AODHÁN
Book One of the DEOS IRÆ Trilogy
By Adrian Buckle
When a storm splits the sky over the quiet town of Rashford, something ancient is born in the wreckage. A naked boy with golden eyes and no memory stumbles into a grieving woman’s life. His name is Aodhán—and he is not entirely human.
As strange omens and eldritch horrors ripple across the town, gods long thought dead stir from exile. Apollo, fallen from Olympus and burdened by loss, believes Aodhán may be the key to stopping a rising darkness. But others—angels, demons, and corrupted divinities—seek to claim the boy for their own apocalyptic designs.
Caught between cosmic forces and haunted by the shadow of a forgotten past, Aodhán must choose: embrace the light that calls to him or surrender to the monstrous power growing within.
A genre-bending fusion of dark fantasy, cosmic horror, and mythic drama, AODHÁN explores grief, identity, and redemption on a divine scale. With echoes of Neil Gaiman and Madeleine Miller, this is a tale where even gods tremble before the dark—and a boy may decide the fate of the multiverse.
AODHÁN
Book One of the DEOS IRÆ Trilogy
By Adrian Buckle
When a storm splits the sky over the quiet town of Rashford, something ancient is born in the wreckage. A naked boy with golden eyes and no memory stumbles into a grieving woman’s life. His name is Aodhán—and he is not entirely human.
As strange omens and eldritch horrors ripple across the town, gods long thought dead stir from exile. Apollo, fallen from Olympus and burdened by loss, believes Aodhán may be the key to stopping a rising darkness. But others—angels, demons, and corrupted divinities—seek to claim the boy for their own apocalyptic designs.
Caught between cosmic forces and haunted by the shadow of a forgotten past, Aodhán must choose: embrace the light that calls to him or surrender to the monstrous power growing within.
A genre-bending fusion of dark fantasy, cosmic horror, and mythic drama, AODHÁN explores grief, identity, and redemption on a divine scale. With echoes of Neil Gaiman and Madeleine Miller, this is a tale where even gods tremble before the dark—and a boy may decide the fate of the multiverse.
A sickening crack tore through the storm-slashed night, the sound of something ancient being violently birthed into the world. The old oak at the edge of Helen Road shuddered, its bark rippling like skin over writhing muscle before splitting down its gnarled heart. Splinters wheeled into the wind like teeth expelled from a rotting mouth.
From the hollow core—a space that seemed to stretch impossibly deep into nothingness—something crawled into existence.
A boy.
Naked. Pale as a drowned corpse. His skin glowed with an unnatural luminescence that seemed to absorb rather than reflect the rain. He staggered into the downpour, a thing not born but excised from reality itself. His skin had the texture of starlight seen through madness, his eyes bottomless pits that reflected nothing, consumed everything. The wind clawed at him with invisible fingers, dragging leaves, water, and voices—oh god, so many voices—through the fractures in what should have been ordinary sky.
He blinked, consciousness assembling itself from scattered fragments.
Noise. Wet. Pain? Breath. Breath is knives in lungs. Breath is wrong.
He tried to move, limbs responding with delayed, puppet-like obedience.
Legs... mine? Not mine. Someone else's. Stolen? Feet—cold. So cold it burns. Word for that? "Cold." Yes. Cold like death. Cold like the space between stars.
The ground beneath his toes wasn't solid but sloshing, churning with something that seemed alive. His fingers stretched into the dark, reaching for the rain—but it wasn't rain. Not merely water.
Wrong. Thick. Like blood. Or birth. Or the fluid that leaks from corpses left too long in summer heat.
Shapes moved just beyond his vision—twisted, stitched things with too many joints, too many eyes, too many hungry mouths. They hovered at the edge of perception, vibrating with anticipation, watching him with patient malevolence. He could feel their hunger seeping into his newly formed consciousness.
He turned sharply, heart hammering against ribs that felt too fragile.
