A short story dedicated to all older heroes lost in a world that has forgotten them….

The lake had gone again.

Cian stood on the edge of the hollow where Loughareema should have been, his boots sinking into dark peat, the shore grass bent like the hair of half-drowned men. Mist clung to the heather, soft and uncertain, as though the lake had forgotten how to hold water. The air smelled of peat and cold iron.

He leaned on the sword that had once been his right arm. It was no longer a weapon, only a length of old memory in bronze. Once it had sung for him, clear and true, a note that could split the air, but now it was silent. He had polished it that morning until his hands trembled, yet when he looked for his reflection in the blade, there was none. Only the grey light of Antrim and the faint breath of the wind.

He tried again, crouching to the wet ground where the lake should have mirrored the world. The surface was dark peat, slick and glistening, but even there, no face, no eyes, no sign of him.

“You’re fading, old wolf,” he muttered, his voice rough as gravel.

Once, the good people of Ballycastle would have turned when they heard that voice. Once, they would have saluted. Now they nodded politely, remembering, vaguely, that he had been someone of importance in Princess Taisie’s time. She still sent him sweet breads at Samhain, though he suspected that kindness came from habit rather than affection. He could hardly blame her. She had grown beyond the need for guarding.

The Fianna were gone. Their names lived only in song, and precious few people now sang them, preferring the new ballads to the old.

He looked again at the banks of the lake, and the mist seemed to shift, drawing back like a curtain. For a heartbeat, he thought he saw the glimmer of water returning, a sheen like glass, rippling with light. Then it was gone.

Something deep in him stirred. The old tales said that the lake disappeared and reappeared because it was a doorway, a breathing of Tir an Óg through the skin of hos world. Perhaps, he thought, the water wasn’t what vanished at all. Perhaps it was he who had gone.

Cian straightened slowly, the ache in his knees answering the wind.

“If there is a mirror here,” he said quietly, “I’ll find it. I’ve one last thing to understand.”

He turned toward the hills, where the mist was thickest, and began to walk.

The wind rose as Cian climbed the slope, thin and restless. It tugged at the edges of his cloak and rattled through the dry reeds that ringed the hollow. Each gust carried the scent of rain though no cloud yet dared to break. He paused, listening.

At first, it was only the whisper of grass. Then, beneath it, something else, a murmur like running water far below the earth.

He frowned. “The lake is gone,” he said aloud, as if explaining it to himself.

No, old one, said the wind. The voice came softly, as a stream speaks when stones lie heavy in its bed. I am here. I have only held my breath for a moment.

Cian’s hand tightened on the hilt of his sword. “Who speaks?”

You know me, the voice answered. You drank from me after battle. You washed the blood from your hands and saw your youth reflected on my skin. You thought I was only water, but I was watching you even then.

He felt a chill along his spine, though the air was still mild. “Loughareema,” he whispered.

That is one of my names. The Vanishing. The Mirror. The Breath Between Worlds.

He listened, heart thudding like a drum in the distance. The wind eddied around him, brushing his cheek as though with unseen fingers.

You come looking for yourself, the lake’s spirit said. But your image no longer clings to water or steel. You have carried too many reflections, of battles, of loyalty, of the girl who became queen. There is no room left for the truth of you.

Cian’s throat tightened. “Then what am I, if not those things?”

There was a long pause, broken only by the hiss of wind through grass.

You are the space left when purpose is done, said the voice. You are what remains when the wave sinks back into the sea.

He sank to his knees. “I have given everything. My strength, my name, my life in her service. If I am nothing now, what was it for?”

The voice sighed, like rain beginning to fall.

Understanding is not found in what endures, Cian of the Fianna, but in what passes. The mirror does not hold the image; it lets it go.

The mist thickened again, wrapping him in grey silence. He thought he saw ripples forming in the air itself, faint lines of light trembling across the empty lake. For a heartbeat, he heard a stream laughing among stones, a tender, human sound and then it faded, leaving only the wind.

Cian bowed his head.

“Then teach me,” he said. “Before I vanish too.”

The voice did not answer, but the air around him grew warmer, as if in assent.

The mist thickened until the world disappeared. The wind stilled. Only the slow, deliberate drip of condensation from the reeds broke the silence, each drop falling into the hollow like the ticking of a clock running out of hours.

Cian stayed kneeling until his knees ached, until the cold crept through wool and skin and bone. When he rose at last, the air shimmered faintly before him. The empty basin was no longer empty.

A thin sheet of water was returning to the lake, so slight it barely covered the mud, yet it caught the dim light like a mirror of smoke. His breath caught. Shapes moved within it, faint as the last memory of a dream. The flash of a sword’s arc; the laughter of men around a campfire; Princess Taisie as a child, her hand small in his; the faces of comrades long buried.

Each image formed and dissolved like mist on glass.

He took a step closer. The surface trembled but did not break. He leaned forward, searching for himself among the phantoms, and saw, nothing. No reflection, no body, only the play of ripples widening from where his breath touched the surface.

For a long while he simply watched, and in the watching came a quietness that was not sorrow but release.

“You’ve taken me back far enough,” he murmured.

No, whispered the water, the voice of the lake gentle now, like rain falling on moss. I only show what you already know. The rest is yours.

He smiled faintly. “Then let it be yours, too.”

He stepped into the shallows. The water barely reached beyond the soles of his boots, yet it rippled outward in impossible depth, darkening as if it drew him in. The mist closed around him, one breath, two and then the basin was still again.

When the villagers came at dawn, they found only his cloak folded on a rock his sword ling atop, dry despite the rising mist. The lake had vanished once more now a dark brown hollow in the high moorland.

Sometimes, when the waters return and lie perfectly still, those who walk the road from Ballycastle to Cushemdun through Ballypatrick forest, say they see a figure standing at its heart, a man with no reflection, looking down into the mirror lost but seeking understanding. But when they blink, there is only the wind, and the lake breathing in its sleep.