It was Sunday, December the 4th, although it would become the 5th in a couple of hours. It was as cold as a refrigerator that night, but it was not snowing. The buffering from the Atlantic made summer heat and winter frost rare, with a narrow temperature range. Still, 4.4 celsius was enough to put more than a simple chill in Cian's bones as he trekked across the bridge from Poll Raithní to Gob an Choire. More than once did he stumble over his shoes, twice planting his backside on the century-old swing span bridge's bitumen.
Cian's little spinning on the memorial to the founder of the National Land League was due to the traces of toffee-tasting poitín still lingering in his system to keep the cold at bay. He was a lightweight when it came to alcohol, brought on by a low tolerance he nursed by rarely indulging in mountain dew or any other dew. But tonight, the mayor of Poll Raithní needed pot valiance, and as a sharp wind scraped across the Acaill Sound, he decided more was needed and was thankful he had the foresight to bring along some more of the oily, colorless, 100-proof poitín. Forty millimeters could be found in a deep yellowish-green glass bottle that once held 11 ounces before Cian had gotten the letter that morning. The letter demanded that he come later that night.
The mayor decided to spend his Sunday off from work judiciously imbibing from his birthday gift from his secretary that he had never gotten around to tapping into, getting drunk, getting hungover, and recovering from a hangover. Cian took the near-empty bottle out from the inside of his jacket and held the glass to his lips. As the mayor imbibed, in a bout of alcohol-induced appreciation for the surroundings, he looked up to the night sky. It was so rare to find a winter's night with no clouds in the sky, and the alien moon and stars in the heavens, usually obscured under gray clouds, reminded Cian he was far from home. Through the disorientation from the last dregs of his bottle's contents, the stars took on a more familiar quality; the stars pulsated with a dazzling array of colors, and the moon looked bigger, closer to the planet it orbited like it wasn't 250,00 miles away.
The last of the burning moonshine was sucked into Cian's throat, and he resumed walking after fumbling the bottle back into his coat, eventually making it to the village of Gob an Choire. Behind him, Poll Raithní twinkled as bright as the embers of a steady fire, once a little village just like its neighboring settlement on Oileán Acla, but under him, the mayor, it had grown to a bustling little town of around 5,000 people. Gob an Choire, however, like the rest of the peat-bog dominated Oileán Acla, remained static, clinging to its past; insular, traditional, proud. Cian swallowed a wad of saliva with an audible gulp that seemed to echo on the limestone walls of the buildings that flanked the deserted road. The Dappled Deer was a short walk from the bridge, but getting to the pub's front door felt like it took an hour, and after knocking on the door once Cian got there, it felt like another hour waiting for the door to open.
"Tá tú déanach." Nial Rafferty, The Dappled Deer's publican, finally opened the door; a short man with a bald head, pencil-pointed mustache, and a limp in his right leg. The limp was a complication of his survival of infantile paralysis brought on by Lyme disease. He was born after the invasion between the Republic of Ireland and the Sovereign Principality of Éire. There weren't many medical resources in this rural part of the country in that twilight, but he survived with a limp to show for it. 'Tá tú déanach' means 'you are late' in Irish Gaelic, and responded appropriately.
"Of course I'm late," Cian replied as cooly as he could in the language that beats the air hard like cold waves crashing into the shore. "Don't make it sound like I ever considered coming here tonight of my own volition. You and your cohorts' letter significantly dampened my mood, so I spent most of today trying to remedy that the best way I know."
"Drinking." Niall flattened his lips to a thin line while his eyes squinted at Cian's face with a twitch of his nose. "You stink of the 'water of life.' That's not like you."
"What I do in the privacy of my own home on my allotted day of rest is my business and no one else's." Cian stiffened, trying to sound intimidating, but he suspected it sounded more like defensive whining. "Will you let me in, or shall I freeze on your doorstep?"
"Come in and get yourself warm, Mr. Mayor." Niall Rafferty stood at the door frame for a few moments more, an indiscernible expression on his round face, before finally standing aside so that Cian could enter The Dappled Deer. The late-night guest had to bow his head to avoid bumping it on the lintel, as he was an unnaturally tall man, standing six feet and seven inches, lean muscled with spindly arms and legs awkwardly jutting from his long thin line of a torso. Ever the politician, even on his off day, he was dressed in his signature brown tweed suit, lavender dress shirt, and striped tie. No one has ever seen him wear anything else.
