Light in the Darkness
This article is a part of Spooktober 2024 and is still a work in progress. Written for the Aberration prompt.Niamh Ó Conaill fidgeted nervously as she stood next to Cahir Hancóc, rolling a worn old coin between her fingers a bit faster than was naturally possible for a mortal. They were standing on at the top of the Hancóc castle, magically hidden in the shadows of the ruins of Dún Másc, looking out as they watched the Scottish fragment of the Hancóc sect arrive for the meeting that both sides had agreed upon. Ever since the split had happened in 1646 when part of the sect had decided to stop upholding the deal they had made with her mother when Marie Smith had come to Ireland in 1638, there had been two opposing sides in the sect. Tirlagh Hancóc, who was still the current head of the Irish half of the sect, had agreed to help hide her mother from her own clan, even knowing about the deal she had made with the vampire Ebio, and Enrie Hancóc had ended up raising enough dissenters to split them apart. They had at least made a deal to meet in person every fifty years a few years after the split, to try and keep some kind of connection between the two halves of the sect. What the Scottish half didn't know about was her: birth daughter to Marie Smith but the blood cursed daughter of the Walking Death, Cael Ward. Given that they hadn't agreed with protecting her mother, she couldn't imagine that they would react well to knowing that Rohan Hancóc had raised her alongside his own son and daughters. Ayne, Cahir, and Elinor at least all loved her as their own, calling her their sister, but they were all in their fiftieth and fortieth years now, getting older and slower. And she should have looked of age with Cahir, her body perhaps beginning to grow frailer, perhaps her dark hair graying...but the vampiric blood that had tainted her mother's womb had trapped her. She had only reached the age of seventeen before Cael Ward's blood had damned her, leaving her a slight girl with coltish limbs that had once bore the promise of height and still the baby fat of youth in her face. After a long moment of them standing there, Cahir's hand slid over her own and he said with amusement, "You're going to wear a hole in that old coin, ialtóg bheag." Niamh let out an annoyed huff at the nickname her brother had used since they were children, after he had found her lying down at the top of the castle watching the local bats as they circled the ruins above them, before tucking the coin away. "What's got your nerves so wrecked?" "They don't know about me," she pointed out, not tearing her eyes away from the group slowly approaching. "If they find out that Tirlagh let Father keep me, it's going to just pull the sect further apart. And I'm not even really a part of the sect." "Of course you are," Cahir objected. His hands fell on her shoulders and he turned her to face him, bending slightly to look her in the eye. "You are my sister, Niamh, even if we don't share blood. Our father never thought of you as just his ward and neither did we." She knew this. Of course, she knew this. Yet it didn't stop the horrible wrenching feeling in her belly that her very existence might be responsible in causing harm to the only family she had ever been allowed to have. Shaking her head slightly, Niamh lifted her free hand to gently grip his wrist as she hissed, "You know what they will say as soon as they hear my name, Cahir. You know. They will know what I am. An abomination. An aberration. A thing that should never have existed!" Her voice grew more and more bitter as she continued to speak and her brother's expression grew ever more heartbroken. "They'll tell you that Tirlagh should have killed me in the womb rather than allow a blood cursed to live." "And they will be wrong!" Cahir exclaimed, his grip tightening on her shoulders. Then he stepped closer, pulling her into his chest and wrapping his arms around her. Niamh huffed out a breath into the fabric of his shirt but slung her arms around his waist, inhaling the scent of herbs, fire, and the New World tobacco he'd grown fond of over the past few years. Cahir pressed a kiss into the top of her head and then stated, his voice pained, "I promised Father long ago that I would take care of you for as long as I could. As long as I had air in my lungs and fire at my command. I swore an oath in blood, Niamh." The knowledge that Rohan, the only father she had ever known, had wanted to make sure she was taken care of hurt. Like a knife to her heart, reopening the wound that she had barely managed to sew shut after his death only eleven years before. And her dear brother, her beloved Cahir, who had been her ever watchful shadow and playmate given their only year apart as children, had promised to take care of her. Even while he was getting older and grayer and his own children were older than her own appearance now. Tears prickled at her eyes and she wrenched them shut, burying her face into his chest as she hugged him with all of her strength for a moment before releasing her grip. Niamh clung to him, her hands tangled in his shirt, and gasped, "I can't keep doing this. Loving all of you and then losing you. I can't, Cahir. It hurts too much." "Oh," he breathed and his arms tightened around her. "Oh, ialtóg bheag." Niamh could smell the salt of his tears as they fell into her hair. They stayed like that for a long time, clinging to each other, until the door that led up to the top of the castle opened, admitting their youngest sister, Elinor Hancóc. "Oh!" she exclaimed, letting the wood bang shut behind them as she hurried over. "What's happening?" she demanded kindly, touching their faces and brushing away the tears that had dried on their faces. "Niamh? Cahir? Are you alright?" "We're fine, Eli, we're fine," Cahir assured. He then looked at her and said softly, "Niamh thinks that the Scots will call her an aberration. That they'll say that Tirlagh should have killed her." Elinor gasped and turned to Niamh, cupping her sister's face and pressing their foreheads together, as they had used to do as girls. It was