TM: Religion

They came before my time, but the stories stay, woven in with our own. They speak of defeat. Of the staff of power that caused the druids to crumble. They speak of the banishing of the snakes, of the wisdom of the divine feminine driven from our shores and replaced with the legend of the Martyr. Men had long since driven us underground, claiming the Earth as their own, but they paid us homage, as was our due. They worshipped our Mother, our Elders. They left offerings for each of us, invoking our names to bless them, bring them victory.

And then they stopped, and the new priests came, speaking of mercy and forgiveness as they took our lives and twisted them into fairytales. The Children of Lir, they said, were freed from their pagan curse by their acceptance of the true light of the Christ, but I have seen those swans still, migrating from lake to lake, and their cries are haunting, chilling.

They walked our land and they twisted the tales to suit them. What they could not erase, they changed, as with Brigid, my King’s sister, my adopted aunt. They reduced her from Goddess, and set her in stone in their cathedrals and called her “saint.” No one asked her if she wished it, but still the people prayed, and because she loved them, still she listened, and her new role was cemented. My King’s son, they called the devil, for the horns that came from his head and his cloven hooves. He led the Wild Hunt, and they named it evil—demons on parade.

We were stripped of our legacy, the stories taken from spoken word to written, twisted and altered in subtle ways by the monks, striving to make us less than. A tribe from the North, they said, defeated and driven out or disappearing by intermarriage with the Milesians. Wise. Good farmers. Technologically advanced, so that those they conquered thought they did magic. They mangled it all until very little was left, except to those who sought carefully.

They tried to kill the Old Ways, instead of blending, but the heart of the people rejected our annihilation. They knew. It caught in their hearts, and they themselves resisted the new priests, changing them as much as they were changed, until Old and New mingled across our land. Where priests search the mists for answers and pagans make the sign of the cross, and something new and unlike anywhere else was born and sustains itself on the paths through time.

There’s magic in Ireland still, in the land and in the people who remember, who will not release what they know to be true.

TM: Two letters

My darling son,

Do you know how much I love you? I wouldn’t be surprised if you don’t. If anyone in this world deserves the “worst mother” award, I sometimes think I have to be her. I don’t have any excuses, or none that are enough. I showed an extreme lack of discernment that I can only attribute to my own selfish grief. I thought you would be better with them, in his world, away from everything that I am. I only seem to destroy that which I love, and I didn’t want to turn it on you.

But I did anyway. I left you with that awful woman. I didn’t know how your mortal blood would effect you, but I should have warned you there were consequences to what we are. I don’t know if it could have saved her. I didn’t know. That is as true as my love for you. Had I known, I would have warned you, but even so…I do not know what we could have done to prevent it. I am no good at teaching temperance. I knew what I was when I went to your father. I knew what could happen, and I went anyway, driven by my own needs and my own desires. What could I have taught you about control? Still…I would have tried, to spare you that grief that I know far too well.

I tried to protect you from me. Know that. In the end, I chose wrongly. Perhaps in Faerie things would have been different. You at least would have grown knowing that you were loved and adored. I did so many things wrong, and yet, you have never turned from me. You’re always there, and often I know that you are the one watching out for me, protecting me in ways I never did for you. I don’t know why you do it. I don’t deserve it.

But I love you more for it. For being there. For loving me. For forgiving me.

You are the most precious thing in the world to me. There is nothing I would not do for you, no one I would not destroy for harming you. Know that, even if it is the only token of a mother’s love that I know how to give. You are my heart. You are the best thing I ever did. And if it takes millennia, I will make up for all my mistakes in your childhood. I am so proud of you, my son.

Always.
Aislinn

Mother,

I never wanted to be a princess. I do not want the throne. Not now, not then. I only, ever, always wanted to be free to pursue the things I love. Music. Art. The passion of the written word. Dancing in mortal nights, and dreaming under Faerie stars. Your ambitions were your own. When you call me a failure as a daughter, I try and forgive. I try to not hear you. Because I am not a failure. I am my father’s daughter, and I am fulfilling the purpose to which I was born. It was never to sit on a Daoine Sidhe throne, but to walk among mortals and bring beauty to this world. Byron. Shelley. Oscar. Tennyson. Van Gogh. Monet. Liszt. Mine, all of them, mine. Works that live on, breathe on, spiral through time and space and they will be remembered.

The need for personal glory is yours, not mine. I do not want your Power.

I am not a failure. My father would be proud of me, is proud of me.

And that is enough.

Aislinn

OMP: Something Blue

She stares at it with a curious expression, fingers sliding over the wood. He speaks softly, as he seems to do everything else, treating her like a wild thing that might disappear if he makes any sudden movements. He isn’t far off, and it disconcerts her a little to realize it. She doesn’t like being known.

In that same careful tone he tells her what it is, what it can do. When she asks what sort of magic it is, he blinks and says it is not. It is science. That gets a dismissive frown, because science is a thing of humans, of lesser beings who have not conquered the mysteries of the universe. He lifts one eyebrow and asks her if her people can travel through space and time. She does not deign to answer, stroking the wood of the box with a sort of reverence. It pulses, is alive, and somehow it seems to know her, though she thinks it is like him, knowing the Other, elsewhere. She is not her, and they would both do well to learn that.

But just like the Other, when he opens the door, she steps in eagerly, always too curious for her own good.


OOC Note: Based on RP with thecricketer

RoTM 1.66.3 -- Learning and Living

Disce quasi semper victurus, vive quasi cras moriturus. - Learn as if always going to live, live as if tomorrow going to die.

So many of them follow this tenet, and it is good. They are as hungry as I, always reaching, searching, wanting to learn, wanting to find just one thing more to pull into themselves, absorb, mutate and use to give birth to something new, something brilliant. They embrace life to the fullest, reaching higher toward the sky, and sinking lower into the depths. They are flame and I am the moth, always drawn and circling. How can I not be, when they shine so brightly? It’s as if they know consciously the bargain their subconscious wrought, even when they will not acknowledge the fantastic bits of it all. They always grasp for more knowledge, more beauty, as if it will sustain them, and then they fling away parts of themselves throughout their worlds, because they know so well that it will not.

There is something marvelous in their doomed beauty that I have never been able to walk away from. I don’t know how any of my kind ever could.