland

Off the coast of Vodii, deep in the forest there lived a pair of mismatched girls in a small hut so well hidden that it hadn't been visited by outsiders in years. Miles from the nearest village or human residence, the old woman that lived on that land cared for the two girls that were not her own. Ester and Aiyanna, born only days apart, never knew a father or mother, only their caretaker. A woman with no history. If Iona once had a husband and children of her own, the girls would never know. In their child minds her life began with them and ended when they parted. She had no village, no clan, no others of her line left. Only the two girls that had been brought to her as babies, taken from their people to be raised in the protection of isolation.

Ester's earliest memories were of this soft woman, with warm knobby hands covered in tiny brown spots. Her hair was always short, cut with the dullest of knives once a month so that the thick strands of her whitish grey hair sat just above her shoulders. Iona was never young in Ester's memory. She was never light on her feet and always walking with a slight hobble. One leg seemingly never at the same length as the other. In the girls' minds, Iona never slept but she also was never tired. Neither of them would ever be able to recall a moment when they were awake that Iona was not. She was watching, listening, on guard for any slight change in their seemingly isolated part of the world. For the first eleven years of their life, neither girl ever saw another living been in the forest other than each other and their protector, Iona. Although they never called her mother, always by her name, Iona was not just a teacher, protector and keeper of the girls. She was and would always be the most intimate maternal energy they would know. Mother in everything but name.

In the first eleven years, the best of their childhood, the two girls were taught everything they would need to know to survive in the world outside their forest. In that short period of their lives, Ester and Aiyanna learned more than some humans did in their entire existence. They were educated in basic survival, the ways of the land and its animals. Which plants they could eat that would provide superior nourishment and which ones, with only touch could make their skin break out in horrible red, itching rashes that would make any person wish to peal the skin from their own bodies. They learned to make rudimentary tinctures and ointments. The girls understood when it was necessary to take an animal's life for nourishment and the most humane way to do so. They were taught how to provide shelter for themselves, anywhere they may be and how to always find clean water, even if it needed to be tapped from the trunks of the Alder trees. But most importantly, both Ester and Aiyanna were educated in ways of their people. Their history, their gifts and the reason, the girls had been brought to heart of the Voddi forest. Iona had no drawn pictures, written down teachings, nothing to illuminate the history she would share. She would leave no trace of what the girls had been taught. Using only her voice, to paint imagines for her girls in the small room of their thatched hut. Her descriptions so vivid, her conviction so intense that her words drew imagines in the girl's minds, conjuring up another world for them made of smoke and air.

The girls' people, the Fae, could be traced back to a time long before the monks landed on their shores, building their monasteries and bringing word of their God. The first Fae were born from many human mothers but only one father. His name was Shamsiel. In the light of day, he would find them lost in the forest. These human women were drawn there inexplicably by some intangible force. It pulled at their eyes and ears, coaxing them to follow, enticing them to pursue their urge until they could deny it no longer. Like ghosts they wandered into woods not knowing where they were going, how far they had traveled or how they would return. Some walked for days, following that illusive pull that called to them as the sweetest of sounds. And when they saw it, the colors of the woodlands splintering into dozens of different shades of greens, yellows and blues they'd never seen before, they knew they were there.

The light that had guided them to that place heightened to such a blaze that it was blinding. Stopping them in their tracks until it dulled to fine point and they could see him at last. And to their unconscious expectations he was more beautiful than anything they could imagine. His hair a burnt burgundy and skin a pale ocher that glowed. Enamored at such opulence, these women were easily seduced, dozens of them lying with him and thereafter producing Halflings.

The first of the Fae children were as inhuman as their father. Their skin the same pale ocher, glowing perhaps not as bright but just as stunning. It was unquestionable that they were not of their earthly fathers. Their features too pristine and their gifts unlike anything the people of that land had seen before. Children of the Fae could seduce any human they chose: their beauty undeniable, their bodies aging at a much slower rate than humans until they stopped aging altogether. Any plant or animal they touched was affected by their presence. Their crops grew healthy each season without disease. They could speak to animals in a way unknown to man, communicating to them in an unspoken language. They became keepers of every inhuman life they touched. Protectors of nature and it's natural balance, in contrast to the lack of their own. The Fae influence on the human body was beyond what even the most advanced future science would be able to explain. There was no wound they couldn't heal. No illness of anatomy they couldn't cast out, save only the illness of their own Fae minds.

