Group:  Celt heading to the Saxons by way of Viking 'transport'
Name:  Aodhán o'Gheal (Fire from the Hawthorn), Aodhán il'Ainmm (Aodhán the Many Named), Aodhán il'Guth (Aodhán Many Voices), Mac Trimayrey (The Threefold Son), Mac Roigh (Son of the Wheel), Mac Tlachtga (The Earth Spear's Child)
Age: Probably 20 something
Occupation: Outcast, Exile, Wanderer, Holy Man, Fool, Dreamer
Sexuality:  Heterosexual and probably a virgin (unless dreams count)
Physical Description:  Aodhán was named for his flame colored hair, shoulder length and often pulled back.  He has sky blue eyes, though they're sometimes the color of winter ice or a southern sea, which you can make of what you will.  He's no warrior, but with the right clothes he could pass for one.  He's tall and fit, though a little lean by Viking standards.  He doesn't carry any weapons, except for a knife, though he doesn't carry that so much as have it in a pouch along with a few other simple tools, like flint and steel.  These are his only possession besides his clothes, which amount to a robe (in faded green) breaches (in tan) and a shirt (in linen).  He doesn't wear shoes and claims he likes to feel the ground beneath his feet.  As a result, he steps so lightly and gracefully as to not even snap a twig, though he'll admit, they sometimes get cold and he curses up a storm when he stubs a toe.

His smile betrays his youth.  It comes onto his lips easily and makes him seem alternatively childish or boyish (the first seeming foolish, the second mischievous).  It often leads to a sparkle in his eyes, though they tend to show his age (or at least his wisdom) and can seem more attentive than he might otherwise seem (when he's being foolish) or more knowledgeable (when he's being mischievous).  This combination has worked in his favor on more than one occasion and he can play up one or the other when needed.

Personality:  Aodhán is arguably crazy.  He listens to the world as though it speaks, and not just to him.  The pop of a dry piece of wood in the fire, the bluster of the wind through the trees, the bay of a hound searching for kin, all of it has meaning and the world is a very very loud place.  As such, he sometimes struggles to focus on people.  That's not to say he doesn't pay attention, he just gets distracted easily and has to work to keep a conversation going before running off on what might seem like a tangent (though in his mind those tangents are often immensely meaningful).  He's extremely cheerful (sometimes even in the face of horror) and has utter faith that the wheel turns with purpose and meaning.  Everything has a purpose, even if it isn't always understandable and it usually isn't understandable.  In that way, he can relate to the Brown Robes, he just doesn't like that they don't allow room for other gods, especially the old ones, the ones whose voices are getting harder and harder to hear.

Aodhán is searching.  He knows there are people with important destinies and believes it's his job to help them reach for those destinies (he can't help them succeed, per se, that's up to them and Fate, but he can at least try to push them in the right direction).  Of course, that assumes he knows what the right direction is.  He thinks he does.  He might sometimes be wrong.  He hasn't quite figured out what that means yet, when he's wrong, other than the world occasionally 'lies'.  This doesn't seem to bother him.

Aodhán is often amused.  People are funny.  They struggle with the most simple things and pay so little attention to the important things.  Eventually he may become jaded about this, but right now he's still patient, optimistic and generally pretty easy going.  He figures he's good for at least a few more disappointments before that attitude starts to crack.

Family:  Aodhán claims to have been born of three fathers and one mother.  The fathers, he would say, are insignificant, that they were simply righting a wrong though if pressed he would claim they came from the Three Kingdoms (though which three he wouldn't say) and if his feet were put to the fire he'd give them the names of Cumma, Doirb and Muach.

He claims his mother is the Phantom Queen, Macha he would assume as neither Badb nor Nemain have the patience to await the birth of a child.  Alternatively, he claims kinship with the ancient line of Mogh Roith and Mogh Roith's red-haired daughter Tlachtga though those lines are so old as to be myth with no living relatives to speak of save him.

He has adoptive parents named 'Mother' and 'Father'.  'Father' is dead, killed when a neighboring kingdom invaded.  Mother gave birth to a son a short time later.  Presumably Mother and Brother still live but Aodhán is unsure, having left shortly after the birth at the behest of Badb, or perhaps just an angry crow.  Admittedly, he might have misunderstood that sign since things didn't go all that well.

Biography:  Here.

It was a question, a statement, a hope.

