Chapter Text
Ash ‘n Bone
Now is answered what you ask of the runes:
It is the fool who meddles with the Stanes
It was an awful place. An in-between place. The long, low, mournful wind whistled right through Merida, chilling her to the core. Sharp gusts cut her hands and cheeks, while grey mists swam and shifted into tall thin figures, their long fingers drifting steadily closer.
Merida shivered. The cold was unbearable. Ice crystals had started to form on her hair and eyelashes. It wasn't the crisp, fresh winter mornings of Dunbroch, either. The air here was damp and stale, and left a rotten taste in her mouth that made her think of mouldering leaves at the back of a graveyard.
A sudden, swift movement through the fog sent a chill finger up her spine.
"This is stupid. This is so stupid," she muttered to herself, bouncing on the balls of her feet and clapping her hands together. "Come on, Merida. You've faced worse than this, girl!"
Gritting her teeth, she forced her feet forward and scanned the swirling mists. Merida wasn't she what she was looking for exactly, but she knew instinctively she was searching for something.
Suddenly, her skin prickled. The unmistakable breathy cry of a wisp had whispered close to her ear. She spun towards it, expecting to find the familiar puff of blue flame beckoning, but the sight that met her instead caused a little squeak of fright to escape her throat. It took Merida a moment to realise the stone figures towering now over her were not human, and another to calm her hammering heart.
Cautiously, she walked further into the centre of the stone circle - a place all too unpleasantly familiar. The old folk of Dunbroch called them the Clanach Sluagh; a foul set of fourteen jagged black teeth that grinned out of the hillside, their roots buried deep in the rock. The presence of the stones seemed to thrum with energy, and brought to her mind an image of twisted figures strange creatures frozen for all time at the very moment of their death.
There was a wrongness to the stones encircling her. Merida's gaze fell upon one stone in particular. She glared.
The fourteenth stane had been brought down five years ago by her mother, Queen Elinor of Dunbroch, crushing the demon bear Mor’du beneath its weight. And yet, there it stood before her. She recognised the megalith by its crooked back and great height, having a good four feet on its thirteen brothers.
There was something strange about the inky blackness of its surface against the cool grey har. Loneliness radiated from the megalith; of more than that. Something troubled, but cunning and trembling with power.
And angry, so very angry.
Merida did not notice she was reaching for it before she snatched her hand back, as if burned.
She looked down at her hand in shock. Her body had seemed to move without her permission. Even now, the giant megalith was drawing her in. It had a magnetic quality that was impossible to resist, even though every fibre of her body was now screaming at her to stop, to run, to hide. There was something human about the way it bent its crooked peak into the wind, and the air whistling through the stane’s nooks and crannies almost sounded like pleas to her ears.
She crept closer, unable to resist. If she touched it.. if she touched it, would it turn to look at her? Would a face appear in those sharp angles and jagged edges? It was so much darker than its brethren and the spider-webbing of cracks across its surface pulsed like tiny veins. The whispering was growing louder. Now she was sure it wasn’t the wind, and her heart caught in her throat. Her eyes drew upward and in that moment a thunder clap split the sky, followed by a flash of lightning which drained the remaining colour from the land. Blinding light transformed shadows to ink and pale to white, and then she saw it:
Black hands like thorny branches, great maws like gaping caves. A dreadful gawping face in the rock.
Merida heard herself screaming even as she woke, her bed sodden with sweat as she scrambled to untangle herself from the sheets. Her mouth was dry and her tongue felt thick and furry. There was a metallic taste at the back of her throat as she gulped down great lungfuls of air. It took her a second to realise she was still in her bedroom, safe inside the protective walls of Castle Dunbroch.
“Only a nightmare,” she whispered breathlessly to herself. “Only a bad dream. Pull yourself together, you big jessie.” She forced a laugh, but it sounded hollow even to her ears.
She looked around, drinking in the familiarity of her bedroom with hungry eyes. The room was lit with a cosy orange glow from the fireplace, where red embers still crackled lazily away. The castle was silent, but it was a full, peaceful kind of silence. Comforting, like an extra layer of protection to Dunbroch’s walled citadel.
Merida curled her knees up to her chest, wrapping goose-pimply arms around her shins and hugging them tight. She was surrounded by people in every room, the castle full of sleeping bodies warm in their wee beds, but the loneliness of that awful place in her dream had followed her into waking, clinging like long tendrils of mist to her hair. Every alien sound - a creak of floorboards, a distant fox’s cry - became the menacing chant of the Clanach Sluagh.
And every dark shadow became that dreadful face.
Merida was a Princess of Dunbroch. She had responsibilities, duties, expectations. She was surrounded by people day and night.
But at that moment, she had never felt so alone.