The Knight of Slaughtaverty

Catacombs of the Living

Slaughtaverty, 1745

Mairead Doyle awakes from a restless, dream-filled sleep, opening her eyes to the watery gloom surrounding her. She's not sure if she is seeing her surroundings with her eyes or the other sense, the one that causes her to know things she shouldn't know.

She's not sure how long she'd been sleeping this time, just as she doesn't know how long she'd been here in this soft bed in the pretty room with embroidered sprigs of yellow and pink flowers on the bedding and thick drapes covering the windows. She cannot tell day from night or feel time passing.

Her hours flow between being awake, drinking strong herbal tea and savoury broth and sleeping. She's vaguely aware of using a chamber pot occasionally and being washed, but her only companions are generally dreams, visions and memories threading through her mind. Some of the memories and thoughts are her own, but most are not. Even when she is awake, she is still dreaming... and yearning.

Oh, the yearning...

Right now, the flower patterns on the fabrics are black against grey, and the world is framed in a blurry border of deep blue, embracing a hazy centre of washed light, as if she's looking through a cloudy round window. A tunnel of sight.

She has been floating in and out of sleep for so long, seeing and hearing things while awake and asleep. She is slowly becoming used to the fact that her heart and mind can hear and see things that her ears and eyes cannot detect.

Even in her weakened state, her mind still thickly woven with cobwebs from her troubled sleep, she is unable to resist the strong pull in the core of her being, drawing her from her bed. Placing her bare feet on the rug by her bed, she stands alone on shaky legs for the first time since she was brought here from the woods.

Propelled by a longing too intense to describe in words, she follows the sound of hoarse screams ringing loudly in her head, her heart drawing her towards it. She'd been hearing these screams for a long time. They've been ripping like knives through her soul, bringing tears to her eyes, even when she wasn't able to wake up.

She could never drown them out and not hear them, not feel them. They are part of her.

Her footsteps do not falter as she wades through the thick darkness in unknown corridors, her surroundings a blur of furniture in midnight blue shadows as she follows the light leading her on. It is not a light she can see with her eyes or the light that draws the deceased to their final rest. It's a light streaming from her mind, filling her heart with knowledge she could never explain.

She knows her little brother Ulliam is sleeping in a bed similar to hers and that he hasn't stirred or woken up since he was brought here many days ago from a terrible place where things happened that she'd desperately wanted not to see but couldn't stop from entering her mind. She clings with all the hope she can muster to the fact that, for now, Ulliam is alive and safe. For now, he is breathing and in no pain.

Soon, she might hold him in her arms again...

She doesn't hesitate when she leaves the comfort of the wooden floors and rugs of the hallway for the ice-glazed stone steps leading into the darkest recesses of the mansion, the bare soles of her feet treading solidly on the cold surface, not even feeling the sting. Winding her way from one non-descript grey corridor to the next, her white night dress fluttering around her naked ankles and her red hair trailing down her back, she finally reaches a wider corridor flanked on either side by rows of solid wooden doors, pitted and scarred by centuries of use.

The hoarse, tormented cries that brought her here are now filling her ears too, growing louder as it merges with the sounds reverberating deafeningly in her mind and soul. Raw sobs and cries of pain that go on and on, tearing at her heart.