Laura led the others to an industrial estate on the outskirts of the city where she had experienced something unbelievable. It was one of the fluid spots, as they have come to be known in these strange times; Church and Laura crossed over to the Watchtower which hung in the space between worlds, while Ruth and Tom were left behind to face an attack by the terrifying shape-shifting creatures. In the Watchtower, Church reeled under the onslaught of premonitionshis own death, a city burning-before he came face-to-face with a beautiful woman who had haunted his dreams since he was very young.

She never told him her name, but she did finally shed light on the mysteries that had wrapped tightly around his life. It was an astounding tale of two fantastic races which first came to earth in the dim and distant past; almost too fantastic-their supernatural powers were at odds with every notion we had of rationality and logic, but it is a story which, for our sins, we have all since come to know is true. The Celts knew them as the Tuatha De Danann, also called the Golden Ones, and the Fomorii, the misshapen, evil Night Walkers. For a period, they opposed each other while the humans watched these gods with tremendous fear. Then, after one final, brutal battle which saw the Fomorii defeated, they and all other supernatural creatures departed the world for their homeland, the place the Celts called T'ir n'a n'Og. The barriers between here and there were supposedly sealed for all time, but some of them still managed to flit between, giving us our legends of fairies. No fairies from a storybook, these, though; they were so alien and unknowable we could never see their true shapes, just the simple forms our own minds projected onto them to maintain our sanity. They came from a place where everything was fluid in our terms-physical reality, time, and, I would aver, morals. They are so far beyond us we must seem like a bacterium to them. Is this a definition of godhood? That is the question that has troubled so many, and that is where I take refuge in my own Faith, for I cannot accept that power without morals is any justification. There must be some sense of right and wrong, good and evil. There must.