Part II: The Ride Begins

They say when the Dullahan rides, the veil between this world and the next thins.
But no one warned me what it would feel like to ride beside her.

The first few nights were quiet. She didn’t speak, and I had no mouth to ask. I floated behind her like a ghost tethered to her lantern light. The flames from her spectral steed’s hooves painted the trees in ash and bone.

We passed villages swallowed by sleep. Her horse never slowed.
And when she lifted her hand—her head in one, the lantern in the other—I understood.
It was time to take.

It wasn’t cruelty. There was always a reason.

A butcher who poisoned his meat.
A priest who bled the confessional dry.
A widow who’d buried more husbands than she could name.
Each night, she rode not for death, but justice.

Which makes me wonder. What did I do to warrant her ‘sweet’ touch?

I watched as she claimed heads like relics. Not trophies. Remembrances. She whispered to them gently as she tucked them into her satchel of shadows.
And sometimes, when the lantern dimmed, she looked back at me.

She began to speak again.
Not much at first. A name. A sigh. A warning.

But one night, when the stars hung low and bruised like dying embers, she whispered,
“You ride well, for someone without legs.”

I laughed—silently.
She smiled—truly.
It felt like a crack in her armor.

We ride together now. Twin shadows in the dark.

I with the lantern.
She with the heads.

The world remembers her as the Dullahan.

But now… there are two of us.

In the marshlands, we hunted a warlock who bargained children’s voices for rain.
In the city of Mirehold, we took the head of a tyrant who lined his gates with the skulls of dissenters.

Each time, she let me choose.
She began to ask my thoughts.
To linger longer.
To stand beside me after the killing was done, as if waiting for a moment that never came.

Once, beneath a tree heavy with owl bones, I asked with my eyes what she had never said aloud:
“Why me?”

She touched her own face—her severed face—gently.
“Because you looked at me and didn’t scream.”

Her laughter came like a storm one evening. We had chased a false prophet through a haunted vineyard and left his head buried in the grapes. It was fun.
She laughed so hard she dropped her lantern and had to fish it from the mud. I floated beside her, watching the cracks in her darkness spread just enough for something warm to slip through.

That night, she didn’t ride ahead.
She sat beside me in the hollow of a ruined chapel, cradling my head in her lap.
And though I could not sleep, I pretended to.

I’m not sure I could even sleep.

She whispered to me then—not a curse, not a spell.
A name.

Her name.

"Éirelyn."

But love, for a creature cursed, is never simple.

Her horse began to slow. Her lantern dimmed faster.
She stared longer into the heads she collected.
Sometimes she looked at me like I was the final one.

And yet, I loved her still.

Even as the nights grew heavier.
Even as I began to feel the pull of death not as a scholar, but as a soul.
Even as I sensed… that something was breaking inside her.

That something was changing.