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halls of the hells, battled free of the underworld, traded blows with demons and lived to tell the tale. Oh, wait, you have done no such thing... perhaps you should consider fear. It might serve to keep you alive after you enter the arch. Purgadair is not a city for weakness - and make no mistake, humanity is weakness. If you betray yourselves the beings of the mad city will tear your soul apart. And don't believe you can simply open your eyes and return from here as though from a bad dream. Any harm done to your spirit here will be matched on your bodies back on the fields beyond Dardun. A cut here will bleed there. An eye lost here leaves a blind man there. Die here and you die in the Tir-Nan-Og."
    "And this is where the Skinless Man is to be found?"
    The Morrigan stretched her neck, clacking the hard edges of her beak together excitedly. "It is, it is. I can open the way if I have your promise, warrior. Such a little thing, a promise. So, do I have it?" The crow-woman asked again, her talons clicking on the compacted glass-sand.
    How could he deny her? He had felt the truth - or an aspect of it - in her declamation. He was not the man his Goddess deserved. But would walking this path make him that man? It was impossible to know, and if, as the Crone intimated, the permutations of future possibilities were limitless, then in some futures he had walked the road, in others he had turned his back. The question was, in which future did he triumph? He thought he knew - because for all of her half-truths, what did the Morrigan stand to gain if the world she loved were destroyed, the land reduced to soured dirt?
    Nothing.
    Perhaps it was his destiny.
    But did that mean he could trust her?
    "What choice do I have, Crone? You do," Sláine said, "you have my promise even if it damns me."
    The bird-woman gestured sharply with her feathered arms and something within the very stones of the arch stirred. A low hum resonated from beneath their feet - more a vibration than a sound as it grew in substance until Sláine's bones resonated in sympathy and he felt the solid harmonies coursing through his entire body. As his skin began to crawl the air cracked sharply, a single harsh snap, and an ethereal blue light beamed from one side of the arch to the other, and spread, joining the columns in bonds of blue fire.
    Every nerve and fibre within him sang to the harmonic of the mystical gate.
    Sláine stepped towards it, feeling the static thrill stir every hair on his body.
    "One final caution," the crow woman said, her hand on his shoulder staying him. "All that you see in this place, or rather all that you think you see, is due more to desire than truth. Be careful what you wish for, warrior. Rein in your guilt and your libido unless you want to experience a very different kind of hell. Once through the arch you have but a single purpose. Do not allow yourself to deviate from it. The only way you can return is with the aid of the Skinless Man. Remember that. Now go with your Goddess."
    Ukko poked a tentative finger into the blue light and leapt back as though shocked. He stared at the tip of his finger, raised an eyebrow and stepped through the arch of time, pausing beneath the keystone to look up. The scoundrel said something but his words were whipped away by the sudden swell of wind that rose up around Sláine and the Morrigan, churning sand up into his face.
    "It is time," the old Crone said - and in the sky around them Sláine saw the first of her harbinger birds fly through the squall, coming out of the darkness. The divinity threw her arms wide in greeting and the birds came to settle on her. The carrion eaters sank their beaks into her flesh, tugging at the oleaginous black feathers until they wrenched them free. The murder of birds took flight with thousands of feathers crammed into their beaks only to scatter them from above.
    The feathers caught on the wind and blew every which way, temporarily obscuring the blue heart of the huge