Leanhaun Sidhe

I come from a land steeped in magic. There are beings here who would chill and delight you in the space between heart beats. Creatures big and small who protect and torment. Many are the sidhe; men and women who owned Ireland before the coming of our kind. We judge encounters with them as a kind of blessing, although one fraught with uncertainty and danger. Some of them we call the leanhaun sidhe and they are dark lovers with fickle magicks. The fairy lovers come in the night offering everything and the stupid and eager are ready to settle for a warm body. The wise who look deeper into the nature of things are wary.

Hundreds of years ago of these ancient creatures left Ireland and journeyed to the mainland. This was when terrible horsemen from the East beset your ancestors and wove a tapestry of flame across the Latin Empire. While the Huns and the Avars made kindling of Rome the Alans burned Frankia the tides of war swept the leanhaun sidhe into the court of a Nomad Chieftain. He was brutal and ugly in all manners, but she offered herself to him. His foreign will resisted the Fairy magic and as this kind is bound to do, she became enslaved to the one who resisted her.

For him life would become long, long enough to become nightmare. All god-graced drive faded from him and he became an eternal husk. Decades wore on and he passed from people to people, unaging but doomed all the same. It was like this, hundreds of years later that I found him. By sheer momentum the chieftain had amassed great wealth and power, creating himself a King of the Magyars who haunt Saxony.

I challenged him to single combat. The renown of besting an immortal would have my name sung all the way back home. The gold and jewels of his hoards would by my hearts’ desire until the day of my death. His thegns would help me spread fire all across Europe. I challenged him for none of these things.

I had seen the woman behind his throne; the broken little thing still glowing with the beauty of Ireland. It was for her that I beat down the self-destroyed Chieftain and took his head. And it was there in front of his assembled tribe I spoke this:
“I have travelled far from home but I know yours customs, Fairy. I could take you now without giving of myself and live well long beyond my years. But they would be meaningless years. Or I could give myself to you. Trade an early death for the gift of a bright life, a life brighter than a thousand suns. If you’ll take me, and give me your boon, I offer myself to you before all these witnesses.”