Eabha's Ulchabhan

Eabha’s bones groaned as she struggled to her feet from underneath the dozens of furs piled high over her to protect her from the cruel winter air. Eabha glared to her right past her nose through her one good eye at the few embers still smoking in the hearth. Her small dingy hut illuminated a smoky abyssal blue, the frost creeping inwardly at Cailleach’s decree.

My fire is almost out.

Eabha smiled wryly, her blind eye studying the fire in its own way as she busied herself stoking the fire. When Eabha was a much younger woman that she cherished these long winter nights cradled in her husband’s arms. The new flames that Eabha coaxed from the peat moss she added illuminated a single tear escaping from her blind eye. More winters had passed since she had planted Dara in the ground than they had spent together, but despite his namesake, his seed never took and in the ground he remained below the great ash tree that once upon a time they had made love under many times during the summer before oaths had been exchanged. They had worried that a bastard might come of it, but...

His seed never took.

Every summer night that they managed to slip away into the forest they would meet at the foot of that sacred ash, Dara brought her flowers whatever was in season and along his path, primroses, marigolds, hawthorns, hazel, gorse, rowan, and sometimes the odd beautiful weed. He would often say to her, “The goddess Brid could not compete with your fiery red hair and your gentle green eyes,” Dara would say with his own blue eyes locked upon her.

Eabha could almost feel Dara’s coarse hands running gently through her hair. Eabha closed her eyes for a moment, lost in remembered ecstasy. She could almost taste his lips, smell his musk, feel his hand on her breast, feel his...It was not the quality of the seed and certainly not the numerous replanting that prevented it’s growth, but the barrenness of where it had been sown. As Brid would have it, Eabha was never a mother.

Maiden to crone.

Eabha’s blind eye glassily studied the flames, searching for omens as she stoke the flame. If only she had watched them more keenly when she was a lass, she’d have known that the grandmother owl in the ash tree had been a harbinger. Or perhaps she had hooted to warn Eabha and Dara away from the folly of their oathless union, haplessly shuddering with pleasure whilst the owl sought to impart some ancient wisdom upon them. Wisdom, gone unheard between their kisses and whispers and laughs. Or perhaps grandmother owl sought wisdom from them. Eabha cackled. Wizened as she has become she would still do the same.

After laying Dara to rest below the ash tree, Eabha had wept the entire night. The air had been sweet, like when they were young, but Eabha’s spirit was bitter. It was then that through teary eyes Eabha saw the owl and remembered. Grandmother owl had been there. All these years she had been in that sacred ash, waiting for Dara. Moonlight glinted from the owl’s eyes as she uttered a single mournful hoot and then in a flurry she darted away with something already in her talons. Eabha was certain that it was Dara’s soul and it comforted her to know that grandmother owl who had seen them in their natural state, now ferried him to the next place.

Every night since, Eabha rose during the witching hour to search for the owl in the ash tree, and each morning Eabha returns to her hut in the morning twilight, both relieved and disappointed. Slowly, deliberately, with cold, wrinkled shaking hands Eabha dressed for her journey. Eabha trekked through the winter landscape of the forest, trudging step after step through the snow. Soon she arrived at Dara’s grave below the sacred ash. She searched the darkness with both blind eye and seeing eye, but to no avail. She spotted not grandmother owl. She laid gingerly in the snow upon Dara’s mound and faded in and out of the present and past, remembering more than she had known even in her own lifetime, and as first light crept into the forest she heard the gentle hoot of grandmother owl. A sound she had not heard in decade of loneliness. She opened her eyes, now both blind, and she saw her.

Eabha smiled as the dawn brought darkness.