Chapter Text
Kieran tore through the back alleys of the village like hell was on his heels. He’d never been so scared in his life. He wanted to cry. He wanted to throw up. He wanted to scream- It’s me! It’s me, Kieran! Please, you know me! You know me! Mathair, it’s me!
He bit back tears as he sobbed and tried his hardest to run faster. He’d never been the athletic type. He was a poet for gods’ sake.
The cobblestone all blurred into one big color as he finally started to cry.
His tears were red, like blood, leaving a clear trail of breadcrumbs to find him. It stained his white blouse like drops of rain. All too soon shadows like devils came back into view.
“ Bhampair!” He heard someone yell angrily. Like clockwork, the flickering light of the torches started to catch up to him. “ Bhampair! Deamhan!” The people screamed behind him.
He tripped over himself and fell to the cobblestone with a painful cry, skidding up his palms and knees. He didn’t have time to balk over the fact that no blood surfaced. He could hear his heartbeat- slow, so slow - in his ears. He scrambled back to his feet, booking it up a set of cobblestone stairs.
He stopped for a moment as a lone tree came into view, just over the cobbled-together wall. Witch’s Bane. The village wouldn’t follow him there, but he wondered himself if the stories were true.
He screamed in terror as a hand clawed on his ankle, dragging him down the stairs and banging up his chin.
“ Mathair!” He cried, shaking his head, trying desperately to shake her hands off of him- his mother, the woman he’d cried helplessly to only hours before over the attack he had in the middle of the night. “ Mama, please! Please, it’s me!” He sobbed helplessly. He couldn’t bring himself to fight back, despite the sharp pitchfork in her left hand.
“It’s Kieran!” He screamed, trying fruitlessly to scramble out of her grip.
Her eyes were cold and heartless.
“ Deamhan!” She yelled. “You are not my Kieran!” She yelled, bringing the pitchfork down.
Kieran screamed again, despite the fact that she’d missed.
His mother. His mother that shared the same hair color as him. Who had the same laughter he did. Who taught him to read and to write and to look at all others with love.
She’d tried to kill him.
She’d stuck the pitchfork just shy of his skull .
He kicked her as hard as he could in her middle, sending her flying further down the stairs into the arms of the other villagers.
He didn’t look back as he climbed the wall and bolted for the lone tree just outside the village. His hands skid painfully against the stone and he could feel his bones clacking around when his feet hit the ground.
His village. His home.
He could barely breathe in between his racking sobs, clawing rabidly at the ground to try and get further, faster, like some squirming animal.
He was almost there. He was halfway up the hill to that cursed tree that marked the entrance to the Outsider’s Woods . The village was too scared to chase him there, he was sure.
He was scared himself. The woods were filled with pagans- druids and witches and wulver’s, beasts beyond their feeble imaginations. There was a reason Kieran had never seen outside his home.
He tried to duck a pitchfork that was being hurled at him like a spear, and ended up slipping in the mud, dashing his head violently against a rock.
No one would’ve known. No blood came forth.
He panted uselessly into the dirt like a pathetic worm. He was so tired from running, so out of breath from crying and whimpering and begging for his life to the people he’d loved all these years. Blood started to pool in his mouth from how he kept cutting the inside of his lips against his teeth- why were they so sharp?
His stomach cramped. He was so hungry.
He let himself cry into the earth. He went limp, squeezing his eyes shut tight as he whimpered and sobbed. He refused to face this kind of death face-first. Maybe if he didn’t see the pitchfork before it came, it would hurt less.
He sobbed harder, letting out broken, guttural sounds as he curled up into a ball on the ground, dirt slipping into his mouth. They wouldn’t kill him like that. That’s not how the village dealt with monsters, demons, pagans. They would break his legs with the pitchfork, or they’d stab him in his chest, and they’d drag him by his hair back to town square- back to where he learned to write for the first time, where he’d drop coins into the well with his mother. Then they’d tie him up for everyone to see, and god forbid, if he were still alive, they’d burn him while he screamed and watched.
He heard the yelling get closer, and couldn’t bring himself to do any more but lie there and cry.
What God would allow this?
What had he done to be punished this way?
There was a sound so loud that Kieran had to cover his ears, and for a moment, everything stopped. Kieran wondered if that was it. If his mother, in her hatred and disgust, had simply put him out of his misery with a swift strike.
He looked up shakily, and the townspeople were still there. They were gawking in horror to something just above Kieran. That sound- the earth itself was singed between them, little curls of smoke coming up from the blackened grass.
A lightning strike?
He turned helplessly to look up at a figure in a long black cloak, holding a green hand out to them warningly, glowing in an orange aura.
“ αφήνω!” He yelled out demandingly. Kieran had never heard that language before.
He wasn’t sure who he was more afraid of.
He locked eyes with his mother, and she slowly began to raise her pitchfork again.
“Αφήνω!” The cloaked figure boomed out. In a matter of seconds, the village went from bone-dry to absolutely bucketing rain, pelting against their faces like hail. “ I will not tell you again!”
They all cowered before the figure, screaming in fear and dropping their weapons as they bolted back to town.
Kieran looked up at the cloaked figure again, outlined in the cracking lightning of the night sky. The figure put two of those green hands up in a placating gesture, starting to approach Kieran with wary, slow steps.
