Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-4893169-20140923012345

Far Liath Weather(Unreviewed)

Nate Welsh didn’t mind the fog, but this particular fog made him uneasy. It moved disturbingly like a living intelligence, the long fingers of fog seemed to have an oily consistence as it reached out and caressed his face. It spun in great, towering spirals as it retreated before him, only to suddenly close in and envelope him.

Dimly ahead, he could just make out the lights of the other investigative team. Toward the west, the soft murmur of the ocean, and the continuous mournful drone of the fog horns.

Grimacing, he pulled the hood of his slicker further over his hairy ears, while moisture dripped from his long aquiline nose. His eyes narrowed slightly as he carefully regarded the ground visible in the narrow beam of light cast by his electric torch.

Gray Man Weather, he thought as he recalled the stories that his grandfather had told him in his primary school days. When a thick, blinding fog swirled around the houses and trees in corkscrew spirals and when its long tendrils felt like solid moist fingers when it brushed your face and hair, that was a sure sign that the Far Liath, as he was sometimes known, was about. Once a pagan weather god worshiped around 1500 b.c. in the coastal communities in and around Ireland and Scotland, he had been demoted to fairy status with the arrival of Christianity. However, this former god showed no sign of fading away and for matters only known to him, decided to emigrate to the States where he took on a modern-day form that now had a big following among the coastal towns and villages of Northern California, Oregon and parts of Canada, who also went by names of the Gray Lurker, Grimmin or the Grey Gentleman. But regardless of what he was called now, it didn’t change the fact that the Far Liath was a highly dangerous entity who hated any mere mortals and took great delight in inflicting much death and misery among them.

His grandfather had assured him that he had nothing to fear from The Gray Man since Welsh was of the Old Blood. A Wehr: one of the True People, and not one of those Humes who worship and follow the Bureaucratic Control God of Endless Torment and False Hopes. But young Welsh wasn’t so sure, having enough gruesome Gray Man stories to acquire a persistent fear of thick, gray mist and silvery, opaque sunglasses.

The hair on the nape of Nate’s neck bristled as he suddenly remembered Behr’s expression of stark terror.

Was there possibly an unearthly explanation to the tragedy that befelled the Chalmers family, and an even more unimaginable one that quite possibly claimed hundreds more?

Wehr weren’t the only humanoid race to inhabit this planet with the humans. There were other sentient nonhumans, and some of them were generally distrustful or hostile toward humans, especially toward those who were of the eager, zealous, missionary variety.

The local paper almost always had some story about someone trying to peddle Christian supremacy and moralistic bullshit in the Restricted Territories, and ended up as a few pickled parts in a jar.

It disturbed him greatly that people still choose to disobey the rules of proper conduct. Crossing over the borders of Faerie without authorized permission was risky enough, trying to ram the Gospel down the throats of Otherworldly Nations was inexcusably stupid.

Obviously the Chalmers had pissed off someone majorly to get themselves mutilated and burned up like that. But why the hell would the Sidhe (if they were responsible) do something like that to the kids. They raised any children they captured on raids to ensure the survival of their diminished race; blonde children were especially popular. Wiping out potential genetic material? It doesn’t make any sense...unless it wasn’t the Sidhe.

He got that scalp-crawling feeling as he passed into the looming forest, as though he was being followed. He always had that feeling whenever he was walking in this type of weather. One of the penalties, he guessed, from living in a town that seemed to be a daily hotbed for otherworldly weirdness. 