Art by Cara Sanders (Owlet Art)
Having waited all day to grace her skin, the warm air streamed through her carrying with it the drowsy sweetness of meadowsweet and cut grass and the deeper, darker fragrance rising from the earth beneath her feet where the heat had been pressing all day into the soil, releasing its fervid perfume. Excitedly, her step quickened through fields of joy, she followed the luminous, throbbing cord. Lost in thought, this moment had been ripening for months, she noticed not the luscious foliage nor the low humming drone of bees, drunk on their ambrosia.
The Sun, now descending towards the Western Door, drew a long ribbon of burnished orange across the sky, fading into lilac haze where the first cool thrumming of night gathered. The expectant air held its breath as if it had also been waiting for this moment. Listening to her heart, she could hear the whole world turning, when her attention was caught by the glimpse of a shooting star falling. Her hands now trembling with excitement, an ardent and expectant quality thickening the air itself, the dusk held its breath as if anticipating this particular confluence…
In the distance, against the windowpane, Niall waited in the scintillant aureate warmth of a single candle, its tawny light moving across his face as she crossed the threshold, gilding the planes of his jaw, the hollow of his throat. The flitting of the butterflies intensified inside Èadaoin, an involuntary respondence of the body to his liminal presence with whom she had become slowly familiar over weeks of proximity and restraint.
The charge between them was glorious, the alchemy of complementary creative forces in each other’s gravitational field. His hands found her waist and she felt the warmth of them through the fabric of her dress, irreducible and unmistakable. She let herself be drawn into the circumference of his arms. Looking into his oceans, the scimpliní sparkled with the feeling of someone stepping at last into a country they have been standing at the border of for a very long time.
Outside, the air stilled to a breathless, burnished hush, the last warmth of the day pressing itself against the earth with a sultry and lingering insistence.
With the back of his fingers, he gently pulled back a strand of hair from her eye and lightly caressed the side of her face. The temperature rising, she followed the bead of perspiration from the small of his back to the nape of his neck with the tip of one finger, tracing the topography of him with the slow and ravished attention. She felt him shudder beneath her touch, that wholly unguarded quiver of a man whose careful composure has yielded to the roar of the awakening dragon. The cadence of her breathing deepened as her lunar mounds ached with the exquisite gravity of a tide answering its moon.
In the moist dark of her own interior her rose opened, petal by luminous petal, she felt the vast and trembling imminence of what was gathering between them, that third thing, wholly itself, the harmonic that two notes in true accord will always and inevitably produce between them, hovering at the edge of sound.
In the ocean above, the first stars penetrated through the indigo membrane of the sky, just as the night jasmine released its most secret and ungovernable perfume into the enveloping night.
By the light of the Moon, her soul flying high above the ground, she saw it. An infinitesimal flicker, a thinning of his pupils, the eyes of a hungry wolf hell bent on devouring her, registering nothing but her exquisite topography and heaving curves. Those delicate oceans now a tempest; that voice, carnally wild; hands now fevered with rantipole, his heat enveloping her in heavenly waves.
“I want you, Róisín”
Like an unexpected crack of lightning, that single breathy whisper escaping from the velvet dark of his unconscious, she pushed away, something inside feeling so small within a chasm so familiar, as the truth dawned, she was not even in his mind – he wants my body, not my soul.
The rains came pouring, violently pounding against the pane in righteous indignation with immeasurable force. Then the thunder, clear, sonorous, Medusa-like, the moment broken and with it, the chain.
A bridgeless chasm between them, two souls living in differing worlds, she recoiled from the candlelit heaven, all the while searching the horizon for a glimmer of hope. All she found was indifference. His truth revealed, his beautiful prose hollow, his heart already given, he didn’t get it. Èadaoin withdrew.
The perfect sky, torn as the tears from heaven soaked her to her bones, a tsunami of grief poured over her as wave after wave eroded her shores. A cold north wind screeched across the land, as the storm gathered momentum. Struggling in the maelstrom, thoughts spinning around her mind, her bitter hands chafe beneath the clouds- how could something so right, be so wrong? How had she misread him? He didn’t want to love her forever. He didn’t understand what moves her. His was not a holy light. The air had taken a turn as her world turned to black.
Arriving home, she opened her journal and upon that empty canvas incandescence poured forth. The grief was there. The pain of having stood at the threshold of the almost-sacred only to realise that the glitter was not gOld.
Then came the fury.
The ink gestated the paper. What flowed from her nib was the thick, dark honey of the chthonic deep, a primal sludge of stars and soil that bypassed the shallow ego of the man who had failed to see her. A fertile eruption of every woman who had ever been reduced to the sum of her surface, a cracking of a seed casing in the dark, the violent, necessary pressure of life demanding to be born from the velvet black of the abyss. If he had sought only the surface, he had tripped over the threshold of a luminous cavern he could never hope to map.
Art by Stella Stoyanova
Her hand moved slowly at first and then with increasing and sovereign certainty, separating what was true from what had merely glittered, what was sacred from what was appetite dressed in the clothing of the sacred, the wolf from the holy light she had been reaching towards through all the weeks of their slow and exquisite approach to one another.
Drawing from the wellspring of the unspoken, the place where magic is knit together in the silence of the womb and the tomb alike, the fecund heat of the earth’s core, a furnace that forged life fanned beneath the floorboards, vibrating through her marrow, as the nib etched the canvas.
The warring clouds and frenzied wind brewed up a storm, as the chthonic force of her own creative depths rose through her the way the first green shoots rise through the earth in spring, unhurried and irresistible and entirely indifferent to whether anyone was watching.
Her mind sharpened by reprobate cruelty, her body writhing with the truth of ecstasy, currents of intuition slithering out from her temple door, she would not surrender to his vanity. Blind to what he had stumbled upon having intimated that he was seeking true connection but had merely sought a pleasure vessel, he had accidentally tapped into the Great Mother’s vein, the source of all myth and melody.
Her unfettered spirit, a talismanic shield against the interloping hands of the vainglorious, she, like all other women, is the abyssal creative, the dark soil from which every dream is harvested. A primordial force reclaimed, the ‘glitter’ he offered was a pittance compared to the ancient gold she found within her own depths, a magic that required no witness to be absolute. She held the incandescence of the deep within her, his flickering candle a distant and forgotten thing, ready to dream a new world into being.
Completed on the 27th April 2026 at 21:41 BST
(Background music by Portishead, Elvis Costello, Damian Rice and Pearl Jam)
