The Last Song of Tír na nÓg

Eileen Ni Fhaoláin had been blind since birth, which meant she had never seen the Fair Folk, which meant that when they came for her, standing in her kitchen on a Tuesday evening while she was washing the dishes, she knew them only by their silence. They made no sound — no footstep, no breath, no rustle of cloth — and yet the room changed around them, the air thickening with the scent of hawthorn and wild honey and something electric, like the moment before lightning. Her harp, which stood in the corner where it always stood, began to hum without being touched.

The tallest of them spoke in a voice that arrived not through her ears but through the soles of her feet, rising up through the flagstones like groundwater. "Eileen, daughter of Padraic, daughter of Grainne, daughter of the line of harpers. The gates between the worlds are closing. We require a song to decide whether they close forever or open wide. You have been chosen." She set down the dish she was holding and dried her hands on the towel that hung from the oven door and said, with the composure of a woman who had spent her entire life navigating a world she could not see, "And what if I refuse?"

The silence that followed was not an absence but a presence, the sound of beings so old they had forgotten how to be surprised, remembering. Then the voice came again, gentler this time, carrying in it the echo of everyharp string ever plucked: "We offer sight, Eileen. Not the sight of your world — the sight of ours. You will see the Otherworld as it truly is, every colour, every light. And in return, you will play." She stood in her kitchen with the dishwater cooling in the sink and the harp humming its quiet, insistent invitation, and she felt the weight of the offer settle on her shoulders like a cloak woven from centuries.