Go. Move. Away. From them. From here. From the hollow place that wants me back.
Lightning tore the sky open like a wound, revealing the truth for a fraction of a second.
He froze, terror crystallizing in his veins.
Shadowy figures stood at the road's edge. Their limbs hung at impossible angles, as if their bones had been shattered and reassembled by a child. Their eyes glinted with recognition that crawled across his skin like insects. When he blinked, they vanished—but the sensation of being watched intensified.
Not real. Not real. Maybe real. Maybe more real than me.
A scream built in his chest, pressing against his throat like a living thing trying to escape, but emerged as something broken and pitiful.
"Aa—argh!"
No one answered. Or perhaps something did, but its voice existed in frequencies that would splinter human sanity.
The wind howled, carrying whispers that almost formed words.
No name. No place. No safe. Alone. Always alone. Never alone.
He stumbled forward on legs that threatened to fold beneath him. His knees buckled, sending him sprawling onto the road that felt like it was breathing beneath him. His fingers clutched at the air as if trying to grasp reality itself. He had no memory of this world—only the suffocating pressure of before. The crushing, choking silence of not-yet-existence, of waiting in the dark between dimensions.
Where is sky? Why does sky hurt? Why does air taste like... teeth grinding against bone?
A deeper cry, something animal and ancient yet impossibly wrong, rose with the wind. It knew him. It had always known him. It had waited for him since before time had meaning.
He walked anyway, each step a defiance against the void that wanted him back.
Meredith Caldwell's knuckles whitened as she gripped the steering wheel, her tendons standing out like wires beneath her skin. The rain transformed the world beyond her windshield into a nightmare landscape of distorted shapes and phantom movements. Her headlights caught puddles that stared back like unblinking eyes, watching her passage with malicious intent.
The folded flag on her dash seemed to pulse with each beat of her fractured heart, the fabric occasionally shifting though no draft touched it.
"Brian," she whispered, her voice cracking. "I should've told you not to go." The words felt like glass in her throat, cutting deeper each time she spoke them into the empty car.
Her son's medals swung from the mirror, catching the light in hypnotic patterns. His smile, preserved in the photo tucked into her visor, seemed to change when she wasn't looking directly at it. The world hadn't made sense since they'd lowered his flag-draped coffin into the ground—a box she knew was empty despite what they'd told her.
Then—a shape materialized in the road, emerging from the rain as if condensing from the storm itself.
She screamed, the sound tearing from her like something alive. Her foot slammed the brake pedal through muscle memory alone.
The car twisted with violent purpose, as if seized by malevolent hands. Tires screamed against wet asphalt—a sound too human, too agonized. Something heavy thumped against metal, the impact reverberating through the frame and into her bones.
Then silence fell, thick and expectant.
The windshield wipers kept beating their metronomic rhythm, smearing rather than clearing the glass. Meredith blinked at the emptiness ahead, her breath coming in shallow gasps. No figure. No body. Nothing but rain and dark and the terrible possibility that she'd finally lost her grip on reality.
"No. Please, no." The words emerged as a prayer to a god she no longer believed heard her.
She shoved the door open and ran into the storm, the rain instantly plastering her clothes to her body like a second skin.
"Where are you?!" Her voice cracked, swallowed by the howling wind that seemed to mock her panic.
Lightning flashed, illuminating the scene with stark, unforgiving clarity.
A boy lay in the road, his body arranged in a position no living person would choose. His pale skin gleamed with an unnatural luminescence that seemed to repel the rain, droplets hovering millimetres above his flesh before sliding away.
She knelt beside him, her entire body trembling. No blood. No broken bones. Just... a boy. Naked. Soaked. Not breathing. His chest perfectly, terribly still.
Then—he moved, the motion unnatural, as if his limbs were being manipulated by unseen strings.
She gasped as his eyes met hers. They glowed faintly, like moons submerged under water, pupils expanding and contracting in patterns that bore no relationship to the light.
