Prologue
They say Ireland forgot her magic. It slipped away quietly beneath the earth, into the cracks of the old dolmens and sea caves, curling into the land’s silence like smoke. It vanished like a mist when the old language was forgotten, and the magic symbols carved into the stones slowly eroded and faded. It died when men stopped believing.
But that is not the truth. Magic did not die. The betrayal of the gods themselves sealed it.
Before memory, before time turned, there was Rhía. Goddess of the Night, Weaver of tides, Keeper of the balance between light and shadow. From her breath and boundless love came Tír na nÓg, the land of Eternal Youth. Here, beauty did not fade, and magic thrived.
Rhía wove the Veil, a living boundary between worlds, and placed a gate between the mortal realm of Ireland and shimmering Tír na nÓg. To guard it, she gave life to the Aes Sí, the Fae, beings of storms and moonlight, sworn for eternity to keep balance between the seen and the unseen.
For an age, the Aes Sí held the gate; they kept the Weave strong. They walked among the druids, whispered through the sacred groves and danced along the ley lines like flames. Mortals and immortals shared breath, and for a time, Ireland bloomed as Tír na nÓg shimmered.
Even the eternal grows hungry. The Aes Sí forget they were stewards. They craved more. More power without offering and continued immortality without service. They drew too deeply from the Weave, hoarding its gifts and fracturing their sacred promise to Rhía.
When creatures known as Sluagh began to rise from death and decay, the Aes Sí refused to fight; instead, they struck a pact in the shadows, and their power to control the gate began to wane. The Weave recoiled, Rhía wept, and as the Veil between worlds thinned, Tír na nÓg rotted from within.
One refused. Cace, the son of the sea, the last Tideborn, cast his blade into the waters and stood against the pact. He warned the elders of the Aes Sí that the land would bleed, that the gate would not hold, and that magic would be corrupted. They did not care and banished him from Tír na nÓg.
Cace fell into the mortal world like a falling star, his name scratched from the stones of his birthright. And so he waited. For centuries. Listening.
As Rhía’s voice faded from the sacred wells, her light dimmed in the stone circles and moonlit shores. Her power in the mortal realm diminished, but her promise did not. She had witnessed Cace’s sacrifice and would not forsake him. For when the time came and the Weave began to stir once more, she would send her daughter, the one who could restore what was broken.
She sent Cace a dream, a silent promise, not to lose hope. Magic wasn’t dead, it was slumbering, and when it awoke, he would find his Ceangal, his soul-bond foretold in the oldest magic. The storm would return. And with it, the heir of Rhía.
