They say the sea took the sound of our wings first.

The waves grew louder each century until no mortal could hear the hum of our flight, and only the moan of wind through heather, the cry of curlews, and the eternal shatter of surf on black rock. But I remember. I remember when the sky trembled with us, when the armored fairies of Orkney ruled both land and air, and the mortals bowed their heads to the gleam of our iron wings.

I am Eiridwen, last queen of the sky-born host. My armor, once bright as frost under moonlight, is dull now, pitted and salt-eaten. We forged our wings from meteoric iron. The smiths said gifted from the heavens themselves, so that no mortal weapon could pierce us. But every gift from the sky bears a curse. The metal burned cold, and slowly it cooled our hearts.

We were the Aonaran Sidhe, the lonely kin of the air. We kept to the cliffs and the wind-swept moors, guarding the old boundaries between mortal greed and the quiet of the Otherworld. For centuries we were legend and rumor, the whisper behind the storm. The humans called us cruel. They were not wrong. We were the balance they feared and the necessary shadow to their fire.

From our citadel on the cliffs of Hoy, we watched the centuries shift. The mortals grew restless, cutting forests, digging iron from the womb of the earth. Iron: the one metal that unmade magic. It crawled through their cities, their blood, their prayers. Still, we endured, half-real and half-forgotten. Until he came.

His name was Calen of Stromness, a prince by their measure, a dreamer by ours. He came not with sword but with song. His ship broke upon the reef one spring night, its timbers grinding like bones against the stone. The storm had teeth that evening; the wind sang with voices of the drowned. When the sea spat him onto our shore, he was more corpse than man.

It was Morrin, my war-chief, who found him tangled in kelp.

“Let the tide have him,” Morrin said. “He smells of iron and prophecy.”

But I, fool that I was, felt a stirring in my chest, something long buried. “Bring him,” I commanded. “If the sea has spared him, so shall we.”

We carried him through the mist to Aircraig, our hidden fortress. To mortal eyes, it was only a circle of weathered stones. But within our glamour, it blazed with light—armor hanging like fruit from rafters of silver, fireflies weaving in constellations through the air. The air rang with the hammering of smiths and the deep-throated hum of our wings.

When Calen woke, he stared at the shimmering roof as though he’d died into a dream.

“Are you angels?” he whispered.

“No,” I said. “Something far older, and far less forgiving.”

He looked at me, dazed, sea-salt still on his lashes. “Then forgive me anyway.”

His smile, soft, human, and reckless, was the first crack in my armor.

Calen stayed as the sea healed and his ship rotted into the waves. He was curious, insatiable, fearless in the way only mortals can be. He learned our songs, our runes, even how to trace flight sigils in the air with his fingertips. The younger warriors adored him. He sparred with Morrin, laughed with my handmaidens, and once, to everyone’s shock, joined our dance of fire at midsummer, bare-footed and wild.

He was clumsy at first, his steps uncertain, his mortal heartbeat loud in the quiet rhythm of our music. But then the rhythm claimed him. The torches bent toward him as though drawn by gravity. And when his gaze found mine across the circle, something ancient and forbidden flared to life.

Afterward, beneath the aurora’s slow shimmer, he said, “Your kind is made of light, Eiridwen. And yet you hide in the dark.”

“We are the dark,” I said. “Without us, your light would burn the world.”

He smiled. “Then burn me.”

He came to my tower often after that. There, in the high chamber open to the wind, stood my scrying bowl, a basin of stormwater that showed what was yet to come. I had seen empires rise and crumble in its reflection, lovers betrayed, stars born and extinguished.

“What do you see?” he would ask.

“Nothing I wish to,” I’d say.

But once, when the bowl rippled, I saw his face drowned in moonlight, his lips blue, his sword drifting in the tide. I said nothing.

One night, as the storm howled outside, he came to me, eyes bright with something between fear and longing.

“If I am to die here,” he said, “let me at least live first.”

His hands found mine. They were warm against the cold iron of my armor.

When he kissed me, it was like stepping into sunlight after centuries of shadow. My heart, so long encased in steel, began to thaw. Mortals weren’t supposed to be able to do this.

And yet, even as I yielded, I knew what the seers had warned: the love of a mortal and an immortal unthreads the weave of the world.

The war came not from gods, but from rumor.

The humans had begun to whisper again about stories of winged demons who haunted cliffs, of a queen who seduced men and drank their souls. Fear travels faster than truth. When their priests arrived, bearing fire and crosses, I went to meet them beneath a flag of truce. Morrin begged to go in my stead. “If they see you,” he warned, “they’ll see only what they fear.”

