Chapter Nine: The Blood at Dawn

The wind howled high, whistling through jagged stone and heather as Talon pressed onward into the upper reaches of O’Coyle land. The trail of hooves had pulled him from the cairn like a thread unraveling—some deep instinct, a blood-born compass in his bones drawing him across frost, stone, and loch-edge ruin. It was clear something terrible had passed this way. Two days' ride from the keep, the air had soured. He crested a ridge and smelled it before he saw it—rot and blood, the sweet stink of death. A few steps more, and the horror opened before him. Below, at the foot of a shattered cliff, Highland mounts lay broken and twisted, legs bent unnaturally, their eyes glassed to the sky. He recognized them—his brother’s horses, the housemen’s war-trained beasts. Loyal. Proud. Then worse—two great wolfhounds, crumpled near the rocks. Still. One pierced with arrows in the back. The other cleaved at the neck. Loyal to the end. But the worst was yet to come—his housemen.
Six rotting corpses. Some he had known since boyhood.
Cut down.
Arrows in their backs.
Frostbitten. Bloated.
Thrown away like waste. Talon dropped to one knee, eyes burning, breath slow. “Cowards,” he muttered. “Not even the dogs…” He rose, turning his gaze outward, his tracking mind taking shape. The hoofprints were mismatched now—southern horses, heavily shod, dragging something heavy. The king’s men.
But no banners. No heraldry.
Ghost riders.
Assassins in red. He circled out from the cliff like a wolf sniffing rot, past the ridge, into the wind. And there—on the horizon, curling slow against the grey sky—a ribbon of smoke.

The Ruins by the Loch

The ruin had once been a watch station, long crumbled into the bones of the land. It hunched on the edge of a forgotten O’Coyle loch, abandoned by time and map. But the fire there was not old. From the treeline, Talon watched them—nine in number. Southern soldiers. King's guard in disguise. Laughing. Skinning rabbits. One kicked something inside the largest tent—and a moan followed. Talon’s jaw clenched. He didn’t need to see.
He knew.

The Old Rite

That night, Talon built a small fire beneath a boulder hollow, saying nothing as he stripped down his gear. From a wrapped pouch at his belt, he retrieved a single dried mushroom of the Fàrdach—the Fungus of Courage, known only to the O’Coyle. It grew where death lingered. Beneath cairns. Among bones.
It was said to open the warrior mind—to let the beast rise.
Not madness.
Freedom. He chewed it slow, watching the stars ripple and shift.
And in the back of his mind, Cu Sith whispered again. “Run with me…” Talon’s vision shimmered. The stone pulsed. Time fractured like glass.
He took up his sword, tied it across his back. The world widened.
Colors deepened.
The cold kissed his skin like love. His heartbeat became thunder. Then he moved.

The Emergence

The moon dropped low. The sky bled grey into light. Just before the sun’s crown broke the mountain’s back, Talon entered the loch. Fully dressed, his green tartan soaked to his skin, sword clenched in his teeth, he slipped into the black mirror of water… …and swam. Through mist. Through silt. Through bone and ice. When he emerged on the far shore, the mist clung to him like fur.
His tartan, dripping and dark, hugged his body like the pelt of a beast.
He rose in silence from the reeds—like a curse made flesh. A lone guard turned, wine skin in hand, eyes wide. “What—” Talon screamed. A cry of grief.
Of rage.
Of Cu Sith.

The Slaughter

He descended on them like a blade through fog. The first two fell without a sound—throats opened in a heartbeat. The third stumbled back, caught a flash of glowing eyes before Talon drove a dirk into his temple. One man turned to flee—Talon tackled him, ripped him apart, blade after blade, a frenzy of violence without form or mercy. Talon did not parry.
Did not speak.
He was fury.
He was fire and fang and blood and green-cloaked wrath. “It’s him!” one cried. “It’s the Cu Sith!”
“The beast! The green one!” One man escaped—scrambling, clawing, vanishing into the trees like prey in flight. The others fell.
Eight in total.

The Tent

Silence followed. Talon dropped his sword, stepped into the tent, shoulders shaking. There lay his brother.
Bound. Broken. Lifeless. The torchlight revealed a face bruised beyond recognition, slashes across his arms, mouth bloodied from defiance. Talon fell to his knees. He touched his brother’s hair. His arm.
Then buried his head against his chest. He did not cry.
Not at first. Only when the wind curled through the tent flap—whistling like a hound’s breath—did he whisper, “Forgive me. I was too late. You were our laird.” He sat in silence then, until the light began to change.

Elsewhere… Two moons later, in a lochside tavern, whispers stirred over tankards. “He came out of the mist.”
“Eyes like fire. Tartan turned to fur. He screamed like death. Killed them all.”
“The O’Coyle boy?”
“Aye. But they say he’s not a man anymore. They say Cu Sith wears his face.” And across the Highlands, for the first time in years, a spark caught in the old bones of the clans. Not just vengeance. Rebellion.

Entered by: 0xe9a1…78d3