daniel

Daniels Book of Shadows

December, 1982
     A year ago I had no children. Now I have two –and I can’t be a father to either of them.
     Cal, the elder, was born in June. I love him; how could I help it? He’s so beautiful, so sweet and trusting. But I can’t bear it when he looks at me with his mother’s golden eyes. I can’t bear the growing fear that he is Selene’s creation, that she’ll mold him to follow her in her madness and that nothing I do can stop it. Yet still, I feel bound to stay. Bound to try to save him.
    Giomanach, my younger son, was born just three nights ago. I felt, across an ocean and a continent, Fiona’s pain and joy as he came out of her body. I ache to be with her, with my dearest love, my soul mate –and I ache to see my newborn son. But I don’t dare go to them for fear that Selene will take some terrible vengeance on them. Goddess, I’m being ripped in two. How much longer can I bear this?
     -Maghach

August, 1984
    I’ve made my choice, if you can call it a choice. I’m with Fiona now, back home in England. Our second son will be born in a week, and I simply could not stay away any longer. She is my muirn beatha dan, my soul’s true mate.
    I think –I hope –that Selene has at last accepted this. When I left this time, she didn’t plead. She said only, “Remember the threefold law. All that you do comes back to you.” She turned away, and I watched Cal carefully copy her. I’ve lost him. He is wholly Selene’s now.
    Giomanach is so changed from the last time I saw him. He’s nearly two years old now, no longer a baby but a wiry little boy with hair like bleached corn silk and Fiona’s dancing green eyes. He’s a happy child but still shy and a little fearful around me. I try not to let him see how it hurts me.
     I try, too, not to think too often of Cal, and of the battle that I lost.
         -Maghach

April, 1986
   Today I found Giomanach, all of three-and-a-half years old, hunched over a bowl of water, staring into it so intently that his eyes were almost crossing. When I asked him what he was doing, he told me he was scrying for his sister. Goddess, I was startled. We’d not told him that Fiona is carrying another child, yet he knew. He’s amazingly quick.
I asked him if he’d seen anything, expecting him to say he hadn’t. He’s too young to scry. But he said he’d seen a little girl with dark hair and eyes. I smiled and told him we’d have to wait and see. But my leug told me our Alwyn will have red hair and green eyes like Fiona’s, so I’m afraid the water lied to my boy. Unless it showed him its own riddling truth.
   Then Giomanach smacked his hand down so the water spilled out of the bowl. I opened my mouth to scold him, but he looked up at me with that little mischievous smile, and I hadn’t the heart. He’s like sunshine to me. After looking over my shoulder for two years, I’m finally beginning to accept that nothing is going to happen, that life can actually be this good.
        -Maghach

Litha, 1991
     Goddess, help us. How can we go on from here? We’ve lost everything –our home, our coven, our children. Our children.
     It all came so suddenly. We’d both been feeling ill and out of sorts for weeks, but I didn’t think much of it. Then, late yesterday evening, I was working in my study when I heard Fiona scream. I raced to her workroom and found her lying on the floor, he leug clutched in her hand. She had been scrying to find the source of her illness and had seen something hideous in the stone. She described it as a wave of darkness, like a swarm of black insects or a pall of smoke, sweeping over the land. “It was evil,” she whispered. “It wants us. It’s…searching for us. We’ve got to warn the others, and then we’ve got to go. Now. Tonight”
     “Tonight? But –the children. Giomanach’s got an herbology lesson tomorrow,” I objected stupidly.
     The look she gave me broke my heart. “We can’t take them,” she said. “It wouldn’t be safe. Not for them or for us. We’ve got to leave them.”
      I argued, but in the end she convinced me that she was right. The only hope for any of us was for Fiona and me to disappear, to try somehow to draw the evil away from our children.
     Fiona left a frantic message for her brother Beck, who lives in Somerset. Then we laid the strongest protections we could on our house. I kissed my children as they slept, smoothing Alwyn’s tangled red curls, pulling the covers back up over Linden. Last of all I stood by Giomanach, watching the rise and fall of his chest. I tucked my leug under his pillow, where he’d find it in the morning.
     And then, once again, I abandoned my children.
          -Maghach

July, 1991
We are in Bordeaux, staying with Leandre, a Wyndenkell cousin of Fiona’s. Fiona is not well. She says it’s only a chill she caught during the channel crossing, but I’m afraid it’s something more serious. For a week now she’s had a fever every night, and none of the usual remedies seem to help it. I’m almost ready to suggest that she go to a doctor of western medicine.
   I went out today and hunted through the fields until I found a chunk of quartz the size of my fist. It’s not as good as Obsidian, but I think it will serve. I’m going to scry for our children, our town, our coven. I feel heavy with dread at the thought of what I might see.
         -Maghach

