A Thread Of Cold Iron

The mud of West Yorkshire did not respect designer footwear.

Rosalind had pointed this out twelve times during the drive from Leeds, six times while climbing over a barbed-wire fence, and approximately every four seconds since they had stepped onto the rain-sodden cow pasture.

“My boots are suede, Maeve. Italian suede,” Rose whined, balancing on one precarious, manicured foot like an aggrieved, platinum-blonde flamingo. She clutched the lapels of a baby-pink faux-fur jacket that was already soaking up the miserable October drizzle. “They’re soaking up filth like a bloody sponge. I can feel it seeping into the insoles. This is a hate crime against designer footwear.”

“Oh, shut up, Barbie,” Maeve barked from ten paces ahead. She strode through the gloom like an invading Viking, all five foot ten inches of broad-shouldered, red-headed wiry momentum, completely indifferent to the squelching mire. Under one arm, she carried a battered leather rucksack bursting with unlabelled glass jars; under the other, an iron cauldron she had bought off Facebook Marketplace for fifteen quid. “It’s organic matter. It’ll wash out. Unlike your endless whining, which is permanently burned into my auditory cortex.”

“It’s not filth,” Edith muttered, trudging stoically between them with her hands shoved deep into the pockets of an oversized, drab olive trench coat that made her look like a miniature Cold War spy. “Statistically, given the herd rotation in this specific portion of the valley, it’s mostly dairy cow manure, decomposing clover, and runoff from the motorway”

Rose gasped in horror, instantly dropping her foot into a puddle. “That’s worse! Edith, that’s so much worse!”

“I aim for both historical and biological accuracy,” Edith said drily. She reached up with a gloved finger and nudged the black bridge of her tortoiseshell spectacles higher on the smooth bridge of her nose.

The spectacles were completely unnecessary. A minor childhood astigmatism had sorted itself out when she was twelve, a fact confirmed by three separate, increasingly baffled opticians. But Edith kept them regardless. She liked the glass barrier between her face and the rest of humanity. It made her look ten years older, intensely severe, and thoroughly unapproachable—which suited her perfectly fine. Paired with her thick, ankle-skimming woollen skirt and her hair scraped back into a bun so tight it practically pulled her eyebrows into an eternal arch of disdain, she was an impenetrable fortress of academic pragmatism.

Never mind that beneath the severe pins, her hair was a soft, gleaming cascade of warm chestnut with gold undertones she couldn’t be bothered to care about. Never mind that she stood barely five-foot-two in her heavy lace-up brogues. If anyone looked closely at Edith, they got a sharp tongue, a cold stare, and an encyclopedic lecture on tenth-century agrarian tax codes until they went away.

Except Rose and Maeve. They never went away.

“Would you two stop bickering for five seconds?” Edith sighed, checking the glowing screen of her cheap digital watch. “It’s eleven-forty. It’s six degrees Celsius. The humidity is currently ninety-eight percent, which means within twenty minutes, Rose’s blowout will collapse, Maeve’s fringe will frizz into a copper bush, and I will develop double pneumonia. Can we please get to the pile of rocks, light your little hippie,-dippie scented candle, and go home to the radiator?”

“They are not a pile of rocks,” Maeve hissed, stopping so abruptly that Edith nearly bumped into her rucksack.

They had crested the low ridge of the field. Before them, rising out of the mist like the jagged teeth of an ancient earth-monster, sat the stones.

It wasn’t Stonehenge. It wasn’t even Avebury. It was a forgotten, un-mapped henge—seven squat, lichen-encrusted megaliths arranged in an imperfect circle around a flat altar stone, nestled in a dip where the wind mysteriously died into an eerie, suffocating calm.

“Look at them,” Maeve whispered, her fiery green eyes lighting up with an obsessive, manic brilliance. She dropped her heavy cauldron onto the turf with a dull thud. “The Swastika Stone on Ilkley Moor gets all the tourists, but this... this is older. The forum on Witch.Net said this site sits right on the intersection of three blind Ley lines. The Celtic lunar calendar aligns with the Pleiades tonight. The veil is paper-thin.”

“Witch.Net,” Edith deadpanned, staring at the grey monoliths. “You dragged us into a bog in the middle of nowhere on a Tuesday night because of a URL that definitely hosts malware and men who live in their mothers’ basements.”

“Derek is a verified third-degree adept, Edith!” Maeve snapped, pulling a bundle of dried herbs from her bag. “He translated the Ogham script himself!”

“Derek works part-time at a vape shop in Huddersfield,” Rose scoffed, shivering as she caught up and huddled close to Edith for warmth. “I looked at his profile picture. He has a tribal tattoo on his neck and a photo of a snake wearing a little wizard hat. And HE is the one our dear, naive Maeve is taking life advice from.”

“He has insight!” Maeve shouted over the rising wind. “Which is more than I can say for someone whose entire dissertation is on the semiotics of autumn pastel palettes!”

“Pastel palettes are culturally relevant!” Rose shot back, her voice squeaking with that familiar, frantic insecurity she tried so hard to hide beneath layers of lip gloss and bravado. “Fashion reflects the socioeconomic anxieties of the masses! Edith, tell her! Tell her I’m doing real work!”

