The Long Twilight

Posted on Aug 22, 2014 @ 11:47am by Captain Michael Turlogh Kane
Edited on on Aug 22, 2014 @ 12:05pm

Mission: The Tangled Webs We Weave

"THE LONG TWILIGHT"

(Continued from "Sickbay Stories")

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"Níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin."
- Irish proverb

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Location: Thomond, Earth
Stardate: [2.14]0730.0300
Scene: Home


The river ran on forever. Night and day it called to him, "Come away with me and see what lies beyond the hills!"

Michael Turlogh Kane's boyhood had been surrounded by hills. Behind the castle where he had been born rose the mighty Slieve Bernagh. There the legendary guardian spirit of his clan, the banshee known as Aval, watched over them from her brooding gray crag. Across the fields and to the south were more hills, but the river escaped them all. It ran on and on to places the young Kane could only dream about.

"Take me with you," he whispered sometimes.

Now Kane the man stood amongst those heathered, windblown drumlins and relived the memories of childhood and youth. The summer's day was done, a long twilight was settling in, and he had come home to Thomond, leaving Starfleet, the upcoming Board of Inquiry, and the twenty-fifth century behind him like a bad memory.

Except it didn't feel quite like home anymore. The castle was silhouetted in the distance by a magnificent burnt orange sky, and the village by the riverbank was still there as he remembered it, but it had been almost ten years since he had stood on this road and taken in the scene. His father, long dead, had been joined in the grave by his mother some years ago. Wracked by the guilt and shame over his experiences at the hands of the Calnarians, Kane did not come home for the funeral and his mother had gone into the cold ground on her own. Now both his parents were dead, and there was nobody standing between him and his own mortality anymore. All these things - the mountain, the green grass, the castle itself - were once a part of him as his own thoughts, but they had all faded away as the years passed by, echoes of other places, other voices, another life.

He hefted his duffel bag and started down the road. Bernagh was a giant gray fist stretching to heaven, and the light breeze in his eyes made them water. "Aval," he whispered to himself, "can you see me now? I've come home."

Sometimes he thought he could feel her eyes on him. The sensation was curiously comforting. Aval was magic, one of the old powers who had been forgotten and discarded. The influence of the ancient gods could still be felt in the wilder parts of Ireland, away from the lights of civilisation, in the hills and streams and thorn trees, in the great silent mounds and barrows into which the last of the sidhe had crept centuries ago. They had disappeared from the sight of mortal men forever, sealing themselves away from a world too jaded to shine in their glamour.

The road wound on by hedgerows and fallow fields, broken by the opaque ribbon of water as the river wound its way through the land. A corncrake shrieked in the mudflats and took to the wing, climbing on the zephyrs of darkening air like a lost soul.

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Scene: The village


In the village, nobody was out on the street. Less than a dozen people lived around here full-time anyway. Most of them were crofters or people who made a living accommodating and feeding travellers on holiday. Foot traffic to the village pub was dwindling now - far easier to get beamed straight to where you wanted to go than to actually have an experience getting there. In some ways, modern technology had taken some of the meaning out of life.

It was a notion that his father had espoused while he was alive. William Turlogh Kane was anachronistic and traditionalist, who deliberately maintained his family's ancestral seat in a medieval fashion, with a wood-and-stone interior and almost no twenty-fifth century technology of any kind, not even a medkit. Father and son had clashed many times over the years - the same old argument borne out by radically different personalities. His father's only experience of space was a single off-world pleasure excursion to Lake Armstrong - it was not as if the old man was privy to the secrets of the void and rejecting them. And his endless diatribes on the importance of being an heir annoyed the young Kane no end. The power and structure of the Irish clans had been destroyed eight hundred years ago. As the years fell away and history drew its great grey veil across the memories of the living, society changed. The honour previously accorded to chieftains and bards ceased to exist. They were all scattered like dust in the wind, and all that remained were lonely ghosts stalking sad ruins dotted across the land. Stronger clans had survived by adapting and becoming Anglicised, and thus had secured their hold over what remained of their ancestral lands. Many times, Kane had exchanged frustrated words with his father, wishing that he would throw off the outdated yoke of tradition that he stubbornly refused to let go of.