The first Fae children were immune to death. They lived forever, breeding amongst the humans and themselves: sons and daughters of Shamsiel making sons and daughters of their own. However not all of their children were created equally. Those that chose to mate with humans diluted their offspring's' bloodlines until their skin was no longer ocher or glowed. Their features and body would age as the years passed until they died from earthly sickness and ailments. These children of repeated couplings with earthly mothers and fathers began to lack the power to heal: man, beast or plant, their influence with animals all but gone. To some, however, it seemed a small price to pay. Those Fae that mated amongst themselves retained their unearthly gifts but at a price. The stronger their lineages' power grew the weaker their minds became. Those that inbred solely amongst themselves developed unseemly features different from the humans or Shamsiel. Their skin no longer incandescent but dulled and eventually scaled. Their limbs curled into their bodies, faces lengthened and features sharpened grotesquely. They were prone to long periods of insanity, paranoid ramblings and cruel thoughts. They started wars amongst themselves and the Halflings driving their species towards the brink of extinction until they were forced into darkness.

The exile of pure Fae bloodlines was not initiated by their Halfling relatives or humans, but instead by a much higher power. One that Iona only spoke of in hushed tones that were almost whispers. As though the mere mentioning of her name, would cause her to appear. In her stories of the fall of the purebloods, she named the great force that came to wash the soils of lands inhabited by those cruel breeds of Fae, clean of their presence.

Dovev was their executioner. It was in the night that she came without warning, bringing a terror with her that no Fae had ever seen. The Seeing Soldiers, her instruments of death, spread out like a vast ominous albugineous shield. Cloaked in white, these minions moved without sound. Seamlessly coordinating, always knowing where their prey lay. They carried with them inhuman weapons, casted from the heavens. Eviscerating any full blooded Fae they encountered along the way.

The Seeing Soldiers slew the clans of pure-bred Fae, forcing those few that survived to flee into exile. But even there, they couldn't escape being hunted to their ends. Appointed by both good and evil, Dovev was neither Fae nor God but instead something entirely different and far more powerful than anything their people had ever known. With her genocide of the Fae purists, this Watcher of supernatural creatures imposed her decree that they, the Fae were no longer allowed to breed within their own communities. They would be forced to mate only within the human population. Losing the strength of their gifts with each new generation or risk Dovev's wrath, with the punishment of death.

Few that survived were foolish enough to tempt her laws. Feared by all things unnatural on this earth, Dovev ruled without mercy and killed without remorse. For these species, the unearthly, those who were not fully human, she was their God. Dovev, their final judge and jury. Sending them without remorse to a dark, cold place in the ground. Devoid of any afterlife.

The purge was not Dovev's first encounter with the Fae people, nor would it be the last. But instead it would mark a turning point in their specie's history. Those who complied and reproduced with their human counterparts were spared. But only for a short period of time before they too were hunted almost to extinction. Only this time it was the humans that came in night, pitch forks and fire ablaze, screaming of evil. What work Dovev hadn't finished, the humans were all too eager to complete. And on rare occasions, when temerarious behavior warranted it, the Seeing Soldiers.

Clans were separated, sought out and slaughtered out of fear spread by human paranoia and lies. Many Fae that still possessed gifts within their bloodlines stopped practicing and teaching their daughters the gifts of Shamsiel. Sons however, were almost always safe. As they lacked all ability to manifest their unearthly gifts. Only males born of the rare remaining, inbred full blooded Fae parents could tap into their ancient power. But by Iona's time, true male Fae were not only rare but considered extinct.

In all their time in the forest, only Aiyanna ever showed any Fae abilities. The older they grew, the more potent Aiyanna's craft evolved to become. And although not surprising to Iona, it's confirmatory nature only made the certainty of Esther's future all that more difficult to acknowledge. Ester, although Fae by blood had come from a long time of women that had mated with the gifted Fae men but never produced capable girls. Their kind had a word in their secret language for offspring that couldn't manifest. As the girls would someday come to understand, all creatures did. There would always be a classification of some type, for those of every species that were not neither Halfings or human. The Fae called them Folamh. Fae by bloodline alone, but really nothing but an empty human vessel.