A trio of men was sitting on stools around the high table closest to the bar. Each of them was looking expectantly at Cian as he entered the pub. "What took you so long?" One of them spoke; Oisín Ó Daire, the mayor of Gob an Choire, built like a rock scored with wind-swept wrinkles, a physique commonplace throughout this part of Éire where people had to cut their peat for fuel, one of the most miserable and laborious processes known to humanity.
"Hangover," Cian curtly muttered as he strolled not-so-confidently to the trio of men who had demanded his presence. Maybe he would have kept a better time if he had not lost his prized watch. It had been missing for a week now, a souvenir from home; a bronze pocket watch with two crossed membranous wings surrounded by a wreath of tree branches traced on its top. Since losing it, his brain had been plagued with images of its smashed, its casing bent, a litter of cogwheels and springs blooming from its shattered dial.
"You don't drink." The rival mayor frowned, pushing the empty stool with his foot toward Cian, gesturing him to sit down.
"Your letter encouraged me to try new things." The mayor from the other side of the bridge confessed. "Congratulations are for you three; never before have I read something that made me vomit from the stress it gave me. I didn't think there was a way to construct words into such anxiety-inducing sentences like that."
"The Irish language is rich." Hallissey, the man on the left of Cian, replied. If there was any sympathy in his eyes, it was muted by the accusatory tone in his voice. "Get him some water, please, Niall." The publican silently stepped behind the bar. Conor Hallissey was the president of the Mayo campus of the Atlantic Technological University, having traveled some ways from Mayo's most important city to be here tonight. Cian had met Hallissey before. Cian's town is famous for sending most of its kids to Hallissey's campus, which is renowned for fostering environmental engineers. Mayo was well-known for its peat bog restoration projects and sustainable development. They both were expected to guide students toward jobs in natural sciences and engineering; it was an order from on high.
But the man who was of prime importance to Cian was the one who has remained silent so far; his secretary. Little, timid Shay, always quiet, soft-spoken, deceptively fragile-looking. Cian hired him because he was prospective, shy but always on the alert, qualities that he thought would translate to proficiency in organizing documents, answering calls, and assisting him with his projects. But his eyes saw too much, and now he has organized this late-night meeting and summoned Cian through blackmail. "...It was nothing personal…Mr. Twohig…” He eventually muttered, not looking Cian in the eye.
"...Is that your attempt to make me feel better?" Cian felt a flash of anger course through him, gritting his teeth behind his closed mouth. "Are you trying to say that your actions were divorced from emotions, that I conjure nothing inside of you? Well, thank you, Shay! I'm so glad you don't have anything to justify what you're doing to me outside of cold indifference!" The mayor raised his voice but did not shout, clenching his fists underneath the high-top table as he stared daggers at his secretary. Shay flinched under the verbal bombardment but didn't express any apology.
"That's enough, Mr. Mayor." Niall set down a glass of water in front of him, a pleading expression on his face. "No one can know about what's happening here. Please, stay calm." It was a tall order, and the publican knew it, but Cian snorted and took a swig of water before earnestly trying.
"If it makes you feel any better, this is very much a personal matter to me, Mr. Twohig." Oisin sneered as his sentence came to Cian's surname. He looked at Cian the same way Cian looked at Shay, his face filled with feelings of betrayal. They were on cordial terms before today - no more. "Or would you like to be called by your real name?"
"NO!" Cian shouted before covering his mouth with his hand, his eyes wide and the same nervous sweat from this morning creeping again on his brow as his stomach did backflips. The four other men in the room jolted from the outburst, the skinny man's emotions fully displayed. He wasn't angry - he was afraid. “M-my name…is C-Cian Twohig. I'm from County Li-Limerick, a family of dairy farmers raised me, and I'm human. I'm hu- I'm a human." Cian whimpered frantically, spitting out his lies to convince himself rather than anyone else.
