The Dead Druid's Cave
An Eachann and Connor Story
Continuing their roving through Alba (Scotland), Eachann and Connor find lodging from a storm in a cave inhabited only by the bones and moldering robes of a long-dead druid. In the middle of the night, Connor wakes to find Eachann gone without a trace! What could have removed him from the cave, or indeed, his world as a whole?
Check out some of Eachann and Connor’s previous adventures!
The hammer of the rain against the stones and grass echoed deep into the cave; only a short twist and incline ran from the end to the mouth. It served as a fine shelter for the lads, Eachann and Connor, but the noise made conversation difficult.
“Any idea when this will end?” Eachann asked, leaning closer to his friend who lay stretched across the floor.
“Hm?” Connor grunted, his eyes fixed on the craggy ceiling.
“When will this end?” Eachann repeated, his voice fighting the roar from outside. Connor said nothing. Eachann kicked Connor’s meaty, hard shoulder; the Fer Bolg shot up and glowered at the Gael after the blow fell. His brow, lined with small proto-horns, wrinkled above his eyes.
Eachann smirked. “Thunder-skull, has your Storm told you anything about the rain?”
Connor softened his expression but kept his frown. “It goes when it has raged enough.”
Eachann slumped back against the wall and shifted his gaze over to the third—and original—occupant of the cave: a skeleton seated in a dim corner a few feet away from the lads. Its bones were yellowed so darkly and covered in cancerous, black splotches, the sight of their decay sickened the lads to look upon it. Its limbs were stripped away by time, some down to splinters, and now sat as dust piles on the stone. Mere threads, which must have once been robes, dangled upon the skull and shoulders, swaying in occasional draughts. Its sockets were trained upon the wall across from it. Following its gaze revealed nothing of what it may have looked at in life, save for a spot in the middle where rain dribbled in from a tiny opening in the ceiling. The lads were no strangers to corpses or bones, but even with one as ancient as this they gave it respect. They dared not touch or even look at whatever possessions might have remained, and gave the skeleton what distance they could in the confines of the cave.
With little else to speak of, Eachann and Connor ceased resisting the rain’s ruckus and let it soothe their tired minds. Connor shifted onto his side and wedged his arm between the ground and his head; Eachann sat with his tartan great cloth about him, but propped his elbow against his knee so he could press his thumbnail into his forehead. In these positions, the lads remained on the border of sleep and wakefulness—alert in case a brigand or wolf wandered in, yet comfortable enough to regain their strength through what respite they found.
Later in the night, the rain trickling in from the hole in the ceiling slowed to mere drips with long pauses between them. Outside, the wind howled in place of the rapid pattering and gusts whistled through the hole. A little later, a thin, silvery beam slid into the cave from the same tiny threshold the rain and wind entered. It slanted onto the floor, lighting a small patch in a white glow with a blue haze.
Eachann woke to a thin trail of warm liquid running down the bridge of his nose; his nail finally broke skin.
“Macrall,” he cussed and crawled on his hands and knees to the small puddle in the middle of the floor. He splashed some of the silty water across his face and shook it to dry. Eachann paused and followed the slant of the moonbeam as it landed at the crooked toes of the skeleton. He looked about the cave and sighed at its emptiness aside from him and Connor; his gaze fell once more upon the bones.
“I suppose I have yet to give you proper thanks for this cave,” he said, his voice thick and rumbling with traces of sleep. Eachann rose, letting his great cloth slide to the floor, and approached the skeleton—the moonbeam fell upon his back. He stopped one pace away from the remains and knelt. Then he was gone, vanished without a trace.
***
Connor stirred a little while after his friend vanished.
“Eachann,” he mumbled, “what was that?”
The silence shocked Connor out of sleep; he leapt up and bore his fists, expecting intruders, but was stunned to find himself alone. In Eachann’s spot, a round shield with the device of a bull lay beneath a sword with a crossguard shaped like the rim of the moon. A dirk wrapped in a piece of leather sat atop the shield—Scían Tethrach, Eachann’s grim knife of bone. Beside the weapons lay a leathern pouch and belt.