Often cast out from their kind, the Folamh were seen as a curse. There powers unable to manifest regardless of their lineage. Those that would be classified as Folamh were neither Fae nor human. They hovered instead on the outskirts of the last existing clans. Most of their kind were slaves to the Fae. Submitting to a life of servitude through generations as they knew nothing different and were taught to fear living among humans. Often Folamh's acted as intermediaries between their Master's and the human world. Helping to keep the living Fae hidden and removed from any direct outside interaction with any but their own.

In their small corner of the world, however, the girls weren't aware of any class distinction between them. Aiyanna understood that Ester was different from her and Iona but was taught that she was Fae all the same. Although Iona explained the difference in their gifts by using the term Folamh, she never taught the connotation that was associated. Rather, she raised the mismatched pair to believe that they were different but equal. Only Aiyanna was told in sparse detail while Ester slept, her purpose and the real reason why the girls had been given to Iona to raise. As a true Fae, it was Aiyanna's responsibility to protect Ester. To watch over her friend, to love her and keep her from harm until Ester's time had come. The particulars of Ester's purpose, was always kept rather ambiguous to Aiyanna. All she knew was there was a chance Ester could be important to the Fae. She might possess something that they would need. Something that was secret and not quite known. Rather a rumor that could be true of a few select generational Folamh. If the whispers were correct, there was a chance, Ester would give their kind something that could possibly save them from destruction. And if not her, then perhaps Ester's child, or another down the line. Some Folamh, somewhere, in the few remaining tribes that still existed, could be the answer to their exile.

The girls were linked together in a fated partnership. One of many that had happened over generations as the Fae waited for the promise they'd been given long ago. A chance at survival. An opportunity to bargain their fate with Dovev, could be born. But at their age, a promise, so obscure was too difficult to explain in any great detail. And it was the girls' love for one another, their partnership that would sustain them through the changes that would come. In Iona's mind, she knew when the time came for Aiyanna to bring Ester back to their people, she'd trained the girl to do so without hesitation. In her heart, she hoped, she'd fostered enough belief in their cause, that Aiyanna would be able to forgive herself when she discovered the why of it all. Even if Aiyanna had no true understanding of Ester's potential gift and her inevitable early death, Iona had to hope, the Fae girl she had raised would be able to make peace with the outcome. For Ester was never truly Fae but her life was tied to the service of the clan. The birth and her death, if she was the one, would be the thing that could buy their eternal protection from the Seeing Soldiers. It could give them license to grow again and breed freely without fear of consequence. Ensuring that their kind did not become extinct. Yes, Iona knew Ester's life would be short. And perhaps that is why she was so kind to the girl and treated her unlike an outcast. She wouldn't be long in their world and she'd suffer greatly, but for a short while she'd be loved. Ester would be protected and cherished. Raised to know she was different but not alone. She would know if and when her time came that she too had once been loved. Until then, Iona believed she could keep the girls safe from anything that would threaten to unravel the Clan's sincerest hope. Their illusion however, that feeling of invisibility Iona and the girls lived with in blissful naivety, would be shattered quickly without warning. Iona would spend her life in vain, preparing the girls for the time when their people would come to peacefully collect Ester. For when the clan did come, they'd find nothing but the bones of Iona's corpse. Picked clean by the animals and elements over time. The small hut where the girls had been deposited as babies into Iona's care, a ring of charred dust. Plants peaking their way through the burned remains, enveloping their once cherished home back into the earth from which it was made.

They came in the night, as most all nightmares do. Humans slithering through the woods like snakes in grass. With their torches lit and crosses barred the men of the church herded towards that forgotten home, nestled in the forest bearing nothing but ill will for its inhabitants. Fast asleep, the girls were roughly shaken awake by those same gnarled warm hands they had always known.

"Up girls… Up!" Iona whispered. The fire light flickered across her face, exposing a grave expression poisoned with fear.

