Isolde

The kirk bell tolled. Low. Heavy. A dirge rolling across the loch until the water itself seemed to shudder. It crawled through the glen, pressing down on the heather, bending stalk and stem until even the earth bowed beneath the sound.

From the pulpit the minister’s voice rose — sharp, merciless. Witches. Sinners. The syllables cracked like whips, flaying the air raw. His words curled over the crowd, a sermon of rot and ruin, naming the women who brewed with root and bone, who whispered into the flame, who held men’s eyes too long, too steady. The people drank it like blood.

I stood at the edge of the gathering, cloak wrapped tight around me, my hands hidden, pressed against my ribs as though I could cage the trembling. I told myself I was stone. I told myself I could bear the weight. Yet each word struck like a stone itself, thrown sharp, bruising, though none had yet left their hands. Not yet.

I knew the rhythm. Thunder first. Then silence, drawn taut. And after, the flare of violence — sudden, blinding, merciless. I had seen it. I had heard the screams. I knew.

Still, I could not look away.

His voice thickened, smoke rising, choking. And in the corner of my sight — always in the corner — the shimmer. Shapes shifting. Lights flickering at the edges of the world. My mother had called it fey sight. The gift of our blood. Something older than men. Something as old as time itself. A gift bestowed on the blessed fey lineage that ran in our veins, though we dared not speak of it now.

She said it as if gift could be comfort.
I called it burden.

The kirk doors sighed. I stepped into air that bit like iron filings and psalm-smoke. Hooves shifted to my left. A war-horse stood half in shadow, half in ash-pale light—black as a shut bible, breath fogging in slow, stern clouds.

He saw me first, not the man. Ears cutting the wind. A single stamp, bright ring of iron on frost-grit stone. Leather creaked; light crawled along buckles like captive fire.

I lifted my hand. Stopped. Touched nothing. Still he leaned, a weight of heat, a furnace under skin. The scent of him—sweat, oil, rain caught in mane—unraveled me more surely than sermons. I felt the old magic stir, the one my mother warned me to hide, and the horse felt it too. His great head lowered, as if to the bowl of my chest.

He knows you, the shadows whispered. He knows your root.

A step behind him: steel hissed like a breath drawn and mastered. Alasdair. Tall. Oath-bent. The horse and the man watched me with the same steady mercy, the same terrible restraint.

“I meant no offense,” I said, voice small as a fern in wind.

He shook his head once. Soft. “He chooses whom he chooses.”

“And his name?” I should not have asked.

“Athan,” he said. “He bears me. Or he refuses and I walk.”

The bell tolled again. Athan flicked an ear. I felt the sound in my teeth. I turned away before I could lean my cheek to his heat and call it sanctuary.

I knew the rhythm. Iron before fire. Prayer before ruin. And yet—the horse’s breath followed me like a blessing I did not deserve.

Alasdair

I should not have stared. God knows I should not. Yet I did.

The moment stretched—stretched until the air itself grew tight, a noose of silence around my throat. And when she turned from me, the loss cut sharp. As though I had been left behind on the field again. Abandoned among the dying.

I exhaled. Slow. Measured. Duty first. Always duty.

But the words rang hollow. Ash on the tongue. They crumbled against the memory of her eyes, fierce as psalms, fierce as flame.

At the kirk doors the men muttered. Their voices buzzed like hornets around the name—Buchanan. Creig. Spat like a curse. Too brash. Too wild. Steel always hungry in his hand, as though blood were bread to him.

I heard it. My blood heard it. The old fury rising, cold and iron-edged. The Buchanans—wolves dressed as men. They have always been trouble. And yet.

And yet I knew. Their wildness was not only hunger. It was older. Deeper. Not bound by kirk or crown. A root crawling beneath the earth, older than the loch itself. I felt its shadow stir when they spoke his name.

And her—

Isolde. She heard it too. I saw her shiver, as though firelight itself had burned a secret into her skin. For a breath, her eyes flashed storm, stone breaking beneath water’s weight.

The loch stirred. I swear it. I felt the air shift. As if some unseen covenant had been broken, or made.

I closed my eyes. Lord, keep me steady. But my prayer broke into fragments. Because I knew the truth that stalked me like shadow—

He is the wolf.
She is the fire.
And I—God help me—I am already undone.

Isolde

Night had no edges. Only breath. Only wet fern and the sallow whisper of owls. I went to the burn to rinse the kirk-smoke from my hair, and the water rose to meet me like hands.

Hoofbeats found the stones.

Not iron-slow. Not psalm-taught. Sparks bit the rock with each strike—quick, hungry, laughing. He stepped from hawthorn shadow like a piece of star-fall given body: dappled black, mane a snarl of storm, eyes lit from within as if a coal lived behind each pupil.

I did not move. The burn hushed around my ankles. He came on without halter, without bit, without any law but his own, and with each breath my marrow remembered a woman’s name older than mine.

Come no closer, I thought.

He came closer. Steamed at the throat, kiln-hot. The wild looked at me through him, and I felt the flame inside my chest answer before my mouth could shape refusal.

A voice was a weather break behind him. “He does not bow,” Creig said, as if proud of the blasphemy. “He runs with me. Or not at all.”

The stallion stretched his neck. Touched my palm. I saw it—Beltane fires on black hills, a handfast knot, a kiss that would split the world. Then water broke the vision. The burn leapt my knees, and the stallion laughed smoke.

I fled before I drowned on dry land.

But the night followed, hooves like a second heart. And in my blood a coal took root.

“Cindermane,” the villagers would whisper later, afraid to speak his true name.

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The Maiden in the Firelight

The Maiden in the Firelight

Scotland, 1640.

The braes burn with war. Kirk and crown tear the land apart, and clans bleed in their feuds. Amid the firelight, a maiden is marked by the goddess — and fate binds three souls in a knot that will not unravel.

Isolde — accused of witchcraft, wed to Douglas for protection, yet haunted by dreams of another.
Creag — wolf of the braes, sworn enemy of Douglas, who cannot deny the fire that blazes between them.
Alasdair — knight and husband, loyal yet shadowed, who loves her with a steadiness that could still save or destroy them all.

It is prophecy. It is passion. It is doom.
Around the fire, the goddess laughs, for this bond will echo beyond one lifetime. Desire will not be silenced, nor rivalry buried. The war of clans is only the beginning.

The Maiden in the Firelight is a tale of forbidden love and fierce loyalty, of twin flames and soul mates locked in a triangle that time itself cannot break.