The stranger's words clung to me like the sea-mist, a damp, unwelcome shroud. Bleeding your essence. The gaps in your spirit. I spent the day after his visit in a state of suspended dread, jumping at every creak of the old cottage, expecting him to reappear with more answers I didn't want.
He didn't. But his absence was its own presence.
I tried to paint—a simple study of the lichen on the stone wall outside—but my hand shook. The turpentine smell, usually so comforting, now felt toxic. I saw the brush not as a tool, but as a siphon. I put it down and went to the one person who might have real answers.
Mamaí was waiting, as if she'd sensed the disturbance in my personal weather. She had two cups of strong, dark tea steaming on her scrubbed wooden table. "Sit," she said, her voice brooking no argument.
"A man came," I began, my words tumbling out. "He knew. About the paintings. About… the cost. He called me 'The Last Bloom.' Who is he, Mamaí? What is this?"
She sighed, a long, weary sound that seemed to carry the weight of generations. "His name is Cillian. He was… a friend of your mother's. From before."
"Before she left."
Mamaí nodded."He is of a family like ours, from a glen up north. Sensitives. They call themselves 'The Listeners.' Where our gift channels through creation, theirs channels through memory. They hold the stories of places, of people. He must have felt the… ripples you're making."
"He said I'm paying with pieces of myself. Is that true?"
Her gnarled hand covered mine. "The gift is love, a stóirín. Deep, aching love for this place and its people. But to pull something from the heart of the world and fix it onto canvas, you must use your own heart as the bridge. A little of you crosses over with every truth you make real."
The confirmation was a physical blow. "So every time I help, I vanish a little more."
"It is the paradox," she said, her eyes bright with unshed tears. "To give life, you spend your own. Your mother… her gift was even more direct. She could sing a wilted plant back to health, but she'd be bedridden for a day after. She could calm a storm-tossed sea with a whisper, but would lose her voice for a week. The world asked too much of her. She grew thin, translucent. Leaving… was her only way to stop the giving."
I thought of my own growing pallor, the chilling cold no sweater could touch. "What happens if I don't stop?"
Mamaí looked out the window toward An Choill Bheo, the Living Wood. Its dark trees seemed to lean in, listening. "You become a story yourself. A whisper in the paint, a feeling in the wind. Beloved, but gone."
A hysterical laugh caught in my throat. "So my choices are to abandon Dunna Mara like she did, or paint myself into nothingness?"
"There might be a third way," Mamaí said, though her voice lacked conviction. "Balance. To paint only what is yours to give. But when you love a place, a chroí, what isn't yours to give?"
I left her cottage more lost than I had arrived. The village, now bustling with the new tourists, felt alien. Their laughter was too loud, their needs too vast. I saw Mrs. O'Shea struggling with her heavy market bags and my fingers itched to paint her strength renewed. I saw the sad, empty window of the old toy shop and ached to paint it full of laughter and light. But each impulse was now shadowed by the image of my own spirit, fraying at the edges like an overwashed canvas.
Liam found me that evening on the headland, staring at the standing stone that was now safe.
"There you are," he said, sitting beside me on the damp grass. He didn't speak for a long time, just shared the silence and the vast, roaring song of the sea below. Finally, he said, "You're scared."
It wasn't a question. I nodded, my throat tight.
"Is it the pressure? The article, all these people?"
"It's the paint,Liam," I whispered, the truth too heavy to keep inside. "It's… taking me with it."
I told him everything. The drifting mist, the scent of rosemary, the healed hands, the changed vote. And Cillian's warning. He listened, his face growing still and serious, a rock against the tide of my fear.
When I finished, he took my cold hand in his warm, calloused ones. "Then you stop. Today. No more painting."
"And when the next crisis comes? When the bakery fails, or the school closes, or the next storm washes the road into the sea? I'll just watch it happen, knowing I could have helped?"
"That's not your burden alone, Saoirse!" His voice was fierce. "This village is made of stubborn, resilient people. We've survived for centuries. We'll survive now. Not because of magic paint, but because we help each other. We mend our own nets. You are not a sacrifice."
His words were a lifeline. But as I looked into his earnest, loving face, I felt a new, different terror. The love I felt for him, for this place—it was the very fuel of the magic. To truly stop, I would have to numb my heart. And that seemed like a different kind of death.
"I'll try," I promised him, and I meant it.
But the universe, it seemed, had other plans.