“You both give me a rip roaring migraine,” Edith said smoothly, stepping physically between them before Maeve could brandish a stick of dried mugwort in Rose’s face. “Maeve, stop terrorising the girl. Rose, stop antagonising the giant with the iron pot. If we are doing this, let’s do it efficiently. We have twenty minutes until midnight. Set up your little fire hazard so we can fail to summon the dark lord and go to McDonald’s.”

Maeve huffed, tossing her thick red braid over her shoulder, but she backed down. Edith was the only person alive who could pull Maeve’s leash without losing a limb. Maeve didn’t have parents; she didn’t have siblings or childhood bedrooms to return to for Sunday roasts. The state foster system had forged her into a blunt, uncompromising battering ram of a woman. But Edith and Rose were her people. She would tear down a brick wall with her bare fingernails for either of them, even if she spent eighty percent of her day threatening to strangle them.

“Fine,” Maeve grumbled. “Stations, everyone. Into the circle.”

Rose hesitated at the perimeter of the stones. “Is it going to smell weird? Because I sprayed Tom Ford on my scarf and I don’t want it fighting with sage.”

“Get in the circle, Rosalind!”

With heavy sighs and squelching footsteps, they stepped past the jagged portal of the southern stones. The instant they crossed the threshold, the wind ceased completely.

Edith frowned, pausing. The ambient roar of the distant dual carriageway vanished. The steady patter of rain against her coat simply... stopped, though the grey mist still hung suspended in the air around them. The silence was sudden, heavy, and thick, pressing against her eardrums like the pressure at the bottom of a deep swimming pool.

“That’s... odd,” Edith murmured, her analytical brain immediately searching for a plausible explanation. “Maybe this depression is creating a dead-air pocket?”

“It’s the circle sealing,” Maeve said with a wicked, triumphant grin. She was kneeling by the centre slab, rapidly arranging tallow candles, a bowl of coarse salt, and a bronze blade she’d bought at a flea market. “Right. The Triple Goddess invocation requires three archetypes. Rose, you stand at the East stone.”

Rose blinked, hugging herself. “Why the East?”

“Because you’re the Maiden,” Maeve said, rolling her eyes. “Youth, dawn, vanity, air-headed beginnings. It fits.”

“I am not air-headed!” Rose protested, though she dutifully walked to the eastern stone, visibly pleased with being assigned the youthful archetype. “At least I’m pretty. What’s Edith?”

Maeve pointed a blunt, dirt-stained finger toward the North stone. “Edith is the West. You’re the Crone.”

Edith froze, glaring over the rims of her glasses with enough venom to dissolve iron. “I am twenty-three years old.”

“It’s not about physical age, it’s about energy,” Maeve said dismissively, striking a match and lighting a black candle. “You dress like an Edwardian schoolmarm, you have the disposition of a retired magistrate, and you spend your Friday nights reading tenth-century wills for fun. You are ancient in your soul. You are the Crone. Wisdom, decay, the bitter end of things. Go stand by the rock.”

“Wisdom and decay,” Edith repeated flatly. “Delightful. Remind me to leave you out of my will. Not that you’d be able to read it, written as it is in proper Latin.”

“Just get over there!”

Edith marched to the western stone, muttering dark curses under her breath. Rose gave her an apologetic, sparkly little wave from across the circle, while Maeve positioned herself at the southern stone.

“I am the Mother,” Maeve declared, lifting her chin. “The protector, the gatekeeper, the fulcrum of power.”

“You’re training to be a primary school teacher, Maeve,” Rose called out sweet-naturedly. “You’re going to spend your life wiping snot off seven-year-old’s and cutting up paper.”

“I will be a formidable educator!” Maeve barked. “Now, shut up! The midnight hour approaches. Take these.”

Maeve dug into the pockets of her cargo trousers and walked swiftly across the grass, thrusting an object into Rose’s hands, and then marching over to Edith.

She pressed something cold and heavy into Edith’s palm.

Edith looked down. It was a raw, unpolished stone—a jagged shard of translucent, smoky quartz shot through with threads of deep, metallic copper that seemed to pulse faintly under the grey moonlight.

“What is this?” Edith asked, turning it over. “It’s not standard quartz is it? the crystalline structure is trigonal...”

“Just keep it in your pocket,” Maeve said, her voice dropping, suddenly stripped of all its bravado and teasing. For a fraction of a second, Maeve looked genuinely unnerved. She gripped Edith’s hand tightly around the stone. “Derek said... he said the currents can get turbulent. If things start pulling, you hold onto the stone. It acts as an anchor. It keeps the thread tied between us.”

Edith looked from the strange crystal up into Maeve’s fierce, protective eyes. Beneath the occult obsession and the bossy yelling, Maeve’s deepest, darkest fear was always the same: losing them. Being left behind.

Edith’s prickly demeanour softened. She curled her small fingers around the stone. “Maeve. Nothing is going to pull us apart. We are standing in a cow field in Yorkshire of all places, so don't worry. But I will keep this in my pocket if it makes you feel better, alright?”

