The Morrigan comes to Three Portlands, chasing ghosts.
Our Lady of Sorrows
Authors: DrGrimoire
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Despite the best efforts of three priests, two rabbis, and one very confused mailman, Mrs. Trevithick remained the sole inhabitant of the house on Third Portland Street for the twenty years after her death, her once-beautiful Victorian cottage moldering into a crumbling ruin, silent as the grave save for the occasional, unearthly wailing of its sole occupant.
Unearthly wailing, it turns out, is great for keeping property values down, and in Three Portlands, the moans of the damned was considered less of a deterrent and more of a minor annoyance, no worse than a neighbor who mows the lawn after five. After Alex moved in next door, she quickly came to an understanding with her ghastly neighbor — Mrs. Trevithick would limit her phantasmal activities to between the hours of nine AM and nine PM, and Alex would leave her a bottle of milk and a loaf of Wonder Bread every morning.
Mrs. Trevithick never left the milk to curdle, or the bread to be picked at by raccoons. Yet one October morning, Alex found a glass bottle of what had once been milk, but now more closely resembled cottage cheese, and a loaf torn apart by tiny, humanlike hands on the decaying stoop of the haunted house, which had lost its air of unearthly malaise. Mrs. Trevithick, it seemed, was missing.
Across the city, as Deer College prepared for its student council election, a candidate was missing. Every year since 1966, Ralph Nader's Ghost had put his name in the running, and every year since 1966, he'd lost decisively. Yet this year, his name hadn't even appeared on the sign-up sheet, despite it being left out overnight in the political science grad student lounge, alongside an offering of a smashed Matchbox Corvair.
In Silverhand Cemetery, at the very edge of Little Avalon, Saoirse scrubbed her mother's grave, diligently undertaking a ritual she'd never seen done. She'd brought an offering, a trough sundae from Farrell's, her mom's favorite. But despite her ministrations, no ghostly apparition of a lost parent came to her.
A pattern was playing out across the city, a constellation of missing specters and darkened ghostlights. A tapestry was unfurling, drawing the eye of the weaver of fate herself. The Morrigan, Phantom Queen and guardian of the Otherworld's gates, had felt the threads of fate binding the departed to their living kin snap. For the first time in a hundred lifetimes, the loom of fate had begun roughly dropping destinies. The chaos of it clouded her perception of the future, casting her reading of causality's design into a fog. And so, she had come to Three Portlands on raven's wings, to find her missing subjects, and to find some answers.
She arrived in the city in the dawning hours of Samhain. She should've been able to feel the presence of thousands of ancestor spirits deep in her soul, an ethereal roar as they flooded through the gates from the Otherworld to return to the world of the living, and a quiet murmur of activity as they milled about, waiting for their descendants. She felt the roar, fierce and powerful as ever, but no murmur, no sign of activity from those spirits which had already arrived.
It was deeply unnerving. She tried to think of any possible cause — A psychovore on the prowl?
A memory bubbled up inside her vast godsoul, an other-self offering it up as counterexample. For an instant, it is the fifth century, when her birth-name was Sadhbh. She is in Ériu, in a nameless village. She is in her war-aspect, the Badb, spear in hand, hunting a gortach, an ancestor-spirit forsaken by its kin, barred from the Otherworld for its crimes and turned to devouring other spirits for sustenance. She remembers the trail of destruction it left over a league of the countryside, a path of defiled dead and desecrated graves. She remembers the sounds it made as it bit into the spectral forms of the honored dead, their screams of ghostly agony as their essence drained into the vile creature's mouth. She remembers hurling her spear, and it striking true.
She soared higher, the better to get a look at the city beneath her. Casting her gaze into the crossroads between life and death, she sought out the spoor of a spectral predator, the tell-tale patterns of predation. But while she could see the constellation, defined in absence, it was too regular, too calculated, too clean for a thing of hunger and rage.
Not a psychovore, then. She continued to mull over the possibilities as she flew on.
A necromancer making pneumanite foci? The thought troubled her. Mortal magic had grown far stronger in the last century, but this strong? Then for a moment, she is in a recent past life, in the forests of Poland. Down her rifle's scope is a Nekromant — a vile servant of Obskuracorps, who has used the artifice of the new age of magic to industrialize the harvesting of souls. In his hands he holds a necromantic focus larger than any she has seen before, blasphemy in crystal form. Behind him is his masterpiece, a vile obelisk of black stone, inscribed with alien runes. It is a siphon and compactor of souls. She squeezes the trigger, and his soul joins those of his victims.
