Leaving Gwyn to his spiraling theatrics, Dáinn strode from the throne room, the cool, root-tangled silence of the hall a welcome relief. He moved past the brownie, who was now anxiously polishing the same spot on an oak panel for the third time, and emerged back into the twilight clearing. The western grove where the Cŵn Annwn were kept was a place of deep shadows and colder air, where the barks of the trees were scored with ancient leashes that held nothing but memory.
The kennels were not built of wood or stone, but of woven twilight and the breath of the departed. The air here was still, the profound silence where the echoing bays of spectral hounds should have been a void that ached in the ears. Dáinn knelt, his fingers brushing over the soft, spectral moss where a lead of braided mist should have been tethered. It felt inert, empty.
"You," he murmured, his voice a low vibration that carried through the grove. "The squirrels in the canopy, the worms in the earth. Did you see? Did you hear?"
A flurry of chittering images filled his mind from a family of voles—a blur of panic, a sense of being crowded, then nothing. A badger, grumpy and half-asleep, sent a memory-scent of something sharp and sweet, like rotting honey, that came and went too fast to track. It was frustratingly vague.
Then, a shadow passed overhead. A large crow settled on a branch above him, its feathers gleaming with a purple-black sheen. It tilted its head, a single, beady eye fixing on him.
"New Gate," it screeched, the sound like grinding stones in his mind. "New Gate! Bright hole! Wrong smells!"
Dáinn straightened, his brow furrowing deeply. He cursed under his breath in a language that had been old when the first stones of Atlantis were laid. "By the tangled roots of Yggdrasil, must you all speak in riddles? What gate? Where?"
The crow merely cackled and took flight, leaving him with more questions than answers.
It was then that a new shadow detached itself from the base of a gnarled yew tree. A black cat, so dark it seemed to be a piece of the night that had decided to go for a stroll, sauntered into the center of the path and sat, directly blocking Dáinn's way. It began to meticulously wash one outstretched paw, radiating an aura of utter, smug self-satisfaction.
Dáinn stopped, looking down at the creature. The cat, Casper, paused its grooming to fix him with a gaze of pure, unadulterated feline superiority.
"Are you lost?" Dáinn asked, his voice flat.
Casper yawned, a surprisingly pink affair in his jet-black face. "No," a cultured, sardonic voice spoke directly into Dáinn's mind. "But you appear to be."
A faint, unwilling smirk touched Dáinn's lips. He knelt, bringing himself to the cat's eye level. The moss was damp through the leather of his trousers. "What makes you think that? I know exactly where I am."
"Yeah," Casper said, returning to his paw. "But you don't know where you want to be. Or, more specifically, where those noisy, slobbering bundles of ectoplasm you're looking for have gotten to."
Dáinn let out a long-suffering groan. "Not another creature of riddles. I've had my fill from the avians."
Casper stood, arching his back in a stretch that seemed to go on for an improbably long time, every muscle defined under his sleek fur. "If you like," he said, his telepathic voice dripping with condescension, "I can show you."
Dáinn blinked, his expression utterly unimpressed. "Show me what?"
The cat turned and began to saunter away, his tail held straight up in the air in a flagrantly disrespectful manner. "I can show you where your lost puppies are. Or at least, the hole they undoubtedly fell down. It's making a dreadful draft and scaring all the decent mice."
Dáinn sighed, a sound of profound weariness that spoke of millennia of dealing with precisely this kind of entitled, enigmatic assistance. He knew, with a certainty that settled in his bones, that this was going to be an epic inconvenience. But the crow's cry of "New Gate" echoed in his mind, and a cat who knew something was better than a king who knew nothing.
Pushing himself to his feet, the shadow of his horse shifting at his heels, the ancient Huntsman fell into step behind the self-important Crypt Cat.
Casper led him on a winding path, away from the groomed weirdness of Gwyn's domain and deeper into the untamed heart of Annwn. The trees here grew closer together, their branches weaving a canopy that choked out the twilight, forcing the world into a deep, verdant gloom. The air grew thick with the smell of loam and something else—a sharp, sweet tang like lightning-struck sap. Then, they entered a small, circular glen, and Dáinn stopped dead in his tracks.
In the center of the clearing, the very fabric of the world was torn.
It was a portal, but not the stable, shimmering veils of old. This was a raw, violent wound. It pulsed with a feverish, greenish-silver light that threw jagged, leaping shadows across the glen. The air around it vibrated with a low, humming thrum that set Dáinn's teeth on edge. It was immense, large enough to ride a chariot through, and the power radiating from it was a physical pressure against his skin, a chaotic, unbridled force that felt both ancient and newborn.
"What the hell?" Dáinn breathed, the curse a low, stunned thing.
Casper looked over his shoulder, his green eyes reflecting the chaotic light with evident pleasure. "Told you."
Dáinn's mind, usually a fortress of cool logic and ancient knowledge, scrambled for purchase. "This should not be. There are no portals of this kind in existence. They were all closed, sealed by pact and power. And when they were open, they were never left unguarded." He took a step closer, the raw energy making the fine hairs on his arms stand up. "How in the name of all the forgotten gods did this one come into existence?"
He turned his fierce gaze on the cat. "Where does it go? Your kind traverse realms with ease. What is the source of this?"
Casper sat neatly next the pulsating maw, unfazed by the way the grass beneath him was withering into blackened crisps. He yawned, a deliberate display of boredom. "It leads to the human realm. Smells like diesel and despair. Quite the improvement, really."
