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The normally jovial halls of the goddess Flidais’s sylvan palace are cloying as Aoife seeks its mistress in the early hours of the morning. Cool light and bad dreams having roused Aoife from slumber, only to the find the palace empty, and its lights darkened. No revellers wander its mossy byways singing drunkenly, the palace’s tapestries instead cast dark by long shadows. Only echoes of the laughter that so frequently lives here in its wooden annexes and cloisters. The jangle of bone, human and animal both, strung high from rafters and along passageways like wind chimes, the only sound that rings here today. Followed by whistling wind howling down empty corridors.
Even the pad of Aoife’s booted feet echoes loud in the emptiness strung through the halls as she follows a weak glimmer of light emanating from Flidais’s throne room. Aoife shields her eyes against the sudden brightness of the scrying portal before which Flidais stands, the goddess cast in sharp shadow against the scene playing out within. Aoife blinks away the spots still in her eyes as she lowers her hand.
The goddess subdued, cast in winter shades: pale white hair hung limp against a raiment of burnt black bark and mottled gray beechskin wrapped in longs strips around her ribcage like exposed bone. The whole of her strung with ragged, mossy falls of old man’s beard intertwined with sprigs of lily of the valley.
If Flidais is aware Aoife’s in the room, she makes no sign. Maol, Flidais’s constant companion, too, ignorant of her presence: the mountain-sized white cow snoring like an earthquake on the other side of the immense chamber; bovine shoulders rising and falling like high hillocks.
Aoife ventures closer, looking over Flidais’ shoulder at what lights this hall:
Flidais is rapt watching a tall well-muscled man, pale as the moonlight that holds him tender as a lover in its glow. His near-constant companion, the golden-skinned woman as tall as he is, absent in whatever time Flidais has called up. Tír na nÓg unbound from mortal temporality, Aoife having seen past and future both reflected in those portals – though Flidais has been careful enough never to show Aoife her own future. Aoife unsure what that portends, but knowing better than to ask. Still, that the man’s companion wanders elsewhere in this instance is probably best for all concerned. Aoife is tired of seeing Flidais watch them fuck. The goddess taut as a bowstring in those moments, quietly seething.