The pub door opened and an old man came out. Kane and he locked eyes, and then Kane remembered him. Seamus O' Shaughnessy, a rogueish block of a man in his youth, vivacious and jovial. The years had changed that smiling face. Now the lip was downturned and riveted by dark, exhausted eyes. His shock of blonde hair was still there, but had changed colour. Silver supplanted the gold.

They eyeballed each other, and Kane saw that the other man finally recognised him.

"So," said Seamus, breaking the silence. "It's yourself, is it?"

Kane nodded. "It is."

"You've come back, have you?"

"I have."

Seamus put his hands in his pockets and came to the middle of the road. He looked at the direction of the monolithic castle. "House has been empty since your mother died. All dark and cold. Do you plan on brightening it up again or something?"

Kane wasn't sure what to say, but finally it came out. "I didn't really have anywhere else to go."

"Ah." Seamus stroked his chin sagely, paused for a moment. "We all saw you on the news. We all saw what you did."

"Did you."

"We did. We knew why you stayed away when she went into the ground."

Kane turned his face away from Seamus. "I'm not staying. I'm going to spend a few days there and see if I can reconnect."

"Is that right?"

"It is."

"And what would you be thinking of reconnecting with?"

Kane started walking. There was no answer to that question. His father had been a believer in the notion that the land and the king are one, that the two formed a bond that shored each other up. Kings came and went, but an unbroken line of generations did not. There were no kings any more, but there were still Kanes.

"They say Aval cried out from the mountain," said Seamus. He said it nonchalantly, like he was throwing a pebble into a lake.

Kane froze. The cry of the banshee signalled a time of trial for the clan she watched over, usually meaning the death of one of its scions. The last time Aval had screeched her primal, nightmarish keen was almost twenty years ago, and his uncle Gerard had died aboard the Ark Royal when she went down with all hands in the Olara system. "When?"

"Oh, three nights ago. I didn't hear her myself, it's just a rumour. Maybe she was foretelling the future. Or maybe she was just letting us know she was still there."

Kane stepped on again. "Signs and portents don't tell the future. They never did."

Seamus chuckled to himself. "Then I wish you pleasant dreams," he said.

Kane felt the older man's eyes bore into his back all the way up the road.

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Scene: Inside the great hall


The castle did not used to be so backward. There used to be a sensor network on the battlements, replicators in the kitchen, a fully automated security system. When his anti-tech father tore out all these systems, he still had the common sense to leave the latter in place, which still worked. The doors unlocked at Kane's voice pattern, and he pushed them open and stepped into a living history museum.

Nothing had been touched in eight years. All the ornaments and the furniture were still laid out neatly the way he remembered them. The stone was still cold and dead, the tapestries and rugs were still mute, and in the great hall, the mighty stag's head still looked down from over the fireplace with lifeless glass eyes.

Kane's footsteps echoed everywhere. The kitchen, his father's office, two living rooms, two bathrooms, a dining room, twin staircases leading to the upper floor. He opened every door, unbarred every window, filled the place up with watery twilight sunshine. Upstairs, his parents' bedroom lay empty, all their clothes still in their drawers.

The castle and all the property within it had entered a kind of legal limbo after his father's sudden death. Theoretically, the family owned the land the castle and village were built on, but required an heir to inherit it on the death of the previous owner. Kane had been named as his father's heir as soon as he was born, but had never claimed his inheritance, so the local district court had simply put a stay on the property until either he or another heir came forward. His mother's family had simply closed the windows, shut the doors, and locked up the place to gather dust.

Kane opened the door to his own room. The shape of it was familiar, but nothing else. The bed and furniture was all where they were supposed to be, but the wardrobe was empty and the walls were bare. The room had been drained and sterilised of any character, and Kane couldn't stay in there for more than a minute.

He felt like a ghost haunting his own home.

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Scene: The roof


By the time he got up to the roof, the long twilight had almost gone, Night, voluptuous and vast, rolled into Thomond, bringing a drizzle of rain and a cold breeze that shuttled through the reeds on the muddy riverbank.

