“The Woman in the Corner”
A Legend from the Ledger of Lirian Ever-Weaver
Part I: The Woman in the Corner
From the Ledger of Lirian Ever-Weaver
Chronicler of Mórradún
And the hush before the tale begins…
The storm had broken by the time I arrived at the edge of the village—the clouds torn open and drifting like old ghosts above the rooftops. The wind had a hush to it, not quiet but watchful, carrying the scent of sodden moss and something older—something listening. Puddles shimmered with the last of the sky’s memory, and smoke curled from chimneys like offerings. The sort of storm that doesn’t pass so much as pause, brooding in the hills for its next thought. Rain still clung to my cloak like old memory, and the mud of the road had a habit of keeping things longer than it should. But there, ahead, I saw the firelight blooming against the windows of a low, thatch-roofed pub. Just beside its door sat a weathered boulder, dark with rain, oddly out of place—as if dropped there by a giant hand or forgotten by time. A spiral faintly etched along one side caught the last of the light. I paused, just for a breath, then moved on.
I stepped inside.
It smelled of smoke, peat, and people too stubborn to go home. Perfect.
The usual scene: farmers half-asleep on tankards, a fiddler in the corner pretending to tune, and the barkeep wiping the same spot on the counter as if polishing a memory. A murmur ran through the place when I entered, the sort of hush that follows a story into a room before its words do.
“That’s Lirian,” someone whispered. “The Firetongue.”
“Aye,” said the barkeep. “Or the Ever-Weaver, if you’re feeling poetic. Either way, the fire listens when he speaks.”
“He’s always ready with a story,” murmured a grey-bearded farmer, not unkindly.
“Aye,” said another, lowering his voice. “But be wary what you call forth—invoking a tale isn’t hard. It’s the listening that costs.”
There was a round of low chuckles at that, the kind that hides a thread of nervous truth.
I offered a half-smile, gave a slow nod to the murmuring table, and let the warmth of the fire settle into my bones.
The barkeep raised an eyebrow as he handed me a cup. “If the fire flares up while you’re talking, Ever-Weaver,” he said, “I’ll not be responsible for the shadows it brings.”
I made no fuss. Just nodded, dropped a few coins on the bar, and found a seat near the hearth. That’s when I saw her.
She was sitting alone in the darkest corner of the pub—not hidden, just… overlooked. Her shawl hung heavy across her shoulders, patchworked with what looked like the pelts of animals long since vanished into winter. The folds of it moved strangely in the firelight, as if remembering older shapes. Her face, lined with the years of a dozen lifetimes, bore the echo of a maiden’s grace, a mother’s stillness, and a crone’s knowing weight. In her, I saw not age alone, but the turning of the seasons—the quiet strength of one who has weathered everything and carries wisdom like a mountain carries snow.
The hearthfire, which had sputtered all evening, steadied as she sat beside it—burning low, but bright. The inn’s cat, bold with strangers, wouldn’t pass near her table. It circled once… then vanished. An old hound near the door raised its head, then lowered it again—not out of fear, but reverence. No one spoke to her. No one served her. And for the briefest moment—just as the fire caught her face in a flicker—I thought I saw a sheen of blue to her skin, like frost beneath the surface of water. It could have been shadow. Or something older.
She met my eyes for a moment. Smiled. Just once.
And in that instant, I remembered something—a voice once heard in another pub, in another storm:
“I’ve seen her, I think. Or something like her—carved into the cliffs above the sea. Hag’s Head, they call it. Swore the wind changed when I looked too long. Swore she blinked.”
The man had not been drunk. Just haunted.
“Tell us a tale, bard,” came the inevitable call. A lad near the fire, too young to know that tales don’t come cheap.
I raised my cup. “Very well. But not one you’ve heard in church or market. This one comes from the stones. From the wind. From a woman who knew the shape of the world before the world had names.”
The room stilled. Even the fiddler held his breath.
I began.
Part II: The Storm-Mother
They say she was born beneath a sky split by violet lightning—the kind that comes only once in a century, when the world turns over in its sleep.
The seventh daughter of a seventh daughter. Though she never confirmed it. Only smiled—like someone who remembered things the rest of us hadn’t yet lived.
Her name? It changes in the telling.
In one village she is called Antha of the Crag.
In another, She-Who-Survived-Winter.
And in some, they whisper simply, Cailleach—and add no more.
She has outlived kingdoms and lovers. Outwaited both drought and betrayal.
Those who encountered her speak of strange things—how snow melted in her footsteps, how horses refused to pass her on the road, how mirrors refused to hold her reflection in full. Children stopped crying when she entered a room, not from comfort, but from awe. Candles burned lower.
Leaves did not fall when she passed beneath trees, even in the heart of autumn.
Rain fell where she walked, but never on her skin. Once, they say, a wolf bowed to her in the dark and left its hunt unfinished. And once, when the rains vanished for thirty years, she spoke a word to the earth, and the river wept for seven days.
It’s said she does not die, but sleeps in stone—waking only when the frost returns to claim the world again. And in the high days of autumn, some say she washes her great plaid in the whirlpool beyond the western cliffs—bleaching it white with foam, and bringing winter behind her like a cloak.
Those hands of hers—gnarled as hawthorn roots—have cradled gods in their fall. They’ve stitched up the torn cloaks of kings who crawled to her door in disgrace. She has taught truth to fools and silence to songbirds. Once, a chieftain who mocked the old ways sought her counsel in jest—and returned days later, wordless, his eyes holding a storm no man could name. And once, it’s said, a lark fell silent in mid-song while perched near her window, listening as if it, too, sought to learn.
