Twelve Months to Midnight

The Otherworld may be the closest non-mortal realm to our own, though concepts like ‘close’ or ‘distant’ don’t mean a lot in the non-Euclidian nightmare that are the Spirit Realms. I stepped out of the gate into a shadowy world beneath a starlit sky. A very starlit sky. I stared upwards into a night sky replete with more stars than I believed could fit between one horizon and another. I turned a full circle trying to spot a constellation I could recognise, but it was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Wide bands of light criss-crossed the sky in bewildering patterns, looping and curving around each other like brush strokes on canvas. One horizon was bright with what seemed to be the Northern Lights, glowing purple and blue and green and other colours I wasn’t sure I could name. “It’s beautiful,” said Donnelly, behind me. “It is,” I said. “Do you remember it now?” he asked. “Did your memories of this place come back when you stepped through?” I hadn’t even considered this poss...

In return for three small symbolic gifts, the Irish Government gets to pose three questions to Mab, Queen of the Fae, about future events. The questions are purposefully vague, and the answers are not something that the government relies on too heavily. Fae can be maddeningly imprecise in their answers, and will often lie to you if they believe you will learn more from a false answer than from an accurate one. There’s also considerable doubt among scholars as to whether the Fae can even tell the future. The only predictions that haven’t come through have been those where someone aware of the prophecy intervened, intentionally or otherwise, to sow a seed of chaos. Whatever the Fae would have you believe, it seemed that mortal free will is a factor. Another aspect of the arrangement is that the government agreed to keep the existence of the Otherworld as quiet as possible. The other side of that deal was Queen Mab would stop stealing children and sending changelings to our realm in thei...

The Irish government has sent two envoys to the Otherworld that never came back. This happened in the years 1980 and 1981, our first two years under a new Taoiseach. Now, I’m not saying that the Taoiseach in question was to blame. There’s certainly no evidence that he loaded the envoys with questions designed to benefit him directly. Especially as he had all minutes of the Special Cabinet Meeting shredded afterwards. But the third time was indeed the charm and all subsequent envoys from him were sent with the same standard list of inoffensive questions that each Cabinet has used ever since. I stepped back out onto the grass of the Park, facing the way I had come from. I wasn’t aware of having done a full about-turn, but stranger things had happened when gateways were involved. Everything was as I’d left it a moment before, but for the absence of Cormac and the cars from the Department of Foreign Affairs. I turned around to examine the gateway. The ribbons and markings that Cormac had s...