Always Forever (2 page)

Shavi-no one ever found out his full name-was certainly the most well
balanced of the five. An Asian who grew up in a strictly Muslim family, he was
eventually cut off by his father when he refused to accept his religion and traditional ways. A lifetime of searching followed, during which Shavi dabbled in
every religion and explored every occult and New Age byway. It left him a
deeply philosophical and spiritual man, and the solid moral core of the group.
He was a neo-hippie, enjoying his mind-expanding drugs, espousing free love
with men or women. Like the others, however, there was a darkness in his life.
As he left a London gay club with his boyfriend, Lee, he was attacked by
someone he couldn't identify in the dark. Lee was brutally murdered.

And then there was Ryan Veitch, a hard-bodied, hard-minded thug who
grew up in a South London family of petty criminals. His childhood had been
troubled by vivid dreams that he'd only been able to exorcise by having their
images tattooed on his body. His mother died when he was young, leaving him
and his brothers to make up for a father so traumatized by his wife's death he
was unable to keep a job and barely able to hold the family together. It was
hardly surprising that he viewed crime as the only option to survive. But then
the young Witches made the mistake of bungling a building society robbery. In the confusion Ryan fired his shotgun and an innocent man died-Ruth's uncle,
one of the many
coincidences
that are thrown up in this new age. But, as we all
know, there are no coincidences. Growing up under different circumstances,
Ryan might have been a very different person. He showed great remorse for the
murder, and from then on, every waking moment was spent trying to make up
for his crimes, "to do the right thing" as he constantly told everyone. More than
any of them he
wanted
to be a hero, to get the girl, the acclaim. To be good.

But that was their lives
before
. In the cauldron of hardship that came after
the world changed they all found what their true characters really were. And in
a way, that underlines the subtext of what I'm saying here: you should never
judge a book by its cover, and although that's a bit of a cliche, it serves a point.
You can't trust your perception at all; there's always something going on behind
the scenes. So if you can't trust what you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, what
should you do? Trust your heart, I say. Trust your heart. But I'm getting beyond
myself...

It started one cold, misty night beneath Albert Bridge on the banks of the
Thames. Church and Ruth came across what at first sight was a mugging: a
minor Ministry of Defence official, Maurice Gibbons, was being attacked by a
giant of a man. Then the attacker's face appeared to melt. It changed into something monstrous, and Church and Ruth both blacked out at the sight. The incident turned their world on its head, though we all know what the creature was
now-one of the unbelievably ancient race of shape-shifters that passed into
Celtic myth as the misshapen, demonic Fomorii, things so alien to us our brain
can barely give form to the signals it receives whenever we see them. Our mind
fakes up the image the best it can, or it simply shuts down and buries the
hideous experience in the subconscious, where it gnaws away like a maggot.
Church and Ruth were so troubled by this process they were forced to delve into
it further, eventually ending up at the studio of Kraicow, an artist who had seen
the same kind of thing. He confirmed their worst suspicions.

The shock drove them on the road in search of Laura, whom Church had
come across on the Internet and who seemed to have information which might
help them; this was after Church glimpsed the ghost of Marianne outside the
flat they used to share.

The Fomorii were on their tails immediately. The two of them were saved
from certain death by Tom, on the surface a burnt-out hippie. It's hard to
believe, but he was actually the mythic figure Thomas the Rhymer, hundreds of
years old, gifted with the curse of second sight and The Tongue That Cannot
Lie. The old stories said he was taken into the Land of Faerie, where time passes
differently from here, by the Queen of Elfland. And like all the old stories, it captured the essence, if not the whole truth. He did spend time in that strange
place, certainly, but no human could have come close to describing the extent of
his experiences there. It was, by all accounts, a time of both pleasure and pain.
He was "taken apart and rebuilt," suffering so incredibly his mind was scarred.
It gave him his strange powers but left him completely detached from
humanity; the loneliest man in the world, of neither here nor there.