Kieran made eye contact with two terrifying orange eyes, glowing like fire in the dark, and immediately started to hyperventilate, scrambling to get away.
"Easy, easy!" The figure surged forward, grabbing Kieran by his shoulder as Kieran whimpered and tried to struggle away. "Listen to me- steady your breathing- if you don't you're going to go into shock. Do you understand?"
Kieran couldn't. Everything was too loud and too dark and too much touching-
The stress of the past few hours caught up to him, and his eyes rolled back. An icy chill shot down his spine.
The cloaked figure caught him as he crumpled, just before he could dash his head against another rock.
“...Γαμώτο-!” was the last thing he heard before fully blacking out.
Maybe this was just him finally dying. It was freezing cold, and dark, and the wind howled in his ears like a beast. This was what Kieran imagined dying must’ve been like.
But then the cloaked figure threw a warm fabric over him and scooped him up by his knees, carrying him as gently as he could back through the trees.
And Kieran was warm. It was the first time he’d felt warm since that awful attack that happened hours prior. The wind died down to a low murmur in the trees, and the dark settled down to a comforting kind of tone. Kieran couldn’t help but shift closer to the figure through his shivering, unconscious state. He hadn’t realized how much he’d miss the sun.
Kieran woke up slowly, with a pounding ache in his head.
He’d been running from something- from some one. He kept running but he wasn’t fast enough. Something stabbed into his neck, and it was the worst pain he’d ever felt, to feel every bit of his soul being sucked out through his jugular.
The environment he was in would’ve sent him into another panic if he only had the energy for it.
His environment was new and strange. A tiny little hut built in what looked like the insides of a tree. Bottles of alien shapes lined shelves, bubbling with colored liquid.
He tried to call out “ where am I?” but what came out instead was a garbled kind of groan.
“Good morning.” A voice said gently. Everything was still blurry and hazy. His head hurt. He could only barely make out the face of a teenage boy leaning over his bedside.
Kieran moaned deliriously, shaking his head, before pointing out to the window, where it was still pouring rain. “ Night.” He argued.
“...Well, nighttime is your morning, now.” The boy sighed. Kieran felt him place something cool on his forehead, and melted into it. “...Things will make more sense to you soon.”
Kieran refused to give up consciousness again so easily. He clumsily yanked a hand up from under his blanket and eventually it made its way to the boy’s face, awkwardly holding a green head in his hand and squishing the boy’s cheeks together.
The boy laughed, and it was so bright and infectious that for a moment Kieran could see everything clearly- everything that mattered, at least. The freckles on the boy’s cheeks, and how his skin was the color of a willow-trees leaves, and how his smile stretched across his face from his eyes, changing everything about his expression.
“bhreaghahhh….” Kieran sighed out uselessly.
There was a glint of recognition in the boy’s eyes before he blushed a pretty purple. It made his freckles stand and shine out like constellations in the night sky. Kieran would have to remember that for a poem, later. “Thank you.” He murmured. “Not many would describe a laugh like mine as beautiful.”
Kieran pouted for a moment, thumbing over the boy’s green lips like a toddler seeing another person for the first time. “Gaaaee-lic…?” He sang out in a high voice.
The boy snorted again, chuckling. “Yes, I speak Gaelic, like you.”
“...Good.” Kieran said simply, nodding his head. “Good- good language.” He patted the boy’s cheek for good measure.
The boy hummed, bringing Kieran’s hand back down to his side. “...Rest, little bat.” He hummed. “...When you wake up, all of this will be a nice dream. You’ll wake to harsher realities.”
Kieran grumbled something nonsensical that Spelldon couldn’t possibly hope to make out- something in such a harsh accent that it sounded more like a creaky door than real words.
“...Mamaaa…?” Kieran whined suddenly, glaring out at the window.
“...Your mother?” Spelldon asked gently.
“Safe?” He sighed.
Spelldon gave him a strange look, like he was studying him- collecting data. “...You’re still…worried about her?” Spelldon scoffed. “She- she tried to kill you, didn’t she?”
Kieran shrugged awkwardly. “...Love her. She’s- my Mathair…” He droned out.
Spelldon sighed. “...Yes. She’s- she’s safe now. She’ll be okay without you.”
Kieran nodded, sighing into another deep sleep.
Spelldon would be in so much trouble when he returned home. Circe had told him not to get involved in affairs like this, but how could he ignore it?
The pretty boy in his bed had never asked to be turned. He didn’t even know what turning meant. The most he could do was find books for him to read up on the matter, or a fellow vampire who wouldn’t take advantage of his good nature.
The longer they spent in proximity, the worse his mother’s wrath would be for them both. It was better for Spelldon not to get attached.
It was better that Kieran remembered this all as a nice dream. The more he remembered, the worse his un- life was going to be for him.
Now he just had to keep Casta’s nose out of it. If she found out he’d been sneaking out through portals to distant lands- far, far away from Circe Isle, she’d kill him for sure.
He found it hard to not stay by the bed, though. Pretty boys like the vampire never came into the woods where Spelldon tended to hide, and Circe would kill him if he went to Greece’s mainland to find any.
He wanted to memorize the boy’s face, while he still had time.
It felt important, to know his face.