His gear remains, Connor thought, still looking about. He wouldn’t have gone to hunt without it, especially his wicked dirk…
Then he spied the great cloth beside the puddle. And he would never go anywhere far without this!
Connor picked up the great cloth and Eachann’s dirk, then looked over at the skeleton. Nothing changed about it since he slept, save for the position of the moonbeam, now creeping closer to the spindly, bone toes.
“If your ghost still dwells here,” Connor’s voice boomed in the little cave, “show me where my brother-at-arms went, O ancient one.”
Nothing transpired after the reverberations of his voice faded. Connor waited a few more moments, but no sign from beyond came. Displeased, he retrieved his club and brandished it in his free hand. He lumbered over to the skeleton with a growl in his throat.
“Cursed bones,” he brought the finely-carved crusher over his head, “I’ll—”
The moonbeam fell upon Connor’s broad back and he, like Eachann before him, vanished from the cave. Now alone again in its domain, the skeleton stared at the wall.
***
Though he only took one step, Connor felt as if he stepped into an entirely new cave; the sliver of moonlight went dark, blackening the walls, and in the skeleton’s place sat a robed man. The sight of the bones’ apparent rejuvenation stunned Connor, stopping his swing in an instant. White robes caked in dust and dyed with a myriad of foul stains hung on the feeble frame of the cave’s original occupant. The Fer Bolg looked into the stranger’s face whose sallow features verged on mummification—sickly brown skin covered in yellowish patches with grey-black orbs in his sockets. A whistling, hollow breath sounded from his throat. A single glance convinced Conner this man was naught but a corpse, yet he still lived.
“By what magicks?” Connor took a step back and lowered his club. His primeval superstitions drummed at his heart.
The mummy-man grinned a smile of greyed, worn teeth; the skin around his lips creaked and formed webs of wrinkles, some tearing at the edges. “By the spells surrounding the world and light and shadow, you have come here,” he answered in Gaelic, which Connor knew well, but parts of his words sounded longer and slightly foreign.
“Here?” Connor looked around the cave. “But I have gone nowhere. You are the one who’s changed! There were but bones where you now sit.”
A string of croaks escaped the mouth of the mummy-man and his smile twitched. “I will be bones one day—you have come from such a day. On this day, I straddle the threshold betwixt life and death; my magic keeps me tethered to this husk.”
Connor looked at his hand clutching Eachann’s great cloth and dirk, then looked back at the mummy-man. “Tell me if my friend, a Gael with the name Eachann MacLeod on him, was in this cave with you, as you are this day.”
“Such a Gael was here.”
Connor sighed, enjoying some easiness that came over his chest. “Where did he go?”
As the mummy-man’s smile faded, he only stared with his shadowed eyes.
Connor asked again, “Where did he go?”
“Such a Gael was here,” the corners of the mummy-man’s mouth tugged upwards, “many, many years ago.”
“What?” Connor shot to his feet. His grip tightened around Eachann’s gear and his club—his nails sunk into the palm of the hand holding the latter. “How can this be? I saw him this night!”
“You both were in this cave from a night when I will become bones; he stepped into a day ere I was this speaking husk. On that day, the chieftain of the fort upon the hill outside this cave brought forth his fighters and maidens, joining me in a rite to summon forth a hero. He came to us out of the light of candles and the shadows of a human sacrifice, knelt in the posture of fealty—naked enough to accept the gifts to be given to him. That was many years ago, and it has been long since he returned to this cave.”
Connor’s gaze sunk to the floor. “Is he dead?”
“Not yet.”
Connor snapped his eyes back at the mummy-man’s as he continued: “His sighs grow shorter; I can hear them echo on the winds. They come out of the ruins of the fort—his ruined fort.”
The Fer Bolg tore his eyes away from the stygian pits in the mummy-man’s head and rushed for the way out. The druid’s croaks followed him all the way to the mouth of the cave. He emerged from under the low lip, stepping onto dry, crackling grass. A putrid red-orange glow dominated the sky and spilled onto the wasted land; whatever trees once sprung from the brae on which the cave sat were withered to jagged, black stumps; the wind stirred up thick clouds of dust that settled just below the grass; a choking mugginess enveloped Connor as he beheld the state of the land before him. A dark, circular heap sat atop a hill some ways away from the cave. It had not been there when Eachann and Connor first entered this land. Connor descended the brae outside the cave with a burst of speed, sprinting through the withered field below. Already a layer of sweat oozed its way out of his skin; from the air, grit crunched against his clamped, nervous teeth, caught in the back of his throat and nose, and assaulted his eyes; the grass crumbled to dust beneath the Fer Bolg’s rush, which left a shin-deep trail in the field.
