Part IV: The Hosts

We came upon a town called Wraithmere, where no one had slept for three years. The Dullahan meant to reap this place had vanished—no signs, no trace. So we rode in their stead.
Nightmares walked in daylight. Ghosts laughed in the markets. 

We came upon a girl no older than ten. She had literal bags under her eyes. Seeing her suffering lit a fire in Éirelyn that I hadn’t seen before

It took a few days but we found it.

We found its source—a man who had bottled sleep and sold it to the rich. He ran when he saw Éirelyn’s eyes.

But he didn’t scream.
He laughed.

“I know what you are,” he hissed, throwing vials of stolen dreams at her feet. “And I know you’re weak now.”

Her face did not change. But I saw the tremor in her arm.

I had never seen her hand shake before. I thought at first that she was scared but I was wrong.

It didn't help that the man kept throwing jabs at her.

“You’re not Death anymore,” he whispered. “You’re just a girl chasing feelings you were never meant to have.”

She did not ride for mercy that night, but vengeance, maybe for the girl or herself.

That night, she took his head—but not cleanly. It was brutal, frantic.
Her blade struck bone and dragged mercilessly and slowly.

Later, as we sat beneath a tree with roots like reaching hands, she turned to me.
“I am fading.”

I tried to shake my head—but I no longer had a neck.

She laughed softly. “The curse doesn’t like love. It hollows us when we feel. Makes us mortal again. Slowly.”

Her hand curled around my cheek. “I think I want that.”

That’s when the nightmares came.

The Headless Host, they called themselves. Other Dullahans. Others like her. Like us.
Only they had not broken the rules.

They found us on the borders of the Vale. The sky bruised and split with black wings.
“You were chosen,” one rasped from the mouth of a severed face he held in a bag.
“You carry what we do not. You failed.”

They did not attack. Not yet. But they warned her.

“End it. Or we will.”

She turned to me that night, lantern cradled in her lap like an infant.
“I can’t lose you,” she said. “But if I keep you, I lose everything else.”

“You’re a disgrace!” one of the hosts shouted. This one held the heads of children with stitched mouths.

She didn’t ask me to decide.
But in her silence, I knew what she wanted.