The lights in the houses in the village were going out one by one. A pair of old men came out of the pub, shook hands in the street, and parted company, disappearing into the gathering dark. The smell of damp turf smoke rose into the air. People were all slow to change around here.The memories of the day started to pale and blur as the night enshrouded them.

The light cloud cover was not thick enough to curtain the whole horizon, and all the stars came out in the darkening sky. A mist started to form out on the river.

Kane looked down from the battlements like a gargoyle, his hair plastered to his face by the fresh, crisp breeze and spitting rain. This was Thomond, as far as the eye could see, bastion of the clan Cathain for over a millennium. Its mighty stone battlements, weathered from centuries of enduring the damp Irish seasons, stood firm against the elements now as they had ever done, casting their stern gaze up the foggy banks of the river's estuary.

It had stood for almost a millennium now, its hewn stone walls withstanding both the winds and the rains that blew in from the river that flowed through the estate like a bright blue ribbon, meandering its way down to the estuary, and beyond to broad Atlantic foam. The Cathains had emerged from the mists of history a thousand years before that, had followed the westward migration of the Celtic peoples following the collapse of the Roman Empire, and had eventually settled and built a rath, or fort, at the mouth of the river. As the clan grew, alternately warring and allying with their neighbours, they had capitalised on their position at the mouth of the river to control tariffs on boats passing up and down the river towards the coast. A victorious war against the MacAodh clan, who lived on the other side of the river, had secured their position of dominance, and the clan prospered. A stone castle, named Thomond after the land upon which it was built, was constructed in place of the old wooden rath, and the reign of Cormac Cathain, the clan's greatest chieftain, had ensured their survival and maintenance of their holdings through the bloodiest part of the English invasion and conquest. The name Cathain became Anglicised into Kane, and as the old ways died and the feudal system of chieftains and bards was supplanted, the heads of the Kane family became landowners, and so the tradition survived up into the nuclear age, the digital age, the space age, and now into the modern age. Through all the winding road of history, the castle remained, eternal and solid, nurturing the children of the clan within its safe walls. When he was young, Kane would lie as a child, listening to the heaves and groans of ages pass through the walls - the castle would seem like a living, breathing thing, and whether it loomed through the frequent mists that rolled in off the river, or basked in the orange sunsets of long, quiet summer evenings that hearkened back to a bygone time, it was always there.

One night a thousand years ago, longships came nosing out of the mist that lay thick on the river. Their prows were ferocious wooden dragon heads, painted in the colours of fire and blood. They struck terror into the hearts of the clans, and so it began - wherever the rivers flowed, the foreigners from the cold lands to the north, the Danes and Norsemen, sailed up them to pillage and plunder. The foreigners called it "going viking". The day they had come up the estuary, they had lain waste to Thomond, pillaged it by the sword and gutted it by fire, almost wiping out the Cathains. It had taken the clan many generations to rebuild its strength.

Kane had always felt protected by the inherent power of these wild lands and rugged glens, and their timeless, elemental guardian. He looked up to Bernagh's black shadow, looked for Aval's lonely crag and listened hard for her cry, but there was nothing save the lonely screech of one of the river birds. The feeling of failure pained him. If he could not touch the ether, then perhaps his father had been correct - after so long away, he had lost his link to the land.

The summer storm that had been brewing through the evening came proper - heavy drops of rain started to fall, made rivulets on his forehead, flowed down to sting his eyes. He wiped his face and went down below into the empty tomb as the first flash of sheet lightning crackled over Bernagh.

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Scene: Bedroom


Kane deliberately did not turn on the generators. He went down to his bedroom and stripped off as the the low rumbles of thunder growled over the mountain. Alone in the castle, he climbed into the cold bed and lay there watching the bedroom door through flashes of lightning.

Night fell, and in the pitch darkness, the ghosts of the castle roused themselves and came for him.

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NRPG: To be continued... MOAR EMO!

My life is gross
I am so morose
Darkness fills my heart
Mom, I need moar black eyeliner from the supermart.


Jerome McKee
the Soul of Michael Turlogh Kane
A Captain in Starfleet


"He speaks an infinite deal of nothing!"
- Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice", Act 1, Scene 1.117

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