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The arrow falls; the door opens; the Queen is made.
This story explores the connection between the Orionid meteor shower, the ancient Celtic myths which surround Samhain, and the great warrior Queens of ancient Ireland.
"Aoife, the Queen Maker" is the story the pixies told me when I wanted to write something else. Sometimes I write a story with a theme and plot that I have created; sometimes I just tell a story as it unfolds in my mind. The story I originally intended to create was a scary story with lots of wild, kinky sex, but evidently the spirits of the glen had a different idea, and they spoke a totally different story in my head. It is a sweet, poignant story of true love intertwined with ancient Irish myths that gave birth to the holiday we call Halloween.
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It was dark and cold and rainy and lonely as I drove north on a little used two lane highway that wound its twisted way through the timbered foothills. The reason I was in my car driving 90 miles in the middle of an October night was because a man whom I had never met, Doctor Nathaniel L. Sorensen, had summoned me to his death bed.
That may sound like an odd way of putting it, but it is exactly what his grandson, Earl, told me when he called me just before ten o'clock tonight. "W," he began, "I have a very strange favor to ask of you. My grandfather has asked me to call you. He says to tell you that he is dying tonight and he is summoning you to his death bed because you are the only one who can understand the story he has to tell. Is there any way you can come up here?"
Earl was a rather famous astronomer and professor. Like his grandfather, he spent his nights staring at the heavens - well, actually, in Earl's case, he was usually looking at monitors that gave him a numeric or visual representation of what his giant array of radio telescopes were seeing as they gathered information from the skies. His grandfather, affectionately known by his peers as "Night Sky Nate," had actually spent many, many nights staring through the eyepiece of giant telescopes located on distant mountaintops all over the world.
What the elder Dr. Sorensen had to tell me, and why he thought I was the only one who would understand, was a complete mystery to me. I had never met the man. I had never spoken with him. I had never communicated with him in any way in my entire life. I knew of him only as Earl's grandfather.
Earl and I had become friends when we met on-line in an electronics discussion forum. We were both interested in remote electronic control circuits. He was, of course, interested in better ways to control his telescopes. I was interested in better ways to control... shall we say, more interesting aspects of human behavior. One of my sidelines is various electronic devices that stimulate the body for the purpose of pain, pleasure, or control.
One session, Earl asked me outright what I actually did with some of the control circuits we discussed. I told him, "You would be shocked... pun intended."
He answered, "You would be surprised what it takes to shock me." And then added "... pun understood."
He then asked me to meet him in a private chat room and gave me a link to a room on a different web site - a site that I knew well. The chat room location was on a very private BDSM site that catered to the tastes of those who liked mechanical overtones to their bondage and discipline
In answer to my un-asked question, he typed, "I spend my life looking for patterns in the sky. I recognized the pattern of your posts - what abbreviations you use and don't use, things like that. The same pattern shows up on several sites under several different login names."
I made a mental note to myself to look into ways of masking that weakness in the future, and met him on the new site. It turned out we had more in common that just an interest in control circuits. Earl became one of my very discreet customers. He was also a big fan, and sometimes helpful editor, of many of my stories. Evidently he must have said something about me to his grandfather, because now the dying doctor was summoning me to his death bed to hear, and perhaps write his story.
What a super-intelligent, apparently straight-laced astronomer who spent most of his life staring at the stars might have to say that I hadn't heard many times before was a mystery to me, but deep in my gut I had a feeling that this mystery was well worth exploring.
When I got to the hospice building next to the hospital, Earl met me at the door. He said flatly, "Nate says he is going to die tonight." Then he shrugged and added, as if in explanation, "It's his birthday. The doctors don't think so, but his father predicted his own death, and so he thinks that he knows when he is going to die also. He says tonight is the night."
Since I was entering a hospice area, I was expecting to find a very frail and decrepit old man, but when I stepped into to the room, Dr. Sorensen was sitting up in his bed reading an old field journal. "Come in W," he greeted me. "You are probably wondering why you are here."
"That is more than an understatement," I replied.
He motioned me to a chair that had been placed at his bedside, closed the notebook, and folded his hands over the cover as it lay on his lap. "Let's begin at the beginning, shall we."
He looked and sounded just like a college professor about to start a lecture. I shouldn't have been surprised at that. He had, at one time, been a very prominent professor as well as a renowned astronomer.