I thought my allies destroyed that knowledge, burned it to ash. But then, did they not say the same about Wernher von Braun? Clouds of doubt and rage began to form about her, anger at those she trusted and at herself for trusting them. Another memory came to the fore, of meeting a once-young necromancer she had fought alongside on that very operation, decades after the war here in Portlands.
Tucking her black wings, she began to dive, heading for that once-ally's lair. A place of knowledge and experimentation, an assemblage of mismatched buildings centered around a ritual seal. A symbol of the Global Occult Coalition's postwar power.
ICSUT's Portlands campus.
She landed at the center of the seal, shedding her crow-form at the very moment she touched the ground in a practiced motion. Her mantle fluttered about her, forming into a long cloak pinioned with corvid feathers. Just beside her landing spot, and far beneath her concern, a group of students stood staring at her with awe and faint terror.
Storming across the quadrangle towards the administration building, she barreled through yet more clusters of students setting up Halloween decorations — little enchanted jack-o-lanterns and orange-and-black bunting. The heavy oak doors to the building were unlocked, and she opened them like a gust of graveyard wind, revealing a familiar reception area, little changed in the decade since her last visit. She stomped past the receptionist, ignoring her ritualistic "Can I help you?", making her way to the door marked Dean of Faculty.
With a blood-red roar matching her hair, she slammed the door open.
"EPHRAIM, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?"
The woman behind the Dean's desk was not Ephraim Bazan. She looked up from the CRT monitor at the incarnate goddess of war and death before her, resignation in her eyes. "Dean Bazan retired four years ago, but what did he turn pink this time?"
"You are not Ephraim." This fact takes the Badb Catha a moment to process, rage radiating from her like heat from an oven.
With a sigh, the middle-aged woman rolled her chair to the side, the better to get a look at the wrathful divinity before her. With a genuine lack of concern, she answered: "No, I have the bad luck to be his replacement. And you are?"
"I am the goddess Morrigan, Badb Catha and Phantom Queen. I am here because I suspect that Ephraim has been committing atrocities on the spirits of this city, and he must be stopped." The war-goddess fumed, the faint outline of a spear beginning to form from blood-red mist at her back.
"Ephraim retired to a tower somewhere in the Carpathians. I don't doubt that he's up to something, but he hasn't been in the city since May."
"Oh." The goddess's rage cooled slightly, burning doubt instead of certainty "Bring me to your chief necromancer, then."
"No. You storm into my office, demanding revenge on Dean Bazan. That I understand, it happens all the time. But I won't let you take out your anger on my staff. I suggest that you leave." Her tone was firm, that of a woman used to dealing with immense egos and terrible powers.
With a sigh, the Morrigan reached into the weave of fate. As it had been for months, the future was chaotic, cloudy like the ocean before a hurricane. With little effort, she grabbed a moment seconds into the future, one where this conversation would go as she needed. Tracing its thread back to the present, she found the words she would have to speak to set fate into motion.
"If that is the case, Dean Mattingly, then I will have no choice but to suggest that the Ó Dagdas fund a department at some other college — Deer, perhaps. They have always heeded my council so well, after all."
The Dean went pale at this suggestion. "You can't — you wouldn't — I mean…" She sputtered, before sighing, defeated. "Fine. I'll show you to the head of the department."
In silence, the dean walked out the door, the goddess trailing behind her like a wraith. As they crossed the campus, the Morrigan's rage slowly cooled, crystallizing into a white-cold mixture of fury and fear. At the Necromancy building, a squat construction of gray stone with a slate roof the Dean showed the goddess to another office, slightly smaller than her own.
It took only a few moments of conversation for the Morrigan to accept that ICSUT had nothing to do with the disappearances. The head of Necromancy, a gaunt man named Cas, explained to her that ICSUT had been spared only because of the strength of their wards, but something was actively trying to pull their spirits away, towards a cemetery in Little Avalon. They'd done their own investigation but found nothing to explain it. Speaking to the remaining specters was little help, either. They described a tugging sensation, a force trying to swallow them, but nothing untoward — no shrieks of spirits being distilled into pneumanite, no indication of anything happening on campus beyond bog-standard necromancy.
With little else to go on, the goddess took to the sky in crow-form once more, returning to her musings on potential causes.
Another god? And suddenly she lives another long-buried moment of her past. She is Astrid, child of one of the Tribe of the Gods and one of the Ostmen. For the first time, she meets an equal, a goddess with a half-skeletal face, with whom she negotiates the dispensation of all souls born to both peoples. She remembers the shifts and changes that her rival's presence inflicted upon her own domain, ice frosting her ethereal crossroads as the cruel northern goddess drew near. She remembers feeling that frost in her soul, and realizes she feels no such rival now.