"The human realm?" Dáinn scoffed, the sound harsh and disbelieving. "Those pathways were permanently closed. The doors were locked and the keys thrown into the void. Only one of the Gods, or their direct, potent descendants, has the ability to forge a new one, and we were all banished from that world by laws older than the mountains."
"Not all, it appears," Casper replied, giving a languid shrug that was pure feline insolence. He stood, gave a final, fastidious lick to his chest, and then padded directly toward the shimmering tear in reality. He paused at the very threshold, looking back over his shoulder at the stunned Huntsman. "You coming? Or are you going to stand there brooding until it swallows the whole forest? The puppies won't find themselves."
Dáinn's jaw flexed, a muscle twitching under his skin as he stared into the maelstrom of light. The human realm. A place of noisy, fleeting lives and blunt, senseless magic. A world from which his kind had been exiled for longer than their histories cared to remember. To step through was to break a covenant so fundamental it was woven into the substance of his soul.
He looked back in the direction of Gwyn's castle, imagining the king's escalating panic. Then he looked back at the portal, at the undeniable, catastrophic truth of it. His duty, as ever, overrode his desire. He had to find out what the hell was going on.
He cursed again, this time with a vehemence that made the nearby tree flinch. "This is a calamity in the making," he muttered, but he was already moving, striding forward with grim resolve. He followed the smug black cat through the tearing, screaming light, and the world dissolved into a nauseating whirl of color and sound.
The world reassembled itself with a lurch that settled unpleasantly in the bones. One moment, there was the screaming chaos of between-realms; the next, the oppressive, damp silence of a tomb. Dáinn Herne Cernunnos found himself standing at the bottom of a deep, raw hole, the air thick with the smell of shattered stone, old bones, and the sharp, coppery tang of spent magic. Above, the jagged outline of a broken crypt ceiling was visible, a dark silhouette against a slightly less dark sky.
Casper, of course, had landed with preternatural grace on the edge of the pit. The black cat peered down, his form a perfect cutout against the gloom. "A little help?" Dáinn grumbled, his voice echoing in the confined space. He found handholds in the rough stone, his fingers scraping against the unyielding surface as he hauled himself up, muscles straining under the weight of his own formidable presence and the disorienting aftermath of the journey. He rolled onto the crypt floor with a grunt, his dark cloak swirling around him like a captured storm cloud.
Pushing himself to his feet, he stared down into the maw from which they'd just emerged. It was no natural fissure. The edges of the hole were seared and glassy, as if by tremendous heat, and from its depths came a low, persistent thrum of power that felt like a sickness in the air. A faint, sickly green light pulsed from far below, illuminating the dust motes dancing in a frantic, disturbed ballet.
"What the hell is this?" Dáinn whispered, the question meant for the universe itself.
"Sloppy, I know," Casper agreed, padding over to sit at the edge and peer in with a critical eye. "An obvious novice. All power and no finesse. But the point is… that it is a working gate. A messy, leaking, dangerous gate, but a gate nonetheless."
Dáinn gave a slow, grim nod. The cat was right. The impossibility of it was staggering.
Casper turned, his tail giving a flick. "This way."
Dáinn followed, his brow deeply creased. "Why exactly are you involving yourself in this? How did you even know this was here?" The questions had been burning in him since the glen. A creature of Casper's nature didn't usually involve itself in the affairs of the Hunt without a vested, and often selfish, interest.
Casper glanced back as he effortlessly leaped onto the sill of a grime-encrusted window. "Because," he said, his telepathic voice dripping with casual import, "I was here when it was opened." He dropped lightly to the other side. "You will have to push the door open. It's being… uncooperative."
Dáinn approached the heavy, iron-bound oak door. He placed a hand against it, then put his shoulder to it, expecting aged wood to groan and give. Instead, it felt like pushing against a living wall. A thick, sinewy network of vines, studded with vicious, inch-long thorns and sporting small, defiant red flowers, had woven itself across the doorframe, binding it shut. The stems were a deep, waxy green and bled a milky, irritant sap where the wood pressed against them.
"Push harder," Casper suggested unhelpfully from the other side.
Dáinn grunted, throwing his full weight against the door. The vines held fast, thorns biting into the ancient oak. "It's no use," he growled, stepping back. "The door is bound shut."
"Euphorbia milii," Casper's voice came through, laced with a knowing amusement. "Crown of thorns. You may have to cut your way out. This is a response to the broken covenant. The earth itself has reacted. It's trying to quarantine the infection."
Dáinn's jaw ticked. The earth fighting back against a magical wound. It was a primal, ancient defense mechanism he hadn't witnessed in eons. His hand went to the hilt of his hunting sword, the worn leather familiar against his palm. With a soft, singing sound of metal leaving its scabbard, he drew the blade. It was not a flashy weapon, but a tool of purpose, its edge honed by countless hunts.
He didn't swing with wild fury, but with the focused, economical motion of a woodsman clearing a path. The blade sheared through the thorny bonds with clean, decisive strokes. Where the sap touched the metal, it sizzled faintly, and the severed vines writhed like beheaded snakes before retracting back into the stonework with a dry, rustling sound, leaving the door suddenly free.
He shoved it open, the old hinges screaming in protest. Casper sat on a moss-covered headstone just outside, looking thoroughly entertained.
"Good job, big guy," the cat said, his tone cocky. "Come on, let's keep moving. The night isn't getting any younger, and I'd like to be back in my sunspot before dawn."