Chapter Text
Bwlch y Clawd Pass, southwest of Treorci, Wales
March 17, 2012, Midnight
Change minus ten minutes
Orlagh Fallon—whose real name was Orla--sat in near-darkness, her knitting needles clicking softly. She couldn't sleep, which wasn't unusual for her while traveling in a motor vehicle. After nearly thirty-eight years on Earth, she still hadn't adapted to the infernal things. Knitting kept her mind at least semi-occupied.
She'd taken a temporary leave as Tin Cup Gypsy's lead singer to participate in a Celtic Woman reunion tour. She was incredibly excited about that. She'd had a great deal of fun as one of Celtic Woman's original members. Not all of the former Celtic Women were able to work the tour into their lives, however--they were missing Meav Ni Mhaolchatha, Deidra Shannon, and Lisa Kelly, who'd just left the group to focus on her family for a while.
Orla was still troubled by the persistent lack of communication with her husband John and son Fred. Five years before, she'd been on a mirror-call with them when the image had gone all ruddy, as though the sun had been shining through the smoke of a forest fire, or through a red-stained glass window. Minutes later, fire had erupted in the near background and the call had been severed. No amount of trying had re-established the line. Her initial attempts had been interrupted by band practice. When she'd finally had time to try again four hours later, she'd still had no luck. She'd then tried several other people on Ingary with the same unsettling lack of results. Since then, she'd felt adrift in the galaxy.
She wasn't alone in her insomnia. Further back on the bus, someone, probably one of the drummers—Ray Fean and Andy Reilly were both notorious night-owls--was reading by a small LED lamp. Across the aisle, violinist Mairead Nesbitt was also knitting. Like Orla, Mairead--privately called Marido by her husband and Orla--also had trouble sleeping on the bus.
Orla paused in her knitting and listened to Mairead's own needles furiously clicking in the darkness and smiled. She knew Jim sat next to his wife and also that he, too, had trouble sleeping in a moving motor-vehicle. It seemed to be something all three of them had in common. She heard scribbling of pencil on paper. How did he manage to write in the dark? Maybe he knew some magic that helped with that and maybe it was what helped him run all the lighting boards in the dark during concerts. He didn't talk about it and while Orla suspected Jim might be a Dark-seer, she wasn't about to be nosy. It was just bad manners. Still, if it was something Jim could teach, Orla could think of any number of situations in which seeing in the dark would be very useful. Fortunately, she didn't need to see in order to knit, so she went back to it.
After a few minutes, a glow to the southwest caught her eye. She glanced in that direction, then back to her knitting, then quickly back toward the glow. She froze. What, in the name of Grapthar's Hammer, was that? The only major city within hundreds of miles with enough candle-power to produce that kind of glow was London. But London was not only too far away to appear that bright in south-central Wales, but was in almost exactly the opposite direction. The light quality was all wrong, too. The glow from city lights was always yellow-ish. The glow from the southwest was stark-white. A city's lights were generally concentrated in more or less one spot. The southwestern light seemed to be spread out along the entire horizon. Moreover, it was growing.
She leaned closer to the window, but her breath fogged the glass. She wiped at it with her sleeve. The light was not only expanding, but seemed to be moving. She quickly dismissed the possibility of a nuclear explosion. Not only was it in entirely the wrong place for that, unless someone had struck the entire east coast of the United States at once, but it was behaving in entirely the wrong way. A nuclear blast would have been a sudden spike of bright light, which would then quickly have vanished. It couldn't be Iceland exploding either, as that island was just a little west of due-north and, like London, in entirely the wrong direction. She didn't think the geology was right for a super-caldera and a volcanic eruption would have been more orange anyway and not remotely that expansive.
As she watched, what looked like a wave of light crested the horizon. Was it some odd form of lightning? No...it was all wrong even for that. As it grew closer, she could see what looked like multicolored electrical arcs dancing across what seemed to be a wave-front. She felt her eyes widen. She'd seen paintings of that sort of thing, paintings of intense magical battles from one of the ancient Mage Wars.
“Mairead? Jim?” she said, using their assumed names, without taking her eyes off the approaching light. A moment later, she heard them both gasp. She heard at least one more gasp behind her and a curse from the driver. Then the road dropped below the ridge-top and she lost sight of the wave.
The light continued to grow. The bus veered southward with the road and minutes later, the wave crested the ridge. Then the light washed over them and all hell broke loose.
Her head seemed to fill with light, as though it had entered her skull to briefly bounce around inside it. She heard most of the people on the bus yell some sort of expression of pain. Orla herself felt something entirely different, though she was at a loss to describe it. She didn't have time to dwell on it. The bus lurched, tires squealed, then the whole thing tilted in a way buses were not intended to tilt. It kept tilting. Then the noise stopped, though the motion continued.
Moments later, there was a powerful jolt accompanied by screeching metal and screaming people. The bus and all of its contents whirled about chaotically as up and down became mixed up in one another. Orla felt something hit her head and she lost consciousness.