She flew onward, the cemetery growing in her vision, worry growing in her heart. She looked to her own fate, the thread of her existence twined with countless lives, and saw it shifting, chaotic in a way it had only been recently, since the disappearances began. Sometimes, it stretched out into infinity, as ever, at others it was cut short. At others still, it tangled into knots, bunched into a skein of possibilities too tight for even her to untangle.
As she arrived at the cemetery, she alighted behind a moss-covered mausoleum, its spiritual occupant missing like so many others. Normally, she would not care if she was seen shifting form, but her destiny's turbulence made her cautious. Better for now if none know who I am.
Casting a glance around to make sure she is alone, she stepped out of her corvine form and into her Sidhe body, thaumic backlash contained with ritual geometry formed by reflex out of her own vast soul. She took a deep breath, savoring the return of her nose, the scents of bonfires and marshmallows wafting from the small Samhain celebrations already in progress nearby. Coming out from behind the mausoleum, she made her way to the center of the cemetery, where an ancient portal tomb, painstakingly transported from lost Avalon, lay.
And within it, a gateway to the crossroads, to her realm.
The flow of spirits, of energy through it was a throaty roar to her phantom senses, and yet, it appeared abandoned. She saw no cause, though she also noted that the tomb was ill-kept, covered in a thick layer of Portlands moss. Jumping over the low wooden fence surrounding it, she began grabbing rough handfuls of verdure, tossing them aside with indignation. Perhaps the overgrowth has damaged the gateway, somehow? She waited for disagreement from within her composite soul, but none arrived. If not, at least I will be able to see more once this is clean.
"Umm, what are you doing?" A bright voice startled the goddess from her thoughts. Turning, the Morrigan saw a young woman standing nearby, her blood-red curls suggesting Avalonian heritage even as her rounded ears dismissed it. She was not dressed for Samhain; she had no mask to frighten away harmful spirits, and instead of finery she wore ripped jeans, with a short-sleeved band tee over a black long-sleeved shirt.
"Cleaning the eldest tomb." The goddess replied, flatly, as though the answer should've been obvious.
"Oh, why? Are you trying to meet an old ghost or something?" The girl began to approach, eagerly.
"I am not trying to meet any 'ghosts'. Ancestor spirits, though, I am trying to find. And this tomb should always be kept clean."
"Okay, but like, are you related to whoever is buried there? Because I think that it only works if you are."
The goddess smiled, though it did not reach her eyes. "In a manner of speaking —" she was about to remind the girl that this tomb, all such tombs, are hers, created when one of her bodies is returned to the earth, before she remembered that she was keeping a low profile.
"What does that mean?" The girl asked, hopping the fence herself. "And can I help? I think I'm doing it wrong."
"I— it is complicated. I cannot explain it now. But yes, you may help." Turning back to the stone, the goddess ripped another clump of moss off. As she did, she brushed the stone with a knuckle, feeling it thrum with barely-contained spiritual power. Pressing a hand to the exposed surface, she confirmed her earlier sense — the gateway is active, spirits passing through it in a torrent. So where are they?
She was interrupted by a prickling sensation, familiar but unexpected. The feeling of the shifting of fate. Within herself, in the part of her that ever dangled at the most fundamental levels of reality, observing the loom of causality, she witnessed the thin thread of the girl's destiny begin to align with her own, even as both began to spasm erratically. Looking to her right on the mortal plane, she saw that the girl had placed her own hand on another clear patch of stone, mimicking the goddess' position, her eyes occasionally darting over to confirm their symmetry.
"What is your name?" She asked, breaking the silence that had settled between her and the girl.
"Uh, Saoirse. What's yours?" The girl jumped at the sudden noise, deaf as she was to the ethereal roar.
"I have many. But you may know me as the Morrigan." She scanned Saoirse's face as she spoke, gauging her reaction.
It took a moment, confusion clouding the girl's face. "Wait…like the goddess? Are you serious?"
"I am. I do not tell you this lightly. I believe that we are meant to help each other. Our fates have aligned, to an end I cannot yet see." The Morrigan's voice was solemn as the grave.
"Wait, like I'm supposed to help you clean this?"
"It is grander than that. I am on a mission of great importance, and I am certain that somehow you are key to it."
"Okay…" Saoirse drew out the word, leaning away from the goddess as she spoke. "I should probably go now."
"Wait. Please." The goddess said, suddenly remembering she was not speaking to one of her devoted. "I am unused to the Sidhe of this city. It seems clear to me that your people have forgotten me, mistrust me. You do not even recognize me before you."
"It's not — look. I'm not really Sidhe. I don't know who you are. And now you're talking about it being my 'destiny' to help you — you're really freaking me out." Saoirse said, taking a step back.