The four men had been enlightened to Cian's true nature. He was...
Choice 1: ...A Changeling.
Choice 2: ...A Pony.
Choice 3: ...A Griffon.
Choice 4: ...A Dragon.
Choice 5: ...A Human (wait what)
Cian's little spinning on the memorial to the founder of the National Land League was due to the traces of toffee-tasting poitín still lingering in his system to keep the cold at bay. He was a lightweight when it came to alcohol, brought on by a low tolerance he nursed by rarely indulging in mountain dew or any other dew. But tonight, the mayor of Poll Raithní needed pot valiance, and as a sharp wind scraped across the Acaill Sound, he decided more was needed and was thankful he had the foresight to bring along some more of the oily, colorless, 100-proof poitín. Forty millimeters could be found in a deep yellowish-green glass bottle that once held 11 ounces before Cian had gotten the letter that morning. The letter demanded that he come later that night.
The mayor decided to spend his Sunday off from work judiciously imbibing from his birthday gift from his secretary that he had never gotten around to tapping into, getting drunk, getting hungover, and recovering from a hangover. Cian took the near-empty bottle out from the inside of his jacket and held the glass to his lips. As the mayor imbibed, in a bout of alcohol-induced appreciation for the surroundings, he looked up to the night sky. It was so rare to find a winter's night with no clouds in the sky, and the alien moon and stars in the heavens, usually obscured under gray clouds, reminded Cian he was far from home. Through the disorientation from the last dregs of his bottle's contents, the stars took on a more familiar quality; the stars pulsated with a dazzling array of colors, and the moon looked bigger, closer to the planet it orbited like it wasn't 250,00 miles away.
The last of the burning moonshine was sucked into Cian's throat, and he resumed walking after fumbling the bottle back into his coat, eventually making it to the village of Gob an Choire. Behind him, Poll Raithní twinkled as bright as the embers of a steady fire, once a little village just like its neighboring settlement on Oileán Acla, but under him, the mayor, it had grown to a bustling little town of around 5,000 people. Gob an Choire, however, like the rest of the peat-bog dominated Oileán Acla, remained static, clinging to its past; insular, traditional, proud. Cian swallowed a wad of saliva with an audible gulp that seemed to echo on the limestone walls of the buildings that flanked the deserted road. The Dappled Deer was a short walk from the bridge, but getting to the pub's front door felt like it took an hour, and after knocking on the door once Cian got there, it felt like another hour waiting for the door to open.
"Tá tú déanach." Nial Rafferty, The Dappled Deer's publican, finally opened the door; a short man with a bald head, pencil-pointed mustache, and a limp in his right leg. The limp was a complication of his survival of infantile paralysis brought on by Lyme disease. He was born after the invasion between the Republic of Ireland and the Sovereign Principality of Éire. There weren't many medical resources in this rural part of the country in that twilight, but he survived with a limp to show for it. 'Tá tú déanach' means 'you are late' in Irish Gaelic, and responded appropriately.
"Of course I'm late," Cian replied as cooly as he could in the language that beats the air hard like cold waves crashing into the shore. "Don't make it sound like I ever considered coming here tonight of my own volition. You and your cohorts' letter significantly dampened my mood, so I spent most of today trying to remedy that the best way I know."
"Drinking." Niall flattened his lips to a thin line while his eyes squinted at Cian's face with a twitch of his nose. "You stink of the 'water of life.' That's not like you."
"What I do in the privacy of my own home on my allotted day of rest is my business and no one else's." Cian stiffened, trying to sound intimidating, but he suspected it sounded more like defensive whining. "Will you let me in, or shall I freeze on your doorstep?"
"Come in and get yourself warm, Mr. Mayor." Niall Rafferty stood at the door frame for a few moments more, an indiscernible expression on his round face, before finally standing aside so that Cian could enter The Dappled Deer. The late-night guest had to bow his head to avoid bumping it on the lintel, as he was an unnaturally tall man, standing six feet and seven inches, lean muscled with spindly arms and legs awkwardly jutting from his long thin line of a torso. Ever the politician, even on his off day, he was dressed in his signature brown tweed suit, lavender dress shirt, and striped tie. No one has ever seen him wear anything else.