While traveling west, the three companions were attacked by a flying, firebreathing serpentine creature from the storybooks. This Fabulous Beast drove
them to take refuge at Stonehenge, where that site's particular powers made
them invisible to its attentions. And it was there Tom told them what was at
first an unbelievable tale: of how myths and legends are the secret history of the
world. Every creature that ever slithered through our dreams and nightmares
into old stories actually existed, though perhaps not in forms we knew. And he
told the oldest story of all, one that has become preserved in every culture: of a
tremendous war between two opposing powers-the Fomorii, known as the
Night Walkers, a force of entropy determined to drive all existence into darkness and chaos, and the Golden Ones, known by the Celts as the Tuatha De
Danann, as hypnotically beautiful as the Fomorii were monstrous. Angels and
demons, if you will. But the Tuatha lle Danann were as alien to us as the
Fomorii-unpredictable, unknowable, beyond all concepts of good and evil, and
therefore just as dangerous.

The struggle between the Golden Ones and the Night Walkers almost devastated the world in antiquity, but at what the Celts called the second battle of
Magh Tuireadh, the Fomorii were defeated. The postwar deal meant both sides
vacated this planet for that strange place where the laws of physics don't seem
to work-Faerie, Otherwords, T'ir n'a n'Og, Heaven and Hell, whatever name
you prefer-and they took with them almost all the other creatures of myth.
The deal was that they would never return. But some of them managed to sneak
back for brief visits through the liminal zones, the lakes, the hilltops, the stone
circles, where the division between our two worlds were thinnest, explaining all
our history of supernatural phenomena from ghosts to UFOs to lake monsters.

The deal held reasonably well for millennia, until, through some process no
one quite understands, the Fomorii broke through once again. They unleashed
a tremendous force, the Wish-Hex, which trapped some members of the Tuatha
lle Danann in exile and brought some under Fomorii control; only a handful
escaped.

But our own world was not without its own defences. Running through
everything is a strange energy that manifests itself as a blue fire. The Chinese know
it as chi; other cultures call it something different, but every race has an under standing of it. It's the lifeblood of the planet, the lifeblood of us, an overpowering
spiritual force that heals and uplifts. The Fiery Network is in everything, but it is
most evident at certain potent sites which have become sacred down the yearsthe places where our ancestors erected stone circles, or our greatest cathedrals.
Over the years we lost touch with this force, and became the worse for it. In all
but the most powerful places it grew dormant. The Fabulous Beasts, as the ancient
Chinese knew, were both symbolic of the earth energy and guardians of it, following the lines across the land, living on the energy it gave off. These remarkable
creatures had awakened with the return of the Fomorii, but the one which
attacked Church, Ruth, and Tom had fallen, briefly, under the power of the
Fomorii; it was too powerfully independent to be controlled for long, though.

And, too, there were human avatars of the Blue Fire, the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons, humans within whom the spiritual force burned most brightly.
In ancient times they helped defend the world, and now, Tom said, they had
been resurrected. There would be five in total, and Church and Ruth were two
of them. The five were found by the Blue Fire and it was up to them to defend
the world, however reluctant they felt about this task. But their job wasn't just
defence; there was another side to it too. Prophecies linked to the old Arthurian
legends spoke of a king awaking in Britain's darkest hour to save the land. Like
so many other aspects of myth, this was a metaphor. The king was the spiritual
force in the land and it was up to the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons to wake it
from its slumber. Those tales of King Arthur actually proved a secret guide; sites
linked to Arthur were places potent in the spirit power. The stories themselves
told in their complex code how the earth energy and its champions defended the
land and how it fell into dormancy, waiting to be called back again at a time of
greatest need.

Understandably, Church and Ruth found it difficult to assimilate all this new
information, especially when it went against the way they had been taught to see
the world since childhood. But how could they deny the evidence of their eyes?

As they slept in Stonehenge that night, Church was visited by the spirit of
Marianne once again, and this time she left him a gift: an unusual black rose,
the
Roisin Dubh
. He took it, not realizing what it meant.

In Salisbury they encountered Laura for the first time. But they were also
pursued by frightening aspects of the supernatural: the demonic black dog, Old
Shuck, which acts as precursor to the Wild Hunt of legend, fabled for hunting
down lost souls, as well as the Baobhan Sith, ghostly, bloodsucking creatures of
the night. And Ruth had her first encounter with the goddess who would eventually become her patron, the mysterious triple nature deity that manifested as
maiden, mother, and crone.