"You're alive," she breathed, relief and horror mingling in her voice. "How are you not hurt?"
He flinched from her voice as if each word were a physical blow. His fingers dug into the wet gravel, breaking nails that seemed to immediately reform.
Voice. Sharp. Like... knives peeling skin. But kind? Kindness hurts worse than cruelty.
She reached out with trembling fingers. He recoiled, pressing himself against the ground as if trying to sink into it.
No. No touch. Touch means... pain? No. But... hand is... warm. Warm like fire that consumes. Warm like blood spilling.
Her hand hovered between them, rain collecting in her palm like tears. He looked at it, wide-eyed, confused by the simple human gesture that felt impossibly complex to his forming mind.
What is this? Why do I want... want to take it? Why does something inside me remember touch from before I existed?
Finally, he reached back, movements jerky and uncertain.
Their fingers touched—and for a heartbeat, Meredith saw impossible things behind his eyes: vast, empty spaces between stars; creatures that moved in dimensions humans weren't meant to perceive; a war in heaven that had been raging since before Earth coalesced from cosmic dust.
A raven cawed, the sound like laughter in a graveyard.
It sat on a branch above them, rain sliding down its feathers that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. Its eyes were wrong—too human, too knowing, too ancient for its avian skull. It watched them with the patient malevolence of something that had all of time to wait.
Meredith's breath caught in her throat, a primal part of her brain recognizing the wrongness.
"It's just a bird," she whispered, the lie bitter on her tongue. But even she didn't believe that. Nothing was "just" anything tonight.
They returned to the car, which seemed smaller now, more confining. The boy said nothing, just pressed his face to the window, watching the storm with the fascination of something experiencing weather for the first time.
Lights. Moving. Wet. Fast. Too fast. Heart hurts. Inside. Chest. Is that normal? Is pain what makes humans real?
"Do you have a name?" Meredith asked, her voice unnaturally loud in the confined space.
He didn't respond. Words formed in his head, but none made it to his mouth, caught like insects in amber.
Name? Sound. A… Aodh… Aodhh...n. Yes? Mine? I think. Not sure. Names have power. Names can trap. Names can bind.
He tried to speak, but the sound caught in his throat like thorns, drawing blood that tasted of ozone and copper.
"Never mind," she said gently, misinterpreting his silence. "You're safe now." The words felt hollow, a promise she had no power to keep.
As they entered Rashford, the streets looked warped under the rain—longer, darker, older than she remembered. Houses seemed to lean inward, watching their passage with windows like hooded eyes. The town seemed to shrink from them, or perhaps lean closer, hungry.
The boy shrank into the seat as they passed the old church, its spire piercing the storm clouds like a needle through flesh.
A keening sound escaped him—animal, grief-stricken, ancient. The sound of something recognizing its jailer.
"What's wrong?" Meredith asked, alarm sharpening her voice.
Stone. High. Building. Screams inside. Faces in glass. Burning. Don't go near. Don't go near. They bound us there. They trapped us in symbols and glass and stone.
He shook his head, eyes shut tight against visions only he could see, memories that preceded his existence.
Meredith felt it too—a pressure like being watched by something buried in the earth, something patient and hungry that had been waiting since before humans walked upright.
Her farmhouse appeared out of the dark like a forgotten relic, its windows reflecting nothing, absorbing the headlights' glow.
As they pulled up, another raven swooped low and landed on the gatepost, dripping black water that hissed where it touched the ground. It watched them without blinking, its head occasionally twitching at impossible angles.
"Not tonight," Meredith muttered, a prayer or a plea. "Please. Not tonight."
She opened the door, and they stepped inside. The wind slammed it shut behind them with deliberate force, like a jailer closing a cell.
The boy flinched violently, his skin momentarily translucent, revealing a geometry of bones that didn't match human anatomy.
Box. House. Small. Bright. But warm? Safe? Maybe. Walls keep things out. Walls keep things in.