A trio of men was sitting on stools around the high table closest to the bar. Each of them was looking expectantly at Cian as he entered the pub. "What took you so long?" One of them spoke; Oisín Ó Daire, the mayor of Gob an Choire, built like a rock scored with wind-swept wrinkles, a physique commonplace throughout this part of Éire where people had to cut their peat for fuel, one of the most miserable and laborious processes known to humanity.
"Hangover," Cian curtly muttered as he strolled not-so-confidently to the trio of men who had demanded his presence. Maybe he would have kept a better time if he had not lost his prized watch. It had been missing for a week now, a souvenir from home; a bronze pocket watch with two crossed membranous wings surrounded by a wreath of tree branches traced on its top. Since losing it, his brain had been plagued with images of its smashed, its casing bent, a litter of cogwheels and springs blooming from its shattered dial.
"You don't drink." The rival mayor frowned, pushing the empty stool with his foot toward Cian, gesturing him to sit down.
"Your letter encouraged me to try new things." The mayor from the other side of the bridge confessed. "Congratulations are for you three; never before have I read something that made me vomit from the stress it gave me. I didn't think there was a way to construct words into such anxiety-inducing sentences like that."
"The Irish language is rich." Hallissey, the man on the left of Cian, replied. If there was any sympathy in his eyes, it was muted by the accusatory tone in his voice. "Get him some water, please, Niall." The publican silently stepped behind the bar. Conor Hallissey was the president of the Mayo campus of the Atlantic Technological University, having traveled some ways from Mayo's most important city to be here tonight. Cian had met Hallissey before. Cian's town is famous for sending most of its kids to Hallissey's campus, which is renowned for fostering environmental engineers. Mayo was well-known for its peat bog restoration projects and sustainable development. They both were expected to guide students toward jobs in natural sciences and engineering; it was an order from on high.
But the man who was of prime importance to Cian was the one who has remained silent so far; his secretary. Little, timid Shay, always quiet, soft-spoken, deceptively fragile-looking. Cian hired him because he was prospective, shy but always on the alert, qualities that he thought would translate to proficiency in organizing documents, answering calls, and assisting him with his projects. But his eyes saw too much, and now he has organized this late-night meeting and summoned Cian through blackmail. "...It was nothing personal…Mr. Twohig…” He eventually muttered, not looking Cian in the eye.
"...Is that your attempt to make me feel better?" Cian felt a flash of anger course through him, gritting his teeth behind his closed mouth. "Are you trying to say that your actions were divorced from emotions, that I conjure nothing inside of you? Well, thank you, Shay! I'm so glad you don't have anything to justify what you're doing to me outside of cold indifference!" The mayor raised his voice but did not shout, clenching his fists underneath the high-top table as he stared daggers at his secretary. Shay flinched under the verbal bombardment but didn't express any apology.
"That's enough, Mr. Mayor." Niall set down a glass of water in front of him, a pleading expression on his face. "No one can know about what's happening here. Please, stay calm." It was a tall order, and the publican knew it, but Cian snorted and took a swig of water before earnestly trying.
"If it makes you feel any better, this is very much a personal matter to me, Mr. Twohig." Oisin sneered as his sentence came to Cian's surname. He looked at Cian the same way Cian looked at Shay, his face filled with feelings of betrayal. They were on cordial terms before today - no more. "Or would you like to be called by your real name?"
"NO!" Cian shouted before covering his mouth with his hand, his eyes wide and the same nervous sweat from this morning creeping again on his brow as his stomach did backflips. The four other men in the room jolted from the outburst, the skinny man's emotions fully displayed. He wasn't angry - he was afraid. “M-my name…is C-Cian Twohig. I'm from County Li-Limerick, a family of dairy farmers raised me, and I'm human. I'm hu- I'm a human." Cian whimpered frantically, spitting out his lies to convince himself rather than anyone else.
The four men had been enlightened to Cian's true nature. He was...
Choice 1: ...A Changeling.
Choice 2: ...A Pony.
Choice 3: ...A Griffon.
Choice 4: ...A Dragon.
Choice 5: ...A Human (wait what)
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April 19
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