“Keira’s Very Fairy Bad Day.”
— Hyacinth
Somewhere in the wild and desolate far north of Scotland…
| Battle-proven frost witch with an irresistable old granny act. | |
| Elres | On secondment to the Covenant from… Well. That’s Need To Know, and so far nobody has needed to know. |
| Robin | A Neanderthal who accidentally travelled from “long time back ago” after touching a magic obelisk. |
| Keira Sayles | Nickname “The Smile”. Ended up working for the Covenant after charging them for her assistance on a mission. It’s cheaper to have her on the payroll than accept her freelance rates. |
| Karl Novac | The Novac family has been providing private protection against supernatural creatures for generations. For a price. Karl works for the Covenant because he’s more interested in monster hunting than diplomacy. |
Mission summary:
C sent the team to the tiny hamlet of Abersky in the far north-west of Scotland. One of the Covenant’s allies had claimed a Fringe Physicist was in the area, up to no good. The mission parameters were quite simple: check it out. See if there is anything unusual. If there is, report back. DO NOTHING. It was not supposed to be an investigation. the only job was to verify that something needed investigating. Should an investigation be needed, the allies in question would take that on themselves.
C was very clear about this. Everyone said they understood.
Everyone.
On arrival, the team repaired to the village pub, where Robin explained to Karl that a “pint” meant a beer and Keira took some photos of the wall of fog about a mile offshore. The landlady, Mary Urqhuart, mentioned when questioned that there had indeed been someone odd in town — an English lad, she said, was renting the old McPhail farmhouse. “He doesn’t really talk to anyone,” she said. “He does a lot of hiking up the back hill, near the stone circle.”
Elres insisted that they investigate further, despite Keira’s objections. On leaving the pub to investigate the farmhouse, the team discovered the mist had come all the way into the village. As Keira drove the Covenant Range Rover slowly out of the village to the McPhail farm, the mists grew thicker until she could barely see a thing. Within the mists, shadows moved.
In the farmhouse, the team found various papers covered in calculations, maps, a few photographs, and some strange pieces of apparatus that looked like old valve radios hooked up to crystals by means of wire resembling flexible haematite. Despite their orders to leave well alone, they decided to go looking in the woods for the stone circle.
In the woods, they came across a reality tear — a blue, shimmering fracture that appeared two-dimensional from any viewpoint.
Robin, surprised, through his rock at it, and his rock vanished through the tear. It was his favourite rock. He was distraught. He immediately tried to go into the tear to find his rock, but Keira held him back on the basis this was A Very Bad Idea.
Hyacinth and Elres decided they would go through instead.
On the Other Side, Hyacinth and Elres became separated. Elres recognised the place as the Betwixt, the world that exists in the gap between the Land of the Fae and the Land of the Humans — between the Underworld of the Sìth and the Overworld of Earth. She called for Hyacinth, knowing how easy it would be for a human to become lost there, even a human as magically powerful as Hyacinth. When she did so, Hyacinth called back from somewhere in the misty gloom.
But so did something else. A deep, throaty bark shattered the eerie stillness. Then another. Both Hyacinth and Elres could feel the burgeoning fear as the Cù-Sìth approached. Elres drew her flaming sword, seeing red eyes, twin points of flame in the twilight. She called again for Hyacinth, knowing that if she ventured so far into the Betwixt she lost sight of the portal back to Earth, neither of them would make it back.
Hyacinth found her, but the black dog was between both of them and the portal, and it seemed it would be impossible for them to pass. Although she had drawn her sword, Elres had a power that none of the team knew: she banished the Cù-Sìth, sending it far away. Ears flat, tail between its legs, whimpering, the great dog slunk away into the darkness like it had been scolded by its master.
Hyacinth and Elres made it back through the portal, Hyacinth now very suspicious of her team-mate.
The others had already gone.
~⊕~
Tired of waiting for Elres and Hyacinth, and with more and more shadows appearing in the mists, the other three had headed towards the circle. As they proceeded, they were stalked from above by a small, implike creature that fluttered through the trees above them, watching their every move.
On reaching the circle, they decided not to go inside the perimeter of stones. “That’s magic stuff,” Keira declared (not for the first or the last time). “Magic stuff is not my job. Where did Hyacinth get to? She does magic stuff.”
At that moment, a loud, deep bark echoed through the trees. The stone circle began to glow with a blue shimmer resembling the one they had seen in the forest.
The team made to scarper before being swallowed by some sort of proto-dimension. Behind them, figures appeared in the circle: a man and a woman, surrounded by a pack of lithe, restless hounds with white fur and red ears. The man was large and swarthy, carrying a short sword. The woman was tall and red-haired. Both were painted in complex designs of bright blue. They spoke in a language the team didn’t understand, but which sounded a little like Welsh. Their hounds began to pour from the circle in an undulating wave of shining teeth and panting tongues.
The team ran, almost colliding with Elres and Hyacinth, who had finally caught up. All of them headed back through the trees, only pausing long enough for Keira to shoot the bat-winged creature tracking them from above. The white and red hounds gave chase.
As they approached the outer edge of the forest, the shadows in the mist grew more numerous, more substantial. Finally, they caught sight of one — a terrible, cadaverous form with dead-fish eyes and the thin, greasy hair of a corpse. it screeched, running towards them, only for two of the white hounds to set upon it like lions on a gazelle. The white hounds continued to protect them as they made their way out of the mist-dense forest.
Upon reaching the farmhouse, they discovered it was occupied. A man was there, wearing a tweed suit and packing equipment into a bag. This man turned out to be Dr Gerald Windsor, who was unexpectedly co-operative when it came to explaining what he was doing, although his confident assertion that he was making a perpetual motion power generator from an astronomical conjunction didn’t make a lot of sense. Keira was finally reduced to shooting him, although this did no damage until Hyacinth’s magical senses determined he was protected by an amulet.
Amongst his papers, they found a diagram showing how his devices were connected to the stone circle, and decided to end this.
Outside, the cadaverous creatures were everywhere, and both Keira and Hyacinth found themselves overcome with terror at the sound of their terrible screeching, so both of them were unable to stop themselves fleeing. Elres, Karl and Robin were not affected. Karl laid into the nearest pair, aided by Robin. Karl’s serious firepower made short of work of his opponent, but Robin was bitten and was being drained of life until Elres stepped in with her flaming sword and stabbed the creature attacking him. She then banished them all, clearing the way for the team to regroup and head back to the circle.
Up at the circle, the entire population of the village had gathered and was heading towards the great rip at the centre of the circle. Local PC Kenneth McLeod was desperately trying to get them to stop. He and Keira recognised each other.
“It’s the wrong time!” he yelled.
With some effort, Keira was able to find out from McLeod that the circle was a gateway to the village’s ancestors, imprisoned by the Sìth in a kind of temporal limbo. Once a generation, circumstances arose that blinded their Sìth prison guards and allowed people from the village to meet with their Pecht ancestors — frequently becoming inhabited by more recent ancestors while this happened. Windsor had somehow found out about this and thought he could tap the energy created by tearing the village free from its temporal moorings. The problem was, doing it at the wrong time meant the Sìth guards could see it happening, which was why the area was swarming with Sluagh and Cù-Sìth.
Keira relayed all of this to Hyacinth, who managed to explain to one of the villagers, at that moment possessed by the spirit of her Great Great Great Great etc Grandmother, who could speak the language of the Pechts. She in turn explained it to the Queen, who ordered all of the villagers to leave the circle while the Covenant team found all of Windsor’s devices and smashed them, anchoring the circle back in the present where it should have been, and bringing the village back to the present.