how Niamh, five years older, had calmed the younger Elinor when she had cried during storms, the only one able to do so. They had slept, limbs tangled with Elinor's ear pressed into Niamh's chest over her heart...until the day that Niamh had died and become truly half-cursed. The night after that horrible night, Elinor had climbed into bed with her, pressing their foreheads together before she had urged Niamh to lie with her ear against her sister's heart instead. It had been a bold, brave, foolish thing for a twelve year-old child to do with a blood cursed still struggling with their new hunger. The motion brought Niamh to tears and she leaned into Elinor as her sister - now in her forty-second year with a son of twenty years and a daughter of seventeen - angrily declared, "If those bastards who couldn't keep a promise to a desperate, scared woman even dare to look at you wrong, I will string them up from the top of the tower myself. I'll do things that would make the worst vampire flinch! You are our sister, ours, and no coward who couldn't bear to keep a simple oath will make me stop loving you. Do you hear me, Niamh Ó Conaill?" "I hear you," she gasped in reply. "I hear you." Niamh then shuddered and pulled away, just enough to look up at them both with fear in her eyes. "But," she said softly, "I don't know if I can bear to watch you die. Either of you or Ayne. Grane and Jovane, Arte, Keane, Mortagh. Their children and their children after. Over and over again, all I am ever going to be able to do is watch you all die." Then she got angry and exclaimed, "If that isn't an aberration, then what is it?!" Elinor pulled her close and then tugged Cahir in, both of them wrapping themselves around her. The were both taller, though Elinor wasn't by much, and Niamh sighed, closing her eyes as she breathed in their scents. Trying to imprint them on her mind so she would never forget. Cahir's fire, herbs, and tobacco alongside Elinor's wood smoke, bitter greens, and iron tang like hot metal on a forge. "You aren't an aberration, little bat," Cahir murmured, forgoing using the Irish for once. "Not like how they would mean. You're our sister, who was born different. Nothing more, nothing less." "And we," Elinor said sharply, "are going to forever live here," as she kissed Niamh's forehead. "Us, Father, Ayne, our children, our grandchildren, and our children's children's children. It will be hard, of course it will be, but you will live and love again, sister. Yet this family right here? It will always be there for you. We'll make sure of it." "I don't think I'm strong enough," Niamh whispered. Cahir sighed and then she felt him bend, his lips pressing a kiss into the side of her head, before he spoke. "It has never been about strength, little sister. We fear for you too and what's to come for you, of course we do." Niamh turned to look at him, tears half blinding her, and he smiled through his own as he cupped her face between his hands. "There is always some light in the darkness," he continued, his voice almost a whisper now. "Mother's favorite phrase, you remember." "I remember." "That's all you need to do," Elinor whispered. "Remember. And we'll be there." It wasn't the same. Memories couldn't love or hug or press their forehead to yours or call you little bat. But it would have to be enough. It would have to be. Clinging to them for a long moment in silence, Niamh broke it by asking, "You would really string someone up from the tower if they called me names, Eli?" Elinor burst into laughter at the question and, just like that, the bitter sadness that had felt so heavy a moment before lifted. "At least until Cahir runs up to cut them down," her youngest sister teased. Their brother laughed and replied, "If it's Neavan, I'll at least let you keep the bitter old bastard strung up for half a spell before I run up. Now, come on. Are we ready to face the Scots and get this meeting over with? Then we never have to see their bitter faces for another fifty years." Niamh beamed through the tears and slid her hands into each of theirs, nodding sharply. "Ready as I shall ever be," she declared. For the Scottish sect. For her family dying. For facing the long centuries.
ialtóg bheag - little bat | Irish (via Google Translate)
Timeframe: 1700
Location: County Kerry, Ireland
Event: Niamh Ó Conaill, frozen in time by her cursed blood, ends up spilling her fears for her future to her adoptive brother Cahir Hancóc and her sister Elinor Hancóc. And they, in turn, detail their own for her future.
Consquences: In the end, Niamh finds a way that she thinks may lead to her being able to accept the long life she has ahead of her.
The younger sister of Darragh and Daman Ó Conaill was hidden from the world for a long time, adopted by Rohan Hancóc after her mother came covered in blood to his door. Despite being blood cursed, Rohan raised her as his daughter and his children by birth also saw her as such, a trend which has continued to present day - though only some of Cahir Hancóc's descendants still acknowledge her. While she does think of the Hancock sect as her family, one day she hopes to still be able to reunite with her brothers.
The only son of Rohan Hancóc, he grew up with Niamh Ó Conaill as his sister - never knowing life without her as she came to their family when he was only a year old. As he and his blood sisters aged while Niamh didn't, he saw the struggles that she was going to have and did his best to stall them. He gave his sons, Arte and Mortagh, the sole task of making certain that their aunt never felt like she could not come home to her family.
The youngest daughter of Rohan Hancóc, she was five years younger than her adopted sister. Niamh was the only one who could calm a crying Elinor during thunderstorms and they grew very close despite their age difference. When her sister's cursed blood took over, Elinor made it her goal that she would become her big sister's protector when she needed it most. As Niamh had protected her from storms, Elinor would protect her from anything that came for her.
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