The lines on her face? They are not from time. They are stories—each one etched by a name she dared to speak, or bury. Some curve like the spirals carved into standing stones; others cut deep, like fault lines where memory cracked the earth. They say if you looked closely enough, you might see a name tremble across her cheek—one she’s not yet finished carrying.
It’s said she once dropped stones from her apron across the valley—great boulders that tumbled like fallen stars, forming what the old ones now call The Stepping Stones of the Hagstones. No one climbs them at dusk. And children are warned not to count them aloud, for their number changes with the seasons.
They also say she can call the wind by name—if she’s in the right mood.
Or the wrong one.
No book bears her mark. No temple carries her name. But every fire in the village burns a little longer because she once told a tale beside it.
And if the fire grows low?
They say her shadow leans in and whispers something that makes even the embers blush.
Yes, in one tale, she loved him—Fothadh Canainne, a warrior-poet whose words could still storms and stir the hearts of kings. He had eyes like dusk and a voice that knew how to hold silence. And he loved her sister—Bríona, they called her, a woman said to be as fair as spring and as fleeting. Her hair was the color of sun-warmed wheat, and her laughter stirred men like a thawing river. She was not cruel, only unaware of the storm she stood in the center of. She moved like sunlight, soft and fleeting, and never saw the shadow gathering behind her.
The Cailleach, even then more wind than woman, did not envy her sister’s beauty, but she mourned the loss before it ever truly happened. Her love for Fothadh was the kind that knew no beginning, and feared no end.
He would sing songs to the sister by firelight, unaware that the crone who watched from the shadows had once danced barefoot through those same glens, and still could, if the world remembered how.
When the betrayal became truth, her fury did not scream—it walked. It took shape in silence and snowfall.
She chased him across the slopes of Beara to the River Funshion. He fled over ancient stones said to have been left there when the giants still sang, stones slick with moss and sea mist—like those that rise from the coast at Caorán’naith, the Giant’s Road in Mórradún. With every step, the river surged louder, as if it too was listening. His boots slipped. The weight of his sword pulled him sideways. Some say he stumbled, and the river took him. Others say her shadow fell over him, and he was gone before he hit the water.
He tried to cross. The sky didn’t darken—it listened. Thunder paused as if waiting for her breath. She lifted a boulder shaped like a giant’s tear and flung it. It landed on him midstream, pinning him to the riverbed.
They say the river still sings his name when it floods.
She never spoke of it again.
But her grief bore fire. And her fire bore a daughter: Tlachtga, born of storm and pain, whose power carved the Hill of Ward and whose death in childbirth marked the Samhain gate between life and shadow. But that, dear listener, is another story—for another night, and another fire.
The Cailleach bore no child after that. But she raised fifty fosterlings in Beare. Children of chieftains, of wanderers, of storms. She nursed them, taught them, buried many. And from their line came clans and kings—House Ó Rathúil of the southern coast, fierce and flame-bound; the Thiarnaí of Dromhallow, who swear they still dream in her voice; and the wild Kin of Corran’s Reach, who leave offerings each solstice at stone rings no map will name. Some say the stones of Cork bear her blood still. Others claim wildflowers grow only on the path she once walked, even in frost. The wind along those hills doesn’t howl—it murmurs, like a voice too old for words.
And there is a place, high above the sea, where the cliffs rise like sorrow held in stone. At the farthest edge—where wind sculpts rock into memory—the cliffs form the shape of a woman’s face gazing out over the waves. The villagers call it Hag’s Head.
They say it is her—turned to stone, watching the sea for what was lost, or what is yet to return. And sometimes, when the storm comes in off the Atlantic, the waves bow low at her feet.
Part III: The Fire That Remains
When I finished, the pub was silent. Even the fire had quieted, as if listening.
From somewhere near the bar, a voice finally broke the hush. “Was she real?”
Another muttered, “No one’s ever told it like that before.”
I looked to the corner.
The old woman was gone.
On the table where she’d sat: a stone. Spiral-carved. For the briefest flicker, I thought I saw a faint sheen of blue along its surface—like frost, or breath, or something older. Warm to the touch.
I tucked it into my cloak.
And the fire, somehow, burned a little longer that night.
“She was just there,” someone whispered.
The barkeep, who hadn’t said a word in some time, crossed his arms. “Aye. But some fires don’t wait to be stoked. And some stories don’t need permission.”
The fiddler resumed tuning his strings—absently, as if the notes had gone somewhere distant.
“She’s gone,” muttered the farmer by the hearth. “Told you. The listening’s what costs.”
I didn’t answer. I only placed the spiral-carved stone in front of me, letting its warmth seep into the wood. Outside, the wind shifted. Just slightly.
I did not tell them everything. Some truths are for the silence between the flames.
And in the fire’s flicker, I thought—for a breath—I saw her again, seated not in shadow, but in the oldest seat of all. I do not claim to know if it was her—or if the fire just remembered better than I could.
But only for a moment.
No cloak left behind. No scrape of a chair. Just absence—quiet and complete.
Then the hush returned.
I finished my drink in silence, slipped the stone back into my cloak, and stood.
No one stopped me.
I stepped out into the night, and the wind followed—not loud, not cold. Just… listening.
From the Ledger of Lirian Ever-Weaver, Chronicler of Mórradún, And the hush that lingers when the tale has gone quiet—but not ended.
What’s her story?
The one in the corner?
You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.
But if you sit past dusk—through silence, beyond the second cup—
she might show you. Not in words. But in wind. In fire. In the hush.
If this tale stirred something in you—
a memory, a whisper, a spark in the coals—
then the journey does not end here.
🜂 The Fianna Chronicles: Awakening awaits:
A tale of storms remembered, oaths reborn, and legends that listen.
Own the book — signed, sealed, and sent from the Ever-Weaver’s archive.
