Balor felt that not everything was right when he awoke on that crisp, infernal afternoon within his palace.

  He would’ve slept longer. It was in his nature to work in the dead of night, when monstrous beings like himself were at the peak of their powers and an ominous shadow was cast over the confines of the Otherworld.

  But he couldn’t. A bright light had drifted into his slovenly manor, and it kept stinging his one beady eye until he gave up on his long slumber.

  He sensed that Eithne had fallen in love with someone. He sensed too that Brigid and the other goddesses in his harem had not wasted any time getting out of those mountains where he’d hidden them, rushing back to the forts of the Tuatha Dé Danann, where they would be sheltered from his lustful gaze.

  He sensed that a new child had come into being. A girl. One who would fulfil the prophecy to slay him, end the Second Battle of Mag Tuired, and bring the Otherworld into a state of harmony once more.

  His eye stung again. The radiant light he felt grew stronger. Eithne, her partner, and their child were already on the move in the Otherworld. They had already started planning his demise, reunited with Brigid, and were now in one of the many courts that the Dagda held whenever he had a sliver of good news.

  He clenched his eye shut. He was not worried about ancient prophecies of murderous granddaughters that would be the death of him. He would crush her head once he found her; then the Dagda, Brigid, and the rest of the Tuatha Dé Danann would die at his hands too.

  He got out of bed, stepping past the bones of the Roman soldiers he’d picked his teeth with. He’d feasted on five of them last night; three that Eithne had killed with the blade he’d given her, two she’d tricked into presenting themselves before her dark lord father.

  They had been delightful. Tasty in a spicy, Mediterranean kind of way. Much better than the wild and poisonous game Eithne had sometimes sent in the vague hope of killing him. Like the Dagda and Brigid, she too wanted to squash his dreams of living forever as the ruler of the Otherworld.

  It never worked. Not only was Balor’s stomach far too strong for poisonous roots, but he was also protected by the prophecy he hardly believed in — one that had followed him for hundreds of years ever since the First Battle of Mag Tuired, where Balor, in another life, had delivered the killing blow against his own father on behalf of the Tuatha Dé Danann.

  He had been abandoned by them afterwards. Promises of shared leadership between him and the Dagda didn’t come to bear, so Balor decided he would form his own pantheon instead: the Fomorians.

  These dark creatures were a mishmash of the corpses of the factions who’d fallen in the First Battle of Mag Tuired — the Fir Bolg, the Nemedians, the people of Partholón, even a few of the Tuatha Dé Danann who’d succumbed along the way.

  Balor would rummage through the mounds of the earth and the depths of the sea to find their ruined corpses, taking them back to his home where he would stitch and carve and make something new with all those rotten bodies.

  Eithne had been the first among these Fomorians. She was also the brightest, the most troublesome, and the only one Balor regarded as his child, considering how much of his heart and soul he’d put into her. He had played with her, moved his fingertips through her hair, and did as much as he could with a daughter who never took to him and his evil, wanton ways.

  Then it all came to a crashing halt, once Balor’s Fomorian messengers had brought news of a prophecy that had been unearthed by the other Tuatha Dé Danann — one that foretold Balor would meet his demise at the hands of a child born from one of his own children.

  He had locked Eithne up in that shivering tower in response, and then moved her to a frosty, Hibernian mountain once he’d snatched Brigid and the other goddesses as the Second Battle of Mag Tuired began.

  Both the Tuatha Dé Danann and the Fomorians had been locked in a stalemate. But now that the prophesied bright light had come into being, Balor realised there was a chance for a thaw.

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

  All he had to do was snuff the bright light out.

  Brigid found herself smiling the further she and the rest of the Hibernian goddesses got away from those horrible mountains. Trudging through the wet marshes, some of the other women marching behind her even whispered that she looked delirious.

  Why wouldn’t she be? She was happy that she didn’t have to be the personal sex slave of a Fomorian dark lord any longer. Though Balor often described her as his little plaything or his personal cocksleeve on those turbulent nights when she didn’t want to leave her small hut on the mountainside.

  She would dig her nails into the ground, kicking and screaming as Balor reached across the mountainside to grab hold of her and pull, until eventually her fingernails snapped and tore off.

  The blood would smear all over the snow and the cobbles and the mud, and that would be the last the other goddesses would see of Brigid until she returned from the mountainside a few days later, also quite smeared but ready to get back to running the camp once again.

  She had become the de facto leader of these kidnapped goddesses because of it. Though Balor’s big ugly eye wandered at times, Brigid had borne most of the sexual brunt from him down the years. She hadn’t done enough — she never could give enough to sate a monstrous rapist’s sex drive — to protect all of them, but she had at least tried.

  Tried and given them the peace of mind that Balor wouldn’t come for them if she offered herself in their place. Tried and then comforted them when it hadn’t worked, and Brigid found herself soothing and lulling a much younger goddess to sleep as she wept in her bosom after having been repeatedly violated. Not just by Balor, but by the dozen or so other Fomorians he might cast the goddess to once he was finished with her.

