Page 89 of The Mortal Queen

“See for yourself,” Danu purred, the still pond rippling from her touch. A finger that bloomed with toadstools and primrose.

Aisling faced the waters, stepping just near enough to see properly. Lir, Galad, and Rian followed, one eye on the pools and another on the empress herself. Lir gripping the thread of starlight till Aisling believed it might turn to dust in his hand.

At first, the mortal queen only saw her reflection. The fair-faced mortal she’d known her whole life. Two amethyst eyes glaring back behind lashes as obsidian as the thick curls braided over her shoulder. But no longer was she the northern mortal princess she’d met through the vanity in her Tilrish bed chambers. She was someone else now. Unrecognizable. Thinner. Rougher. A stranger the mortal queen feared. More than she’d feared anything. For behind those purple eyes was somethinghungry.

Danu stirred the pool and Aisling’s reflection vanished. The pond darkened until a single, violet flame burned within. Aisling craned her neck and squinted her eyes, doing her best to get a better look. But the image grew clearer and clearer until Aisling recognized that same stranger that stared back at her moments before, a woman dressed in a gown of glittering lilac pooling around her ankles. Her delicate features were lit by the fire brewing in her hands. The fire grew brighter and brighter. Larger and larger until it burst forth from her palms and spread down a mountain valley. Into a fleet of thousands of soldiers below.

The flames devoured every armored warrior like a bestial serpent. Pillaging the army until the sky was black and ash rained from the heavens.

Aisling’s heart ceased. Thedraiochtwithin her flared in response to the power it beheld.

“They will call you mage. Witch. Sorceress,” Danu said. “Some will follow you. Many will hunt you. All will fear you.”

Aisling shook her head, eyes burning until they leaked down her cheeks.

“And there will be others?” Aisling asked, her voice more level than she felt.

“Yes,” Danu said. “There will be others like you. A rare few who will summon thedraiochtas easily if not more powerfully than the Sidhe themselves.”

“How is this possible?” Aisling continued, staring at her hands held before her.

“You’ve awakened something, little beast,” Danu said, narrowing her eyes towards the pool each of them surrounded. “Your very existence is an ill omen for the age to come.”

Aisling bit her tongue, sorting through the thoughts that swarmed her mind like an angry hive.

“The war, Danu. Who are those soldiers?” Lir asked, gesturing towards the bone and soot remains of hundreds, thousands, of warriors lying dead in the valley.

“I cannot tell. My visions are glimpses. Not lists of details or facts. This is all I can see.”

“Then you don’t know who will win the war?” Lir demanded, his expression growing more feral by the moment.

“The end will change little, Lir.”

“With every given year, the Sidhe are thinning. The mortal sovereigns outnumbering our kind, exploiting our weaknesses with iron and fire, burning our land till the air echoes with the screams of the forest. A forest that the Unseelie, the dryads, call home. The end changes everything, gives us an opportunity to alter that which is not yet written,” Lir growled, the muscles in his shoulders tensing. The surrounding dryads shrinking back from where they stood.

“Few, if any, have ever been capable of changing the course of my visions,” Danu said, her voice deepening. “The Sidhe will continue to dwindle but they’ll not grow extinct.”

“And the mortals? What of them?”

“They will overtake this realm. With iron and fire, they’ll carve the earth and return both Seelie and Unseelie into the realm of the Other.”

Danu stirred the pool once more until another image took form. Fields and fields of forests had been chopped down, burned, flattened, and trampled over by stone homes, thatched roofs, billowing chimneys, and corridors spilling over with mortal townsfolk. Villages, cities, empires built on the ashes of the kingdom before it. The kingdom of greenwood, the kingdom of mountains, the southern, western, eastern Sidhe territories. Images of men with iron weapons that exploded with metal projectiles, men whose armies turned against one another and painted the deadened earth with their own blood.

“Mankind will dub us fairies, demons, spirits, gods, monsters. Mankind will stifle us until we’re nothing but a child’s tale shared around the hearth.”

“How long?” Lir bared his teeth, fangs flashing. “How longdo we have?”

“I cannot tell. It could be another three millennia. A hundred years. A decade. It’s impossible to tell?—”

“How long?!” Lir yelled, his face twisting with fury.

“The Sidhe will lose this war,mo Damh Bán,” Danu snarled in return, thorns growing from her flesh and serrating the curves of her once supple form. “If there is anything you can do to prevent it, the answers do not lie here.”

Lir unsheathed his great axes, the sound of steel scraping against the scabbard echoing throughout the hollow. The dryads hissed, the earth beneath sprouting with weeds.

Galad stepped forward, placing a hand on the fae king’s shoulder.

“Instead of looking towards the morrow, look at today. You’re powerless then but powerful now. Return to Annwyn. The fire hand is but a step in the right direction.”

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