Instead of pursuing her again, the Morrigan cast her eye along the fluxive fate binding her and the girl together, already beginning to vanish, seeking the right words to say. Watching the shifts and twists of the web of fate, she found a design pleasing to her. And from it, she seized one right question.
"Why are you here, Saoirse?"
The girl paused her escape, sighing. "I…at school I heard that if you clean your ancestor's grave today, and bring them an offering, you can see them again." She curled into herself as she spoke, dejected. "I guess it's not true."
"It should be." The Morrigan did her best to sound comforting, with atrophied memories of a hundred mothers. "If everything were as it should be, the dead would walk among us today. Who did you lose, Saoirse? Perhaps I am meant to help you find them."
"It's my mom." The girl remained closed off, but stopped backing away. "Why didn't she come?"
"Saoirse, none of the dead have come today. They should be pouring through this tomb as we speak, but something is wrong. And I must fix it."
"Okay." Saoirse still looked as if she was going to turn and run, but after a hesitant moment, she asked "How can I help, then?"
"First, let us finish cleaning this tomb. I do not know why it was allowed to become so overgrown, but I fear the moss may have befouled some guiding runes. Perhaps if we uncover them, we can return things to the way they should be."
"Alright."
The two women turned to their task, Saoirse working herself into an almost manic vigor. She tossed clumps of moss and lichen aside determinedly, revealing triskele and lone spirals, runes the Morrigan's devoted carved in an age when she was still actively worshipped. The goddess herself made slower progress, eventually giving up the cleaning to pore over her ancient followers' handiwork as Saoirse revealed it.
"What's that?" The girl pointed at a small jet-black obelisk, once concealed by the draping moss, tucked into the dark corner of the tomb. Its dark surface was covered in tiny runes, in a language that should have been lost, burned alongside the notes of a wicked artificer. It tugged on the goddess's vast soul, faintly, with fingers that stung like betrayal. She recognized it immediately — how could she not, though she'd last seen its ilk a lifetime before.
"A hateful thing, one which should never have been made." Anger rose within the goddess as she spoke, her voice hardening to iron, her hair beginning to redden as the Badb emerged from within her once more. "We must destroy it."
"Okay, but how? How can I help?"
In answer, the Badb held out her hand, a pillar of fog rising from the ground, coalescing into a bronze spear. Crouching low, the vengeful warrior-goddess struck at the hateful artifice with the spear she had used to slay giants, monsters, and men.
With a single, precise blow, the obelisk shattered like glass.
From its splintered form, she immediately felt a force grip her vast godsoul and pull, far stronger than before. The agony was indescribable, like a dull scalpel being used to vivisect her entire being, like being ripped into a thousand pieces by a pack of wild dogs.
She screamed, heard Saoirse's scream join hers.
She felt whole lifetimes be devoured by the obelisk, centuries of memories disappearing from her being. Holes torn open in decades, her time in Camelot and Prussia and the Western Front rent from her essence, leaving nothing but searing, agonizing loss.
For an eternal, white-hot moment, she did not know who she was. Her tattered memories and soul-fragments fought against the terrible gravity of the obelisk to stay coherent, moments splitting down their seams, remembered conversations cut off mid-sentence. She watched as her most precious days spilled out of her from a thousand golden wounds, nearly forgetting what she had even lost as the force ripped at the unsubsumed parts of her host's soul.
Then, sudden as it started, the torture ended. Looking down at her body, she saw flesh rent and torn in a dozen places where fragments of her soul crystallized into pneumanite from the force of being ripped from her body. Soulstuff leaked from her wounds along with her lifeblood, memories and divine might evaporating under the noonday sun. In front of her prone form, she saw that the obelisk was coated in a thick layer of crystal — lost fragments of her soul plugging it like a stopper in a drain.
Saoirse lay next to her. The bleeding goddess looked at the girl, and by some buried reflex awakened her phantom sight. Through divine eyes, it was plain as day that the child's soul was nearly gone, the thread of destiny tying this mortal girl to the goddess fraying. She had but an instant to act, before it was cut entirely.
"Forgive me." She whispered through gritted teeth, and released her mantle, infusing her host's body with a tiny shard of soulstuff and willpower in the same moment, an echo of the agony of moments before as she carved off a splinter of her very essence to implant it in dying flesh. Suddenly, she was no longer divine. She was an echo of an echo of her former self, a flickering ember in a corpse.
But that ember had strength enough to wrap the mantle around Saoirse before sputtering out, exhausted. Finally, inevitably, the body that was once the Morrigan succumbed to shock and blood loss and collapsed.