He wandered, trailing fingers along the wallpaper, eyes wide with wonder and something deeper—recognition. The house seemed to respond to his touch, the walls creaking like they were breathing.
"First house?" she asked softly, watching as his fingers left faint luminescent trails that faded moments after contact.
He nodded, a too-perfect mimicry of human gesture.
She started boiling the kettle. Thunder cracked directly overhead, the sound of reality splitting at its seams. He winced, shoulders hunching as if bearing an invisible weight.
Sky breaks. Again. Stop breaking. Stop screaming. They're coming through the cracks.
She turned to find him holding out a mug of steaming liquid, though she hadn't heard him move.
She stared, uncomprehending.
The kettle hadn't whistled. The stove wasn't hot. She hadn't taken any cups from the cabinet.
Steam rose anyway from liquid too dark to be water, too thick to be tea.
"…How did you—?"
She took the mug. It burned her hands with an intensity that felt deliberate, malicious. The liquid inside moved against gravity, occasionally forming patterns that almost resembled symbols before dissolving back into random ripples.
Outside, the raven screeched, a sound like metal tearing.
Meredith touched her chest, trying to establish connection. "Meredith."
The boy tilted his head at an angle that stretched human anatomy, eyes unblinking.
She pointed. "Mer-e-dith."
He hesitated, then whispered, voice raw and stilted as if his throat wasn't designed for human speech: "Aodh-án."
She stared, feeling the name settle into the room like something physical, something with weight and presence.
"Aodhán," she repeated, and as the syllables left her mouth, the lights flickered, the shadows in the corners deepened, and somewhere in the house, something that had been sleeping began to stir.
He blinked, almost smiled—the expression uncanny in its imperfection.
Sound. Mine. Name. She knows it now. That means… I'm real? Names bind. Names trap. Names give power. She has my name now.
Outside, the raven lifted from the gate, wings slicing the dark like blades. It circled once, twice, three times before disappearing into the storm.
It would not be the last time it watched them. It had been watching since before either of them existed, and would continue long after they were gone.
In the darkness beyond the windows, other shapes began to gather, drawn by the speaking of a name that shouldn't exist in this reality.
Things are a little off--or maybe off by a lot--in the town of Rashford. Bizarre events are happening as powerful forces awaken. The story begins with the birth of the title character, Aodhan, who, we learn, is also known as the Eldar, a strange creature who seems as surprised to be there as the reader is to meet him. Soon after Aodhan’s birth, we meet Apollo, Aphrodite (who has suffered a “fall from divinity”--what does that mean, we wonder?), Hermes, and Athena, all former gods of ancient Greece.
The erstwhile deities have survived for centuries, but now, their dignity and sense of godhood in tatters, they struggle to live in the contemporary world. In a delightful mixture of mythological traditions, Athena and Apollo fear the wrath of Yahweh. To make the array of traditions even more intriguing, Luke, also known as Loki, attracted to the potential chaos signalled by the birth of the Eldar, turns up in Rashford. The plight of these fallen former gods might change with the advent of the Eldar, so who or what is he? Does he bring hope of the old gods’ redemption or further threaten them with extinction?
The story’s third-person point of view continually drifts from one character’s perspective to another. The moving point of view is not in itself uncommon, but, in this story, it does leave the reader wondering at times how certain characters can know what they seem to know. Nevertheless, the fascinating questions raised are very effective. Where does the Eldar come from? Why has he appeared in the town of Rashford? What will be the result of his birth?
The story’s prose is overwritten, lurid even, in places, in the attempt to illustrate literally Earth-shattering conflicts of mythic proportions. For example, “Time stuttered . . . in nauseating lurches that made reality strobe like a dying fluorescent bulb.” A little of this sort of imagery goes a long way. The story could do with less of it.
Regardless of choices Buckle could have made differently, the story poses questions to which readers will want answers. Who will live, who will die, and who will thrive? Thus Aodhan is overall an enjoyable read.