Page 37 of A Dark and Lovely Devastation

My two eldest. I’d had two more sons. Not just Lugh and Niamh. I’d never met them, and never would. And now Niamh was dead, too. Only Lugh was left.

“How? Humans don’t have any magic. How could they ever kill us?” Faeries could only be killed for good by another creature of magic that was a non-faerie.

“The humans found ways of harnessing the magic of other creatures, of harnessing faerie magic by taking your blood. It is where your magic resides. They used it against you. In this tapestry” —Illya motioned to the image in front of us—“the humans were coming to wipe your kind from the map. You saved them by releasing the power collected in the scepter and creating the Otherworld.”

“And now, only by killing me can anyone else access the power in the scepter.”

“Yes. You bound yourself to the scepter so that the magic that continues to ebb and flow out of it, holding the very Otherworld together, could not be used or undone by anyone but you.”

“And Badb and Macha?”

He was quiet.

“Illya?”

“From everything I have studied, they, being separate in spirit from you, do not have access to the scepter.” The warning look he cast me told me not to ask any more.

Everything I heard, Badb and Macha heard. I probably shouldn’t have asked.

And in that instant, gazing up at the tapestry, at the confidence on Morrigan’s face, I felt dwarfed by my past greatness. “If you knew what was coming on my nineteenth birthday, why didn’t Dagda come earlier?” I asked Illya. “Why didn’t you warn me?”

Illya sighed. “From the moment you relinquished your powers to the scepter and created the Otherworld, your connection to your sisters seemed to disappear. Even when you fell and became reborn, they did not manifest. We all assumed the act of giving up your powers broke that connection with them. It wasn’t until you started manifesting signs that I realized your sisters might be reawakening.”

“But, if they were gone, why are they awakening now?”

He shrugged. “After Morrigan created the Otherworld, she locked the scepter away. Many thought for safekeeping, but she always seemed to avoid using it. Even when events in the Otherworld became dire, she never resorted to wielding its power.” He scratched his chin hidden underneath that long white beard. “I believe when you wielded the scepter in the battle against the Fomori three years ago, you must have accessed too much of its magic, drawing it into you and reigniting the bond.”

I frowned at the sinking feeling inside my stomach. Using the scepter had caused this? Not that I’d had a choice, or even had known what I was doing at the time. Still, a part of me had been wary, afraid to touch it, as if somewhere deep within I’d known doing so would have dire consequences.

Like awakening my psychotic sisters.

“Come, there is more to see,” Illya said, and he drew me further down the hall. We passed more tapestries, marking the history of the Otherworld, battles and bloody conflicts. I saw Dagda and Morrigan restart life again, their images in the tapestries shifting till my mind spun with the sheer breadth of their history.

We passed the second to last tapestry, a depiction of Morrigan doing battle with what looked like pure darkness. I paused.

“Is this the last tapestry?” Illya asked.

“Second to last.” I again explained what I saw.

Illya’s face became grim. “A couple of years before Morrigan left, the Fomori released a dark magical plague upon the Otherworld. It spread, destroying everything in its path. Only Morrigan, with her knowledge of sorcery, had the power to hold it at bay.”

As if that was all to be said, he tugged me forward, and we stopped at the last tapestry.

“This is the last one King Dagda commissioned to be done,” Illya said, a graveness to his voice.

It was different. Unlike the bright threads of the others, this one was cast in dark, muted colors. The threads streaked down, giving it an almost blurry look, like vague outlines beyond the images—like it was raining. But through the gloom one person was clear. Despite her wearing a cloak, Morrigan’s face peered from under her raised hood as she made to move past Dagda to the portal entrance guarded by the Chimera.

“This was the day she left him,” I said.

Illya nodded. “The day Queen Morrigan and her faerie knight snuck into the human world. They hid among the soldiers that were sent to retrieve the scepter that had been stolen by the Fomori. It was also the day when your last remaining son gave himself up to the Chimera in order to open the portal.”

“Where is Lugh?” I hadn’t seen him since coming to the Otherworld.

Illya shrugged. “He does the Chimera’s bidding now.”

I reached out and touched the thread that started Morrigan’s image and ran my fingers over her shaded cloak. Dagda had lost his sons to the humans. He thought he had lost Lugh, and then Morrigan had left him.

“Why did she go?”

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