The keening began at midnight, as it always did, and Dr. Declan O’Sullivan, who had been listening to it for three weeks from his rented cottage on the Dingle Peninsula, put down his whiskey and went outside to find the source. He was an ethnomusicologist, specialising in the traditional lament traditions of Ireland, and the … Read more
9 min readThe cauldron was found in a bog in County Roscommon by a farmer named Paddy Coyle, who was digging drainage ditches and expecting to find nothing more interesting than the usual complement of waterlogged timber and Bronze Age butter. What he found instead was a vessel of hammered bronze, three feet across, decorated with figures … Read more
9 min readThe river Boyne was in spate when Eithne Gallagher arrived at the Brú na Bóinne visitor centre, having driven four hours from Cork in weather that alternated between biblical rain and the threatening pause between showers that the Irish called “a grand soft day.” She was a folklorist — the last tenured folklorist in the … Read more
9 min readThe holy well of Tobernalt had been kept by the Gallagher women for as long as memory could reach, and longer. It was a small, unassuming thing — a stone basin in a wooded hollow above the shores of Lough Gill, fed by a spring that rose from the limestone with the steady, cold persistence … Read more
9 min readThe music came from underground. Orla Kavanagh heard it first on Midsummer’s Eve, walking home from the pub in Knocknarea at an hour when the sensible people of County Sligo were in bed and only the foxes and the fools were abroad. She was neither fox nor fool — she was a traditional musician, a … Read more
9 min readThe seal skin was hidden in the chimney of the old croft house on the headland above Achiltibuie, wrapped in oilcloth that had been there so long it had become part of the stonework. Caitriona MacLeod found it on the afternoon she moved in, when the removal of a bird’s nest dislodged a stone that … Read more
11 min readNiamh Brennan did not believe in the old gods. This was ironic, given that one of them had been following her for the better part of a year. She first noticed the crow in January, perched on the railing of her balcony in Galway, watching her through the glass door with an intelligence that no … Read more
9 min readA solitary witch who lives at the edge of the world finds a wounded storm elemental on her doorstep. Cast out by the Storm Council for refusing to destroy mortal villages, Caelum is diminished and dying. As Lirien nurses him back to health, she discovers that the woman who preferred storms to people may have finally found a storm worth keeping.
9 min readAt the Library between worlds — where every story from every dying reality is preserved — an ancient Librarian with text written into her very skin takes in a refugee: the last god of a vanished universe. As they shelve books and catalogue the memories of dead worlds together, they write a story of their own.
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