Skellig

A short story about faith, doubt and truthseeking at the edge of the world

Nov 29, 2024

Brother Oissene was born in a storm, and he thinks it very likely he will die in one. The odds are high: there are always storms raging here, at the edge of the world.

He came to Skellig Michael seven years ago, in a skin boat with his brothers. There wasn’t a storm then; if there had been, he wouldn’t be here now. The strait is impassable in bad weather, and making landfall on the island without being dashed to pieces on the rocks? Impossible.

For all the years since then, he has lived in this vertical world; a roofless cathedral, its spires of rock forever reaching for the heavens and never getting any closer. He is working on a vertical cliff face now, hewing a cross out of the unforgiving sandstone - for the glory of God, perhaps. Perhaps not. His hands are cracked and bleeding. Laborare est orare. To work is to pray. His cowl is keeping the drizzle off his head for now, but it will soon soak through. To Oissene, it hardly matters. The rain and the cold have long since seeped into his skin - they are part of him now. He feels them in his very bones.

Oissene came to Skellig Michael to touch the face of God, and he has come close. There is a place between the exquisite pain of his suffering and the indescribable beauty of the storm-tossed sea where divinity surely resides. He can sense it, but he can’t quite grasp it. Whenever he reaches for it, in the gap between breaths, it slips through his fingers.

But it has been a while since he thought of God.

Ever since he first saw her, he has been bewitched. Not filled with lust or sick with love, but terrified - haunted by the shape of her that he sees with his waking eyes. Her name, which he will never speak, sits on his tongue like a stone. It grows in his mind like a fungus, slowly obliterating every psalm and vesper he knows. Soon, there will be nothing left inside him but the sound of it, roaring in his ears like the sea.

The Cailleach.

Sometimes, she seems like a woman, but when he looks closer, he sees that it isn’t so: her eyes are oceans, her brow an entire coastline. Her mouth is a cave that gapes wide enough to swallow the world.

He doesn’t worship her, but he understands that she has been in this land far longer than his God. She is as old as the stones of Skellig Michael. She is the stones. She is earth, slate, grass and sea - and that is why he can’t escape from her. No matter how much he works, no matter how much he prays, he is inhaling her with every breath; with every miniscule raindrop, she is caressing his skin.

He has considered flinging himself down onto the rocks, or wading into the waves. On Skellig Michael, there are many ways that death can find you. But Oissene knows, because he can see her, that he is hell-bound, and that makes him afraid of dying too.

She is standing next to him now as he chisels away at the stone. Her grey tousled hair is the wind that blows around him. It is in his mouth, in his eyes, and suddenly he cannot stand it anymore. Abruptly, he turns to face her and, at the top of his voice, he hurls Latin verses at her. He screws his eyes shut and makes the sign of the cross, over and over, pouring fourth chant after chant until his voice is hoarse.

When he opens his eyes, she is still standing there.

“There is room for everything you believe,” she says, although she doesn’t speak. “You don’t have to choose between us.”

But he shakes his head. He wants her gone, although he knows by now that she is everywhere and everything.

“Then it will be as you wish,” she tells him. “You shall not see me here again.”

Then she is gone, and there is only the call of seabirds like the crying of small children. But there is no relief; her departure leaves him with nothing but emptiness. It eats away at him, day after day, becoming a gaping hole inside him that nothing can fill. He prays, he works. Laborare est orare. He works, he prays, but nothing can heal him. He slowly comes to the understanding that he will never be whole without her.

He knows where she lives - in a cave at the edge of the world. He is already at the edge of the world, so it cannot be far. He cannot tell his brothers where he is going, so he leaves in silence in one of the skin boats. He rows west until his arms ache and his hands are blistered, then he keeps rowing. Oissene is no stranger to hardship - he has Skellig Michael in his bones and its desolation drives him on. If the island has taught him anything, it’s that suffering leads to suffering; he has learnt to never expect better, only worse.

It is almost dark by the time he sees it - a lonely rock in the ocean, more desolate even than Skellig Michael. At least from there you can see the mainland when the sea-mist clears, and it has its smaller brother island to keep it company. This rock is surrounded only by water, alone in an expanse of endless sea. Oissene beaches his boat at the base of the cliffs. He doesn’t bother to tie it up - he knows he will not need it again. He starts to climb.

There is a semblance of a staircase cut into the cliff, but you couldn’t really call them steps, not like the ones his brothers carved out on Skellig Michael. He doesn’t walk, he scrambles and hauls himself up, knowing one slip could send him plummeting to his death. But he is used to that. For seven years, the sea has been licking its lips far below him, showing its pointed teeth.

By the end, he is climbing by the light of the moon. It shows him the place where the not-stairs end, and the mouth of a cave. Inside, a fire is burning, and she is waiting. He falls to his knees beside her, tears coursing down his cheeks. His hands are shaking as she takes them in hers.

“What will it be?” she asks, and her voice is soft earth and hard stone.

Oissene doesn’t know. He has never known. He has been searching all his life for the answer. First, in adventure and violence, then in gold and sin, and finally in religion and solitude, but none of them gave him what he sought.

“I want -” They are the first words he has spoken to her since he arrived, but he doesn’t know how to finish the sentence.

"Nothing?" she asks, but Oissene shakes his head. He wants something, wants it badly, only he doesn't have the words to tell her what it is.

But she is the Cailleach. She already knows.

She breathes out a sigh, and her soft breath becomes a breeze, then a gale, then a hurricane. Oissene cannot stand against it, and he doesn’t want to. It drives him backwards to the cliff edge, and then over it. He falls - and falls. The cliff is higher than he realised - how far had he climbed? His body turns as he falls, end over end: the sky is the sea is the sky. Blood rushes to his head and down to his feet like the waves washing the shoreline, and the wind whistles in his ears. He is weightless and, a hair’s breadth from death, he finally feels alive.

For a moment, Oissene touches the face of God.

Then, his body crashes into the foaming waves. It hurts like nothing he could have imagined. It is not only the impact, but the tearing of his skin, like claws raking along his flesh. He thinks, at first, that he must have struck the rocks at the base of the cliff, but this pain is coming from within, not without. His skin simply doesn’t fit him anymore, and he is changing. He runs a hand along his own forearm, looks down at it and finds it is silver and scaled like a fish. Like a fish, he has no legs now, but a tail.

Oissene’s head breaks the surface of the sea. A storm is raging now. Thunder rolls all around him and lightning rents the sky. He peers up at the cliff-face through the driving rain, looking for her. But he cannot see her, and soon he runs out of air, for the mer can only live under the waves, and that is what he is now. Like a fish, he cannot survive with his head above water, so he dives, the gills on his neck sucking in life, his body undulating as his tail propels him through the water. He swims down, down into the murky depths, for he finally understands. The answers do not lie in books and words sung by candlelight, but down in the darkness: in sleepless midnights, at the bottom of the ocean, in the blackness of his own soul.

More than a year passes before Oissene finds his way back to Skellig Michael and drags himself up onto the rocks. By then, he is a man again, although not the same one he was before. His brothers see him coming, naked and dripping seawater, shivering in the cold, and they take him inside. Praise be, they say. It is a miracle you are not dead. But Oissene knows it is more than that - it is a miracle that he is alive. It is one thing to have the gift of life, and quite another to know how to live it.

I’m delighted that Skellig won the Fantasy Round of the Lunar Awards 2025. This post features more great fiction from runners-up Maximilian P. Siddell and Jack Massa, and honourable mentions Hanna Delaney, Keith Long and Douglas McClenaghan, plus a beautiful write-up from Daniel W. Davison which I’m still geeking out about!