"They have come…." Pulling the girls from their beds, she quickly tried to help them dress and hushed their questions, repeatedly warning them to keep quiet. Gathering them close, she pushed the hair from their eyes and kissed the tear stained cheeks. "They mean to harm us. Simpleminded, superstitious humans," she spat, "They will kill you if they can. So, you must leave-" she started as the girl tried to whisper to her their protests.

Covering their mouths, she kissed their cheeks once more, attempting to temper their fears. "We will see each other again soon. I promise…." She looked to them in their vast confusion and waited for some sign of acknowledgement.

"You will go into the woods," she continued, her voice wavering as she tried to hold the girl's attention. The next few moments were precious and not a time for tears. "Remember the things I taught you, yes? You will be safe there, I promise. When it is time, you come back," she whispered between them as she brought both girls into a tight embrace. With each second that passed the sounds of the men nearing grew louder until they were no longer the symphony of crackling torches, snapping twigs and low murmurs threatening them but now individual voices and words.

Wrapping Ester and Aiyanna in blankets, Iona continued to hold them close as she uncovered the window. Looking out into the night, past the men's lit torches she called upon the creatures of forest that she had fed, cared for and healed. Hoping that the favor would be returned, she waited patiently for an answer even as the men of the church were bearing down upon their door.

Her faith in the wolves was not in vain.

One by one in the darkness they appeared: dozens of yellow eyes glowing sinister in the night. What the girls couldn't see they heard. The baritone harmony of visceral growls echoing through the blackness, calling out in warning before they attacked. The monks waved their wooden lanterns in the obsidian around them, searching for the source of these threats only to find nothing staring back. The wolves artfully dodging detection, stepping just outside their pool of light.

"Where are they?!" One called out, circling with his torch, waving it wildly as his weapon of choice.

"Stop this thaumaturgy old woman!" Another screamed, turning around to find Iona watching them as they panicked. Like a pack of crazed crows, the monks huddled together, squawking at one another in horror. Paranoid, the murder peered out into the night searching for the beast that toyed with them.

"Iona?" Aiyanna pulled at her, drawing her attention from the window.

"Shh... it will be over soon," she promised kissing her hand.

And so, it began. The monks' screams echoing through the dark as the wolves emerged from the forests one by one, teeth bared, jaws snapping. They ascended upon the murder of holy men with only their torches and metal crosses for protection. Iona seized the opportunity for the girls. Opening the door to their hut, she attempted to draw the girls' gaze from the skirmish between the men and the wolves. To keep them from delaying themselves from running, for even a moment.

"You will look out for one another; love each other as I loved you." She told them more than asked, as they both shook their heads in terror and confusion. Grabbing Aiyanna's face, she looked her girl straight in the eye, in their last moments together, "You remember our purpose?" Aiyanna's eyes filled with tears as the old woman's fingers dug into her jaw, painful in their desperation, "Do not forget it. Do not forget who we are," She demanded one last time before she pushed the girls from her, commanding they run.

Confused, Ester and Aiyanna stumbled forward, catching glimpses and hearing shouts of the battle between beast and men at their backs. In the midst of the chaos, it was shocking to see that there were other people in their world beyond just the three of them. So much so that both girls felt a strange desire to stop and stare. The curiosity almost overtaking them. They had never seen men before. And strange creatures they were. Contorted shadowed faces waging war on the wolves the girls knew so fondly. The experience would make a lasting impression upon them both of the opposite sex.

"Run!" Iona yelled, as two monks broke away and began stumbling after them. Snapped out of their daze and whatever hesitation they had the girls did as they were told. Their young legs carrying them through the dense brush. The last glimpse Aiyanna and Ester had of Iona was her being beaten down by one of the holy men.

To the girls, Iona simply disappeared never to be seen again. They never saw her drug scrapping and clawing from that land she'd lived on for so many years. They would not witness her torture and seemingly endless questioning as to where the girls had fled. Nor would they know that she was burned alive, outside the monastery for necromancy. In their ignorance, the men of the church accused her of being a witch, a conjurer but perhaps that was just what they had told the people of village as justification for her eradication.