At the foot of the hill, Connor caught a moment of respite. He spat and wiped his face to clear his vision and breath. His woolen trousers, soaked with sweat, stuck to his legs. A tremble shook his limbs and staggered his breathing. He looked up to behold the heap at the summit of the hill and found the earth and stone walls of a fort, worn and shattered down to crags. Rubble lay on the slopes, frozen in a toppling of its former glory. The main hall of the fort was a low stone tower whose jagged form leaned westward. Thin grey smoke trailed out of the top up to the sickly sky.
Connor ascended, at a slower pace than his sprint across the field. He vaulted a low section of the wall, nearly losing his balance when his feet encountered gravel. On the other side, something cracked beneath his weight. Connor paused and lifted his foot; the shards of a half-buried skull fell from the sole of his thin leathern shoe. He gazed about the enclosure of the fortress—the crumbled remains of huts spilled into the aisle leading up to the main hall. Bones filled those piles as well. Connor left the wall and continued upward. He covered his mouth and nose with Eachann’s great cloth as the air grew heavier with dust and stung fiercer at his eyes. The way up offered little balance as the silt and fine rubble grew deeper, but Connor’s feet churned hard against the ground. Tears and sweat poured down his face and saturated the great cloth.
With only a few steps between him and the threshold of the tower, a figure from within suddenly entered the haze. Connor paused and moved his club upward, but stopped as the water streaming from his eyes purged the blurriness in his vision. A woman in a great cloth met him. She stood tall and proud—though grime streaked her skin and her head came only a thumb or so above Connor’s—and wore her dark hair lined with grey in a braid; she stared at the newcomer with grey eyes.
The eyes of a Gael, Connor thought, like the stones of the land, the waves of the sea, and the clouds of the sky; the eyes of my friend.
“Where is Eachann?” he asked, lowering his club and the great cloth from his mouth.
In a little more than a rasp, the woman answered, “He waits for you within, O Connor Ua Sreng—it has been a long time. Now, his time is short.”
She turned and her form faded in the darkness of the tower. Connor bunched the great cloth, clutching it harder than his club. He followed the woman, somewhat escaping the conditions outside; he rubbed his eyes as he passed through the threshold and opened them to a dimming fire in the center of the room. Beyond the light’s radius, furniture and boards of oak lay shattered and heaped in the shadows. The woman came beside a curled, blanketed form just within the golden ring about the fire. She knelt behind it and placed a hand down on the wool. The hiss of a whisper sounded and the blanket shifted.
“Connor?” a voice, worn and stretching each sound in the name, rose from the blanket. The woman shifted away and a pair of eyes, glittering in the firelight, squinted at Connor from one end of the blanket. Shriveled digits curled over the hem just under the eyes and pulled it down, letting loose grey, knotted curls of hair and beard. The hoary bush moved. “Connor?”
Connor moved slowly, but his heart during his present traversal pounded harder than his sprint across the field. To him, not a full day passed since he saw his best friend in the prime of his youth—perhaps not even quite there yet—running, leaping, climbing, ranging, and fighting alongside one another. Even as he neared the aged figure in the blanket and the grey in the gleaming eyes became apparent, part of his will refused to accept that this could be…
“Eachann.” Connor paused as he stepped into the firelight. Two grey eyes stared up at him, unblinking.
Read the next part here!
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“The Dead Druid’s Cave” © Ethan Sabatella 2025 – Current Year, All Rights Reserved. Reprinting or replication of this work in its entirety in any form (written, audiovisual, etc.) without express permission of the author is prohibited. Excerpts may be used for review or promotional purposes with credit and acknowledgement of the author. This piece cannot be used for training of Artificial Intelligence programs.