The sky over Cluainmór cracks at dawn, splitting
into ribbons of light that fall like molten
glass. The village wakes to find the land itself
altered—fields now bloom with silver flowers,
and the river runs backward. The old well, once
a source of clean water, now bubbles with black
liquid that smells of iron and rot.
The boy, Cian, has no memory of the change. He
only knows that his mother’s hands, once steady,
now tremble when she touches the soil. She
whispers to the earth, as her father did, but
the ground no longer answers.
Cian’s father was a fairy doctor, a healer who
spoke to the unseen. He vanished during the War,
leaving only a journal filled with symbols no
one else could read. Cian finds it beneath the
floorboards, hidden behind a loose stone. The
pages shift when he touches them, rearranging
into new words—Irish, then English, then
something older.
A man arrives in the village, limping, carrying
a satchel of rusted keys. He says his name is
Seán, but the villagers know him as the Man Who
Wasn’t There. He claims to be a witness to a
crime that happened before the war, a crime that
still haunts the land. He asks for shelter, and
Cian’s mother agrees, though her eyes stay fixed
on the horizon.
That night, the man collapses. His skin is cold,
his breath shallow. Cian tries to help, using
the journal’s symbols, but nothing works. The
man’s wounds bleed black, and when Cian presses
his hand to the wound, he sees a vision: a
battlefield, a flag torn in half, a child
screaming.
The next morning, the man is gone. Only a trail
of black mud remains. Cian follows it, deep into
the forest where the trees whisper in a language
that stings his ears. He finds a hollowedout
tree, its roots twisted into a shape that
matches the symbols in the journal. Inside, he
finds a key.
The key fits a lock on the back of the old
church, a place no one has entered since the war.
Inside, the pews are covered in ash, and the
altar holds a single photograph: a man in
uniform, holding a child. Cian recognizes the
man from the vision.
He hears a voice behind him. “You shouldn’t be
here.”
It’s Seán. But his eyes are different now, their
color shifted to something between blue and
green. He says the war isn’t over—it never was.
The land remembers. The dead don’t rest. And
Cian, as a fairy doctor, is now part of the
story.
The next day, the village is empty. All the
adults have left, taking only what they could
carry. Cian stays, because he doesn’t know where
else to go. He opens the journal again, and this
time, the words form a question: What will you
do with the power you’ve found?
The answer, he realizes, is already written in
the land.