They also had what would prove to be a fateful encounter with a strange
wanderer who called himself Callow. On first impression, he seemed merely
eccentric, speaking in a theatrical manner, constantly trying to wheedle free
drinks and food; harmless enough.

Laura took Church, Ruth, and Tom to a depot on an industrial estate where
she had had a life-changing experience. The place looked mundane, but the
depot was being run by the shape-shifting Fomorii for distribution of canisters
filled with a foul black gunk. Church and Laura plunged through a hole in the
air, finding themselves in the Watchtower, a structure suspended in space and
time, somewhere between our world and the Otherworld. Here Church experienced several troubling, prophetic visions before encountering Niamh, one of
the Tuatha lle Danann who had escaped the Fomorii's Wish-Hex. Beautiful and
enigmatic, Church felt he knew her instantly, which in a way he did. She had
been visiting him at night throughout his childhood, preparing him for his role
as a Brother of Dragons, although he had always thought her a dream. She told
him everything about the Tuatha lle Danann and what was expected of him: to
find four mystical objects of power hidden for aeons. They were the sword, spear,
stone, and cauldron-or Grail-which had played such a part in all our legends,
and they were the only things that could free the exiled Tuatha lle Danann. And
they were the only ones who could repel the Fomorii; humanity stood no chance
alone, she said. She gave him the Wayfinder, a magic lantern with a flame of the
Blue Fire that would point him in the direction of the artifacts.

Church and Laura returned to Earth, only to find the depot in flames and
Tom disappeared. They picked up Ruth and headed to the first location: Avebury. There they met the strange, old man known only as the Bone Inspector.
He was caretaker of the country's ancient sites and the last in a very long line of
wise men driven underground at the time of the Roman invasion. He led them
beneath the stone circle to the main source of the Blue Fire in the south, and the
home of the oldest Fabulous Beast. There Laura reclaimed the first of the artifacts, the Stone of Fal, rumoured to be able to recognize the true king of the
land; it screamed when Church touched it, the first sign of his destiny.

Leaving the Bone Inspector behind, they headed east. They were halted by
the inexplicable failures of technology that had been happening randomly since
the change came over the world, stranded with their useless car just outside
Bristol. After making camp, Church encountered a young girl named Marianne
who gave him a cheap locket containing a picture of Princess Diana. Church felt
a connection to the bright, optimistic child, not in the least because her name
was the same as his dead girlfriend.

That night Ruth encountered the goddess again, who asked Ruth to look for the missing other half of the nature deity. Ruth fled in terror, but not before
the goddess gifted her a
familiar
in the form of an owl.

The next day they were forced to rush the now-comatose Marianne to hospital. She had been living for months with a blood clot close to her brain. Before,
it had been too dangerous to operate, but now only a touch-and-go op could save
her. Not long after she went into the theatre, another technology failure struck
and the hospital was plunged into darkness and chaos.

But then a remarkable thing happened. Somehow Marianne made her way
from the operating theatre to cure an entire cancer ward with some power from
within her. It manifested as a brilliant white luminescence, like a lightbulb
burning itself out. She died immediately afterwards. It was almost as if she had
wanted to commit some last act of goodness before moving on. This affected
Church deeply. It showed that the change wasn't all bad; miraculous, wonderful
things could happen too. He kept her locket as a reminder of that day.

They followed the lantern south until they came to an inn in the centre of
Dartmoor where they planned to stay the night. But as they rested, the terrible,
otherworldly Wild Hunt attacked. This shadowy troupe on horseback was led
by the goblin-like Erl-King and was accompanied by a pack of devilish hounds.
Many people at the inn were slaughtered by the Hunt's cruel weapons. Church
fled across Dartmoor on a motorbike to try to draw the Hunt away, while Ruth
and Laura drove off in the opposite direction, but Church hadn't gone far before
he plunged into one of the abandoned mineshafts that dot the moor.