Maeve swallowed, nodded sharply, and retreated to the southern altar stone. “Right. Silence now. No speaking until I finish the Old English warding.”

“Old English?” Edith’s eyebrows shot up. “Maeve, you don’t speak Old English. You can barely manage new world English.”

“I have phonetic index cards!” Maeve snapped, pulling a stack of neon-pink index cards from her coat. “Quiet!”

Rose smothered a giggle behind her manicured hand. Edith crossed her arms, settling in to watch the theatrical disaster unfold.

Maeve cleared her throat. She raised the bronze blade toward the heavy, cloud-choked sky.

"Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum..." Maeve began, bellowing with catastrophic pronunciation.

“That’s the opening line of Beowulf,” Edith called loudly across the circle. “Maeve, that’s literally just the opening line of a heroic poem about a monster in a swamp. That is not an occult incantation.”

“Edith, I swear to God, stop peer-reviewing my ritual!” Maeve hissed between clenched teeth. She raised the blade higher, stamping her heavy boot onto the altar stone. ”Eala, mihtige dryhten! We open the way! By stone and marrow, by blood and bone, turn the spindle, strip the thread!"

A gust of wind—sharp, dry, and impossibly hot—erupted from the dead centre of the altar stone.

Edith blinked. The smell of sheep and wet grass vanished in an instant, replaced by the choking, metallic tang of ozone and scorched copper. Her hair, usually pinned so securely, began to pull free from its heavy tortoiseshell hairpins, strands whipping violently around her face.

“Maeve?” Rose called out, her voice suddenly trembling. The lightheartedness had vanished. Rose took a step backward toward the edge of the circle, but the moment her heel touched the boundary line between the stones, an invisible wall slammed against her, sending a shower of crackling blue sparks across her suede jacket. “Maeve! I can’t get out! The air is hard!”

“Hold your positions!” Maeve yelled, though the index cards had been ripped from her grip, scattering into the air and spontaneously bursting into pale violet flames. “Don’t break the triangle!”

“Maeve, stop the recitation!” Edith shouted, taking a stride toward her friends. “The electrostatic charge in this depression is reaching critical levels—we are going to be struck by lightning!”

“I’m not doing it!” Maeve screamed, staring in sheer terror at the altar stone.

The flat megalith was cracking. Glowing fissures of blinding, molten azure light were splintering across the rock like shattered ice. The ground beneath their feet began to vibrate, a low, subsonic hum that rattled Edith’s teeth in their sockets and made the quartz crystal in her coat pocket burn with sudden, agonising heat.

“Rose! Edith!” Maeve lunged toward them, abandoning the centre, but the space between the three stones was warping.

The air distorted, bending the light like looking through a thick, warped glass bottle. Edith could see Rose screaming, tears streaking her mascara as she dropped to her knees, clutching her glowing crystal to her chest. She could see Maeve, fighting against an invisible, violent gale, reaching her long arms out toward them with a look of desperate, feral anguish.

“Hold the stones!” Maeve’s voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of an iron well, stretched and distorted across impossible distances. ”Hold on to—!"

The world split open.

There was no sound—only a flash of light so intensely bright it burned white-hot behind Edith’s eyelids. The universe tilted violently on its axis.

A monstrous gravitational force grabbed Edith by the chest, ripping the breath from her lungs. She reached out blindly, trying to grab Maeve’s hand, trying to find Rose’s coat, but her fingers caught only empty, rushing air that smelled of wood smoke, wet earth, and thunder.

The violent shock wave tore her spectacles from her face, flinging them into the void.

My glasses,her logical brain thought absurdly, tumbling end over end through a deafening, spinning vortex of gold and shadow.I can’t see without my—

The thought shattered as the darkness swallowed her whole, ripping the three friends apart and flinging them into the deep, churning current of eternity.

P.S I hope you all have a wonderful time reading the tale to come, I hope it is a book you will enjoy and cherish. I hope some of you will be kind enough to leave me some feedback and encouragement, about this story and the trilogy as a whole.

These manuscripts I am posting here have never been seen by anyone else. I have spent many years writing on my own but found the task of editing and grammar checks etc is extremely tedious and time consuming, time i do not have with a very busy life like most people who work, which is where AI today has come in handy otherwise polishing all of this myself would be impossible, BUT THIS IS NOT AN AI GENERATED STORY, EVERY BEAT, EVERY SCENE, EVERY NUANCE IS MY OWN.

BTW I also have the same user name and story up on Wattpad. But this is posted no where else except these two places nor will it be for now, i want to find out where me and my writing fit in best, lets see!

I have spent many lonely years writing only for myself and hiding it all away for fear of ridicule. Writing is sacred to me, these stories are gouged from my soul, they fester in my brain screaming to be let out. So I bring this all to light with a great deal of humility and a massive amount of nervousness as well.

Please let me know what you all think. the good, the bad and the ugly! I am always happy to communicate with any and all readers.

Have a blessed life.

Happy Reading!