Short stories by Mace Styx

How Sharaign met her end is not recorded. Whether some hero did eventually succeed in bringing her to heel we shall never know. Though there are complimentary legends about the crozier of St. Dunstan, a saint already famed for his battles with the devil, being used to strike her dead. What is recorded, is what was done with her remains.

For those who don’t know, a "cairn" is a roughly assembled pile of loose rocks. They usually consist of larger rocks at the bottom with smaller fragments balanced precariously on top the higher it becomes. These most ancient and most basic of sculptures, can be found across the world, from the mountains of Tibet to the trails of the Andes.

In some cultures, the custom is to walk around the cairn, completing a full circle before continuing on your way. In others, it is customary to add a rock to the edifice, balancing it somewhere on the pile every time you pass, as an offering or gesture to the spirits of the mountains, the forest, or wilderness you are about to enter. For some, the cairn is a primeval and potent symbol of man’s instinctive need to project order onto the chaos around him and his innate desire to create. Sharaign’s Cairn is different. The tradition with this Cairn, is to try not to look.

Standing in the center of Fuller’s wood, the pile of rough hewn stones, looking at times like a dismantled dry stone wall, is around four feet in height. It is positioned on a small island of rocks and moss around which run the streams of Hazel Brook. There is a reason for this.

The brook, with its two streams flowing around this island, creates a barrier. For it has long been known to those who know such things, that a witch cannot cross running water. Sleeping beneath the pile of stones, at the center of the wood she once called home, Sharaign is trapped by the brook on her tiny island. Sharaign’s Cairn not only marks the old crone’s grave, it also acts as her prison. Her soul cannot cross running water and so she is forever trapped.

Or at least she should be, but then, there is the old adage, that ‘just as the serpent found its way into Eden, so evil always finds a way in’. Hearing the news about Tony tonight, I fear that the adage has proven to be true.

It was only two days ago, when, full of the false chimera of bravery that comes with too much ale, Tony Flannigan, a man well known in the area, accepted the bet that may well have been his undoing. It started, as many a bad idea does, as a joke in the local, where after a short and mostly truthful discussion of how Fuller’s wood and that old pile of stone had terrified them as kids. The men’s sharing of truth gave way to bravado and Tony, never one to take a knock to his ego lying down, made a ridiculous claim.