“Then let them learn,” I said.

We met at the stones of Brodgar. The air itself seemed to hold its breath. Their leader, Father Alaric, was a tall man with eyes like winter. He raised his torch and said, “Your time is over, spirit. The old gods are dead.”

“And who buried them?” I asked. “Men who fear the dark yet make more of it?”

He threw the torch at my feet. “God’s fire burns lies.”

And then I saw him.

Among the priests, armor dented, sword sheathed but ready. Calen stood there.

My heart turned to ash.

He would not meet my eyes.

“Morrin was right,” I whispered. “Iron breeds betrayal.”

The first spear flew, and the world became sound and light and ruin.
The fairies descended like a storm with wings slicing air, iron singing. The humans broke, scattered, screamed. Arrows hissed, fire caught, and the sky itself seemed to bleed. I fought as one possessed, blade and wind one motion, but every blow I struck felt like striking my own heart.

When the smoke cleared, bodies lay tangled like driftwood. The mortals had fled to regroup, except for Calen. He knelt among the dead, his sword fallen, his eyes wide with horror.

“Eiridwen,” he gasped, “I didn’t mean…”

“Didn’t mean to betray me?”

He shook his head. “I meant to stop them. To protect you.”

“By standing with them?”

Tears burned down his face. “I thought I could make them see reason.”

“And what did they see instead?”

“A monster,” he whispered.

I lifted his chin. “Then remember, you made her.”

I should have killed him then, ended the story cleanly. Instead, I turned away. “Live with what you’ve done,” I said. “That will be punishment enough.”

That night, Aircraig burned.

Flames reached the sky, consuming centuries of song and steel. Morrin died with a spear through his heart, smiling even as he fell. “We were never meant to last,” he said, and was gone.

When dawn came, only seven of us remained.

We buried our dead beneath cairns of shell and sand. The sea moaned as if mourning. I stood on the cliff’s edge and watched the smoke drift out over the water. “The humans will say they won,” said my lieutenant.

“Let them,” I answered. “Victory is only another name for forgetting.”

The wind was cold. My wings were heavier than ever.

We left the cliffs that night, scattering like ashes on the tide. Some crossed into the deep places of the sea; others vanished into stone. I stayed.

***

Years passed. The world changed again. Iron roads spread across the earth. Smoke replaced mist. The mortals no longer sang to the sea. They drowned it in their machines. And still, I lingered.

He found me one evening, older, gray at the temples, his face carved by regret. He came on foot, for the roads had ended, and the cliffs remembered him.

“I have dreamed of you every night,” he said, his voice rough. “And in every dream, you forgive me.”

“In dreams,” I said, “forgiveness is easy.”

He reached for my hand. “Your kind is fading. The forests are gone. The iron in our blood poisons the earth. Stay with me. Let me make it right.”

“There is no making right what time unravels,” I said. “Even the stars burn out.”

Tears filled his eyes. “Then let me come with you, wherever you go.”

I looked toward the sea, its vast indifference gleaming beneath the moon. “There is nowhere left to go. Our wings are rusted. The wind remembers only ghosts.”

He fell to his knees. “Then curse me, Eiridwen. Hate me if you must. But don’t leave me like this.”

I touched his face, gentle like a human. “I will not curse you,” I said. “You were my ruin, and my light.”

He closed his eyes, and for a moment, I saw the boy he had been with salt-tangled hair, wild grin, the warmth that thawed a queen. I kissed his brow, tasting salt and memory.

Then I spread what remained of my wings, black and broken, and walked into the sea.

The water closed over me like a mirror. I felt the iron dissolve from my skin, the centuries peel away. For the first time in an age, I was light. Not the light of flame or sun, but the deep, quiet light that exists beneath sorrow—the kind that does not blind, but endures.

They say that on certain nights, when the storms roll in from the Atlantic and the cliffs of Hoy tremble, a dark figure can be seen walking through the surf, a woman of metal and mist, her wings glinting faintly beneath the lightning. The fishermen cross themselves and look away, for to meet her gaze is to remember everything the world has chosen to forget.

Some say she guards the drowned. Others say she searches still, for the man who loved her and destroyed her in one breath.

Both are true.

I am Eiridwen, last queen of the armored fairies of Orkney.

I remember every sound the sea has ever stolen and still, in the deepest tides, I listen for the hum of wings.

[MD Smith IV of Huntsville, Alabama, writer of over 350 flash stories, has published digitally in Frontier Times, Flash Fiction Magazine, Bewilderingstories.com, and many more. Retired from running a television station, he lives with his wife of 64 years and three cats. https://mdsmithiv.com/ ]