(Warning: This a horror story.)

She slew all three before he woke.

Still clutching the wet knife, she stood at the passage tomb’s silent heart, barely able to breathe in expectation of his waking as the grave’s own dead-cold breath sank through bloodstained clothes into her shivering flesh.

She yelped and almost dropped the knife as he threw off the stone slab before her like a blanket and inhaled the air still moist with staling blood. He rose, a man as tall and straight as the spear he carried, a mighty giant from a dim, misremembered past. The monks’ scribblings had not prepared her for the Formorian. His kind were the first inhabitants of this land, or rather the first to survive, almost gods who long ago returned to the sea and earth that birthed them. The scribes had written of them as either beautiful or monstrously ugly, but in truth, the one-eyed man perfectly embodied both states at once.

He spoke to her in a language she didn’t recognize. On and on, he intoned, a torrent of words she couldn’t comprehend that flooded the chamber with their mocking echoes.

Silence fell. Her lips trembled with the urge to speak, but wonder and awe had robbed her voice.

His hand reached so gracefully toward her the first she knew of it was its touch as soft as a dying breath against her lips. She flinched from it, but he had already drawn something out of her, a thread of her soul, perhaps.

“Why have you have woken me before the Winter has passed?” he asked in the language she spoke, her language.

“But it is mid-summer,” she said, pointing to the bright mouth of the shaft behind her. A shroud of gore covered the little bodies on the floor. Bloodstains on the spiral-covered walls mapped out the death-throes carved by her knife. She was so drenched in blood she might have been one of them herself. She had carried out the rite exactly as proscribed, to the last pitiless detail.

“Winter isn’t a time of year,” he said with the patience of someone explaining to an infant. “It isn’t the cold. It’s death, and death is due to stalk this land for many more centuries.”

“But we need you now!” she pleaded, suddenly aware she was alone with him in the chamber. Nobody else had dared to do what had to be done. “Invaders have come and bring our doom.” It was some of their fruit who lay dead and broken on the floor.

With a weary sigh, the giant drove his spear through her chest. He struck with such force and delicacy she didn’t feel her skewering, even as her lifeblood gushed from the wound.

“To me, you’re all invaders,” he said.

It was only then that she screamed, the passage’s echo taking up her last cry so that she screamed threefold.

© Noel Coughlan