  There were other reasons too that she was chosen to be leader. She was the only child of the Dagda, Balor’s nemesis, and Brigid assumed that most of Balor’s perverse feelings for her stemmed from his desire to desecrate Dagda’s property.

  She was also a seamstress, ready to mend whatever needed fixing among the tribe of women, a blacksmith who wasn’t afraid of some smite, and a scholar dedicated to recording all the truths and tales that had transpired within the Hibernian Otherworld.

  Although the younger goddesses considered Brigid to be a storyteller more than anything, she knew how eventful those scholarly tales she kept in her heart were. In the midst of the festival of Samhain, when the Hibernian winter grew darker and Fomorians seemed to lurk in every crevice, they would gather around her next to the fire she’d lit, listening to the warmth of her words and staying away from the dark monsters that lurked everywhere.

  One of those young goddesses had been Boann, who skipped heartily to the front to stand alongside Brigid and cause a groan of displeasure from the others along the way. She was a river goddess, and one of the few that Balor had not turned his lecherous gaze to in all the years they’d lived on those mountains.

  “How much longer?” she whined. She was tired and exhausted, Brigid knew, because everyone else was tired and exhausted. Nevertheless, the Hibernian goddess wasn’t in the mood for incessant whining.

  “Only a few more miles,” Brigid answered flatly. “We’ll stay the night, then head to Brú na Bóinne in the morning.”

  Brigid felt her skin prickle when Brú na Bóinne came out of her lips. It dredged up even darker nightmares than the ones she left behind. The other goddesses did not know this, however, for whom Brú na Bóinne had always been the opposite experience from the mountains.

  That made the burden of memories Brigid carried all the more difficult. She bore it alone, biting her tongue and not letting them know about the darkness that lurked in the place or in the heart of the King who led it, so they could defeat Balor once and for all.

  Boann was not happy with her answer. The river near the Brú had been her home for much of her life before Balor had grabbed her. She didn’t want to stay in some halfway house where Brigid planned to meet up with Eithne once again. She didn’t want to wait on that Fomorian trollop, her partner, and whatever child they’d created.

  She wanted to go now.

  “What if we ran instead?” she asked.

  “Don’t try it,” Brigid snapped. But Boann was already off, scampering through the heavy marshes and leaving the other goddesses in the dust.

  Brigid ran. She could’ve nestled Boann up in her grasp much quicker than a chase, but damn it she wanted to have a little race anyway. She wanted to feel her sandals snapping and treading over the dark ground again.

  She wanted to feel alive.

  So she lifted up her skirt and ran after Boann, careful not to move fast too lest she slip and fall into a pile of muck.

  Sometimes she would come across a puddle of water as she moved. There was a redheaded woman in her mid forties reflected back at her, with roots that were starting to go grey. She felt it was the age best to present while leading a group of goddesses.

  She had presented herself as older in the past, and also much younger. Balor had preferred it when she looked younger. Much younger than the girl she was chasing right now. Sometimes Brigid even transformed herself into Boann when Balor gazed hungrily at her, who was none the wiser about the truth.

  She felt that dark emptiness in life creeping over her again. Clenching from inside her eyeballs, dragging her elsewhere, taking her into its palm. She picked up the pace, then started to flee.

  Boann moved into the waters — why was she a water goddess when she wanted to live among the trees? — then Brigid saw the dark shapes threading their way through the branches. Horrible creatures that came not from this world or the Otherworld, but had been crafted in spite to terrify others.

  They were Fomorians. A pair of them. Cursed with the same dark eyes, drenched in the nightmares Brigid had of Balor being upon her. Already they were climbing, searching for a river goddess to unravel her spirits at such a young age.

  Brigid screamed at Boann to stay in the highest branch she could find, before drawing in a sudden sharp breath that she only released once the Fomorians had started climbing the branches, their tentacles wrapping around them like Balor had done with Brigid.

  She thought of him when she released her breath, and suddenly out with it came a breath of fire that caught and tugged at anything that was in her way. The Fomorians. The grass. The tree and its most lowly branches. It all suddenly crumbled up into a cascade of red flames in which there was no escape.

  Balor would be lost among the flames. She wanted him to feel that. She wanted him to die at her hands, and not through this prophesied child Eithne and the rest of the Tuatha Dé Danann awaited on.

  It would happen. She wanted it to happen. Brigid gripped at the ends of her eyelids, pretending that the heat of the blast had been the source of her eye irritation, and not that dark, depressing feeling that her rapist was still out there, still not submerged in justice.

  Boann came down from the trees. Silent. Without a whisk of backtalk or backbiting in her veins now. She waited until Brigid had finished, then Brigid took her by the hand and they marched back to where the rest of the women were.