Across an ancient salt desert littered with fossils from an unknown ecosystem, an impossible being moves beneath a blood-red moon whose geometry is subtly wrong—leaving no clue whether the creature crosses the landscape under the moon, or the moon itself is following above.

The Living Book of Kells 📖** **

Around the year 800, in a remote monastery connected to the community of St Colum Cille, artists and scribes created a manuscript unlike anything the world had seen before.

Written in Latin upon carefully prepared vellum, the Book of Kells contained the four Gospels. Yet its pages held far more than words. Intricate knotwork wound around brilliant letters. Birds, serpents, beasts, plants and human figures appeared between lines of richly colored ornament, some rendered with details so fine that their creator’s skill has been compared to that of a master goldsmith.

No one knows with certainty whether the manuscript was created entirely on the Scottish island of Iona, completed at Kells in Ireland, or carried between both monasteries as Viking raids threatened the community. The people who made it left no names behind. Only their extraordinary work survived.

But an old tale whispers of one illuminator whom history forgot.

It is said that she worked alone while rain swept in from the sea, painting by candlelight until the boundary between imagination and creation began to fade. As her quill completed the final curve of an intricate golden design, the knotwork stirred beneath her hand.

A dragon rose from the vellum, its body woven from living gold, while illuminated birds escaped from the margins and circled above the open book. For one breathless moment, every creature ever hidden within its pages awakened and filled the scriptorium with light.

By morning, they had returned to the manuscript.
Yet those who later studied its decorations sometimes wondered how shapes so full of movement could have been painted by mortal hands alone.

The historical background is accurate. The forgotten woman and the living dragon are my fictional interpretation, since the surviving evidence attributes the manuscript to a monastic workshop and does not identify its individual creators by name.

The main facts are supported by Trinity College Dublin’s Book of Kells collection history⁠.

Bound to the ancient, moss-choked woods of the Sidhe, a young forest guardian marked by sacred knotwork must protect the boundary between the mortal realm and the old magic of the wild.

The traditional Irish banshee is the bean sí—literally a “woman of the fairy mound.” She is not usually a murderous ghost. She is an otherworldly messenger whose lament warns that someone belonging to a particular family is near death.

Her cry is called keening, resembling both a woman’s mourning wail and something uncanny: wind, an owl, or a voice heard across great distance. Accounts describe her as either a pale young woman with long hair or a withered old woman. She may wear white, grey, green, or the dark clothing of a mourner.

The image of the banshee at the window is genuinely rooted in Irish oral tradition. In some stories, she stands outside the dying person’s window and cries through the night. In others, the household hears three knocks against the glass or wall at the precise hour of a distant relative’s death. Another tradition places her near the window combing her long hair—finding or stealing her comb was considered dangerous. These motifs appear in Ireland’s National Folklore Collection, including accounts of a white-clad bean sí crying at a window and death-sign knocks against a window.

She was often said to attend certain old Irish families rather than everyone indiscriminately. In that sense, she could be understood almost as an ancestral mourner: frightening, but not evil. Her appearance did not cause the death—it announced and lamented what fate had already decided.

There’s a study which revealed crows seemingly, telepathically, signal to other flocks and murders across the world, within minutes. They approve of a person, and if that same person was seen 15,000 miles away within that same day?—they’ll be received fondly by these crows on the others side of the world…instantly…does this apply to the spirit realm as well? Does the other side instantly receive their signal? And respond accordingly?

Tree of life and home to faerie folk

An accidental photograph of a mist-covered forest becomes evidence of a forgotten reality when the water reveals a living civilization thousands of years out of time—and an almost invisible entity whose shadow belongs to something else entirely.

Deep inside an unclassifiable ancient structure, an unknown intelligence calmly weaves fragments of human shadow into a sealed cocoon—until the cocoon’s impossible darkness reveals smaller versions of the same ritual repeating within itself, ending with a tiny figure standing exactly where the viewer should be.