Iona was never a witch, although she was fully human either. She was Fae. The church, however was never nuanced enough to make or understand those distinctions. To their "Holy" church, Iona and her girls were nephilims. A broad term used for all species of half breeds that were not entirely human but byproducts of unholy couplings between God's creations and the angels of The Watch, long ago.

The girls wandered in the forest, living off the land for two days. Huddled together at night, wrapped as one, face to face in their blankets they would cry for Iona. Wondering where she was and when they would see her again. For comfort they appealed to their God for her mercy, letting their prayers sooth them both to sleep with the hope that they would be answered.

In her ad hoc haste Iona hadn't given clear instructions as to where they were to survive. The how, they understood, the why was now Aiyanna's responsibility. But where were they to go in the forest to begin again? Like homing pigeons, they circled in the woods until they could stay away no longer. When they finally did return to that place they had known so well, their childhood home days later, they found it abandoned. Blood was scattered across the moss-covered ground that surrounded their hut. But there were no bodies to be found of wolf or man. Everything had been ransacked, things tossed about, belongings that had once meant something scattered. Iona was nowhere to be found but the girls were not alone. Waiting for them was a man; one dressed much the same as the others that had come for them days before.

Hesitant, the girls jumped as he stepped into the small hut where they stood bewildered and lost. "Hello," he began, hand out trying to placate them both. "Do not be afraid. I will not harm you," not directly anyhow. He was a monk from the monastery but not one who had come with the same intentions as the men before. He never gave the girls his name. He never answered their questions about Iona. He simply led them from the only childhood home they would ever know, taking them to place where he deemed, they would be safe. He could have returned them to the monastery and allowed the girls to succumb to the same fate as Iona but he wasn't of the same creed as those from the monastery. He was a man of the church but he was also a man of Ireland. Raised on stories of the Fae, he hardly believed them to be real but decided even if they were, he couldn't justify in his mind the slaughtering of two innocent girls. So instead of offering them up as sacrifices to the Great Purge he took them from Vodii to Ebla, a small village not far from Liatháin. There, they were given to a woman. The girls knew it was a mistake to leave the forest. They knew they should have stayed as Iona would have wanted. How would the Fae be able to find them now? How would they know where they had gone? Both had tried to fight the well-intended monk. They tried to run, more than once before they arrived at Ebla. But they were never able to succeed. One of them always within the holy man's grasp, as he reminded them that they were not safe. That even if they succeeded and didn't go with him, they would be found again by the church and not be treated with his same kindness. While in Elba, Aiyanna hardly slept. Days and nights as the girls worked in the woman's home, serving her family, Aiyanna thought of nothing but their escape. She had made Iona a promise. She had a purpose, to protect Ester. But more importantly to be there with her friend, when their people returned for them both. As weeks passed to months and months to years, she attempted to flee with Ester many times, but was never successful. Their captors, wise enough to rarely allow the girls to be alone together, knew that one could not leave without the other. They used their love for each other to keep them. As the years came and went, the two were passed from that home to one other. Their final place of residence could hardly be called a home. Out of desperation for coin, their second family sold both girls to a trader- a peddler, who worked in the markets of Cork. They were with that decrepit old man for only a short period before they were sold for the final time in market, to a group of Vikings returning to Normannaland.

How far the two girls had come from warm hands and soft words in that hut nestled in the forests of Vodii to a land across the ocean. They were spared from men doing God's work only to be sold into slavery. It seemed the God of those monasteries, of the Roman's was different from Iona's. For theirs ruled from hatred and punishment. In the eyes of the church or rather from the mouths of its men, all those that were not human, Christian and men, were to be punished by nature. For that was the will of God. But how could a God that would creature such beings as the Fae, allow such life, hate it as they proclaimed? How could a God that made women, value them so little as the church seemed to think? Their God was nothing like Iona's, the only one the girls would know. For her God knew who they were. She loved the Fae, their people and those girls as She loved any other creation. The Gods of men would come and go in their lifetime. Ester and Aiyanna would learn of many but they would know the truth of only one. The God of their childhood, the Fae's God. Iona's God and theirs as well.