July, 1991
    In Milan now. A close escape. It was my scrying, I think that alerted the evil to our presence in Bordeaux.
    First I sought our children and found them, as I had prayed they would be, safe with Beck. Then I asked my quartz to help me see our coven, and I saw. Oh, Goddess.
    I saw the utter devastation of our town, the swathe of burnt houses, charred cars, blackened tree trunks whose branches seemed to claw at the sky in their agony… Nothing, it seemed, was spared. Nothing except our house. It stood there, the mellow brick darkened by a pall of ash but otherwise untouched.
   Then, from our bedroom, I heard Fiona screaming. I ran in and found her sitting upright in bed, her eyes wild. “It’s coming,” she cried. “It’s found us. We have to go!” She’s calling me. More later.
          -Maghach

July, 1991
   I thought Fiona was delirious from the fever, but her terror was so intense that I ended up bundling her up and putting her into Leandre’s car. I chose a direction at random: east. We had driven for less than an hour when Fiona let out a cry. “Leandre!” She grasped my arm. “I can feel him. He’s dying.”
   I pulled up at the first little village bistro I could find and rushed in to phone Leandre, but I couldn’t get through. Not until late that night did we find out that his farm had been consumed by a mysterious wildfire. He and all his family had been trapped in their house.
   “It was the dark wave,” Fiona whispered, shuddering. “It’s hunting for us.”
    Without discussing it, we got back into the car and continued east, fleeing across France. As I drove through the clear summer night, I kept remembering something Selene had said shortly before I left her the first time. She’d come back from a meeting with her Woodbane friends, the ones I feared, and once again she’d been in an oddly frenetic state, as if she had so much energy within her that she must keep moving or catch fire. I asked her what they’d done. “Watched the wave,” she said with a strange, sharp laugh. Of course, I thought she meant waves; we lived on the Pacific Coast. But now, as I drove, I wondered if she’d meant something else altogether.
    Did Selene have something to do with sending the dark wave? Is she taking her revenge at last?
      -Maghach

Litha, 1993
    We’re in Prague now, but Fiona feels we’ll have to leave again soon. A dubious legacy of the dark wave –ever since she saw it in her leug, she can sense it coming.
    It’s been two years now since we left our lives behind us. Two years of running, hiding, locking our magick away to keep it from betraying us. Two years of longing for news of our children, yet not daring to reach out to them. Two years of Fiona gradually withering, racked by ailment after ailment. We’ve come to believe it’s the effect of the dark wave itself –that it crippled her somehow when she saw it in her leug. So far we’ve found no cure.
        -Maghach

Beltane, 1996
    We are in Vienna, where I have found work tutoring college students in English. Evenings, Fiona and I walk along the Danube or in the Stefansplatz. She has gained some much needed weight and is looking better. The other night we even went on the Ferris wheel in the Volksprater. But the amusement park made us think of the children. Have Beck and Shelagh ever taken them to such a place?
     Giomanach is now thirteen, Linden almost twelve, and Alwyn, nine. I wonder what they look like.
        -Maghach

Imbolc, 1997
   Imbolc is a day for light. Fiona reminds me that Imbolc means “in the belly,” in the womb of the Goddess, and celebrates the seeds hidden in the earth that are just beginning to stir. Even though it’s dark and cold here in Helsinki, it’s a day of hope, and we must light the sacred fire.
   In England, among the covens, there are great bonfires. Here we lit candles throughout our small rented house. Then the two us did a quiet ceremony as we fed kindling into our woodstove.
     The cold is hard on Fiona. She is always shivering and in pain. We can’t live this far north for long. Where next, I wonder?
      -Maghach

August, 1999
     Beck contacted us today. I knew as soon as I saw his face in my leug that the news was bad. But I didn’t imagine it would be this bad.
     Linden was killed. Beck told us, trying to summon the dark spirits. “He called on the dark side to ask how to reach you and Fiona,” was what Beck said in his blunt way.
     Goddess, what have I wrought? I’ve abandoned four children, and now one is dead because of me. I didn’t know this kind of pain was possible.
         -Maghach

Fiona is dying.
The news of Linden’s death broke her, I think, She’d been in pain before, but she had a core of toughness that kept the illness at bay. But in the last two years she has been… fading. Her hair, once so bright, is entirely white now, and her green eyes are sunk deep in her gaunt face. I see her agony, but I can’t bear the thought of losing her, my dearest love, the only precious thing I have left.
   This morning I broke the silence and sent a message to Giomanach. I didn’t contact him directly, but I cast a spell that would open a door to him, that would let him know that we’re alive. Now I’m living in terror that I’ve exposed him to the dark wave.
           -Maghach