Paul McMaster lived at the edge of things.
Not in any way that would trouble a postman or concern the delivery of electricity bills. Number 20 Nether Oak Close was an unremarkable house with a narrow drive, a conservatory added sometime in the late 1990s, and a small back garden where moss won every argument it entered. But Paul himself existed slightly out of step with the world around him, as though his feet did not quite land where the pavement expected.
This had not always been the case.
Once, he had been young and incandescent. At Queen’s in Belfast his words had arrived fully formed, burning with a clarity that startled even him. His first collection, written in rented rooms on the Strandmillis Road that smelled of damp and instant coffee, had been a small miracle. Poems shaped by The Troubles, yes, but not consumed by them: love letters written in bomb-shadowed streets, grief set beside grocery lists, the ordinary courage of people who kept living because there was no alternative.
People said his poems lit fires. Paul never liked the phrase. Fire destroyed as often as it warmed. But he understood what they meant. There had been heat in his words then, a sense of urgency, of something needing to be said now.
Five years later, the second collection was better. Quieter, more assured. Where the first had burned, the second endured. Reviewers spoke of craft, of restraint of a new John Hewitt. Paul found himself suddenly respectable, quoted in papers, invited to festivals. He stood at lecterns and read lines he had once written alone, hearing them echo back at him from other mouths.
Then, three years ago, the words stopped.
Not gradually. Not like a well running dry. They simply… withdrew. Lines would begin and collapse. Images arrived dulled, as though viewed through thick glass. Paul sat at his desk night after night, notebook open, pen hovering, waiting for something, anything, to stir.
Nothing did.
Friends suggested burnout. Editors spoke carefully about “space” and “time.” Paul nodded and said all the right things. Inside, he felt a precise and terrible quiet. The kind that suggests not absence but listening.
It was during one of those listening evenings, rain ticking softly against the conservatory roof, that the old man appeared.
Paul noticed him first as a reflection in the glass.
He looked up from his empty notebook and saw, behind his own tired face, the shape of another man standing where the garden should have been. Tall, stooped, wrapped in a grey coat that might once have been wool. A beard, white and unashamedly long. Eyes bright with something that was not quite mischief.
Paul turned.
The man was standing just inside the conservatory door, water beading on the glass behind him as though he had stepped out of rain that did not exist.
“You look like Gandalf,” Paul said, because it was either humour or screams.
The old man smiled, gently. “I get that a lot, these days.”
Paul did not ask how he had come in. He did not reach for his phone. Some part of him, older than caution, older even than reason recognised the shape of this moment.
“Amergin,” the man said, inclining his head. “Bard of the Milesians. Though titles grow heavy with age.”
Paul swallowed. “I’m not …..”
“I know,” Amergin said. “You’re not writing.”
The words landed without accusation. Paul felt his shoulders sag, as though he had been carrying something too long.
They did not speak again until they were in the car, driving north, Coleraine shrinking behind them. Paul did not remember agreeing to go. Only that Amergin had said, Come. You’ve been too long away from the water.
The road unwound through familiar places made strange by attention. Fields soaked in early spring rain. Stone walls stitched with lichen. Amergin spoke occasionally, never lecturing, never explaining, but mostly he listened. Paul found himself talking, quietly at first, then with more ease. About the silence. About the fear that the words had abandoned him for good.
“They haven’t gone,” Amergin said at last. “They’re waiting for you to catch up.”
They left the car near Dunseverick and walked the rest of the way. The air tasted of salt and cold soil The waterfall appeared below a wooden brige, a narrow freshwater stream dropping five metres from rock into the waiting sea. The sound of it was constant, patient, rippling, a comma in the sentence of the life of the stream.
They sat on damp stone and watched.
“This is where my song begins,” Amergin said after a time. “I am the wind on the sea. I am the wave of the ocean. People think it’s boasting. It isn’t. It’s alignment.”
Paul watched the waterfall, white against dark rock, then vanish into grey-green swell.
“There are four elements,” Amergin continued. “Fire, Earth, Air, Water. A bard must be attuned to all of them. Fire to speak. Earth to endure. Air to listen. Water to change.”
“And you start with water,” Paul said.
Amergin nodded. “Because everything does.”
They sat in silence. Paul became aware of small things: the way the spray dampened his cuffs, the low boom of waves against basalt, the cold that seeped into bone without complaint.
Two seals surfaced not far from shore.
They watched the pair with liquid curiosity, dark eyes catching the weak sun. Their skin shone like wet satin, each movement unhurried, precise. Paul felt a strange tug in his chest, not recognition exactly, but adjacency. Something old and half-forgotten had brushed past him.
Amergin saw them too. He smiled, said nothing.
“The fresh water doesn’t disappear,” Amergin said eventually. “It mixes. It becomes something else. Drinkable becomes vast. Individual becomes shared.”
Paul nodded. He thought of his early poems, sharp and immediate. Of the later ones, heavier with experience. Of the silence now, which perhaps was not emptiness, but his words wanted to be engulfed and widened.
On the walk back to the car, Paul felt lighter. Not cured. Not restored .. he searched for a word and found it he was … adjusted. Inside him he could feel Amergin’s words about needing alignment.
They drove west, passing Portrush as the light began to fail. Amergin asked Paul to stop near a familiar standing stone, pale against the darkening sky.
“The White Lady,” Paul said.
Amergin inclined his head. “A princess. Held in time.”
Paul stepped out into the wind. The stone was cold beneath his palm. He looked out across the water, towards Islay, barely visible on the horizon.
“She waits for her love to return from Scotland,” Amergin said quietly. “He never does. Her millennia of waiting becomes her story. Her tears flow like a river, for those who can see.”
Paul felt it then. A sudden, sharp pang, not his own grief, but an echo of something immeasurably older. Centuries of longing compressed into stone and salt air. His own silence, his own fear, shrank beside it, not dismissed, but contextualised.
Some losses were not meant to be resolved. Some silences were acts of fidelity.
They returned to Nether Oak Close under a sky rinsed clean by rain. Amergin stepped into the conservatory, pausing to look around as though committing the place to memory.
Paul went to his desk. He opened his notebook.
The pen moved.
Just one line.
“My fresh water mixes with sailt”
Behind him, Amergin smiled, said nothing, and slipped away through the conservatory door.