He'd been wrong before, each failure another blow to his trust in the wind, but he'd given himself over to it again, let it blow him where it would, like a dry leaf or discarded feather.  He felt a little lost and discarded standing upon the bow of the ship, the sound of oars slapping the water.  He was supposed to be at those oars, his hands calloused and raw.  They weren't though, they were clean and smooth, unblemished and untouched by toil, touched only by failure.

He'd been put to the oar with the other less fortunates taken from the island west of them, harsh men from the North speaking in the language of the lash.  Aodhán had looked up to them with summer sky eyes and asked a simple question.  They were surprised to learn he knew their tongue.  They were even more surprised to learn he knew the language of the wind.

The sound of wood to water faded as the ship glided to shore.  While the men would have welcomed the comfort of a roof over their head for a night or two, they would not go to the docks, some unpleasant past with the lords of the land, something involving a cousin and an axe.  Most of their stories involved unpleasantness and axes.  Instead, they would continue their voyage home, ship laden with silver, gold and brown robed rowers lamenting how they had been forsaken by their god, their bald pates burned red.

Aodhán would not continue with them.  The wind told him to go ashore.  He was not meant for the sea.  It turned his stomach sour and his skin green, much to the amusement of the men from the North.  They considered keeping him anyway, but ultimately decided it best to let him go rather than tempt Fate.  He was a child of the land.

"The wind will favor you," he promised the captain, thankful for everything they had done for him, though sorry for what was to come.

"And the seas will be gentle."

This much was true, though sadly, a storm waited for them upon the farthest shore.

~O~

Here, the Earth felt different.

Then again, it was different Earth.

The land of his birth was built upon the bones of giants who had come before.  He'd heard there were other lands, built upon other beings, a serpent's scales, a turtle's shell, or born of a bird's egg or a god's breath.  He wasn't sure which this was as he knelt to the stones littering the shore, black like a dragon's eyes and cold like a corpse.  They were alive though, those stones, he was sure of that, and that was a start.

Still, he'd have to learn what the land was built upon, and who strode it.

Here, he wondered.

Was this the place?

~O~

He'd heard the wind since before he could remember.  It had sung to him, in the Hawthorn bush, sharp brambles scratching delicate flesh as it and the bush, rocked him to sleep.  He'd been Aodhán o'Gheal, the flame-haired babe born of the Hawthorn.  It wasn't until he'd been pulled from the bush that the thorns broke his skin and he cried.

"As though ripped from his mother's arms," someone had said.

Or so the story went.  He hadn't remembered and his people were superstitious, they still recalled the old ways, even if the God's Cross marked their buildings where once horns and vines adorned.  They also tended to embellish.  A more likely story was that he'd simply been abandoned, unwanted, though why a bush and not the river or beneath a heavy rock?  This was the question.  And so the story went.  He'd been born to a Hawthorn bush.

~O~

The black stones glowed.  Everything glowed, even darkness.  It always had.

He'd first followed the fireflies and faerie wisps into the woods.  The took him to visit Seanmháthair, the Old Mother, though she wasn't old, not like the Old Mothers in the village.  She was young and beautiful, head aflame and gown of silver mists.  He could never look at her directly without hurting his eyes.

"He's surely dead," Mother and Father had learned to say and not waste their time looking for him, though he always returned, a bit dirty, branches and brambles in his tangle of hair, mud caked to his skin in patchwork patterns.  They were good people, simple people, taking him in as a young couple after losing three of their own to the sickness a few years prior.  Still, they had been ill-prepared to handle a young, wild and willful boy like Aodhán for as soon as he could walk, he ran for the woods.

"What were you doing in there boy," they would ask and when he eventually learned to talk (at a relatively old age it should be noted), he told them he was walking with Seanmháthair or sometimes Fearéan, the bird man, but he would always point out, the bird man wasn't as nice as the old mother, and he'd rather talk to her than to him, but that was true in general, he preferred talking to hers than hims.  Hims had eyes like crows, he noted, even the simple farmers and craftsmen of the village had crow eyes, dark and hungry.  Some hers did too, he supposed, but most had flames or stars and he liked them better.  He liked watching the flames for shapes and sounds.  He liked watching the stars for the same.  What, you don't also hear the stars?  Then you're not listening closely enough; they sing.

~O~

He was looking for someone like the stars, someone who glowed.  He saw them in his dream, a crown so bright he couldn't see a face or form.  Then again, he'd seen crowns before and he'd been wrong about them.

"A queen this time perhaps," he hoped.  He had an unreasonable amount of hope.  Even when it was dashed, it grew again, like the blackberry, unless you dug out the root.  Hope's roots ran deep but then, he hadn't seen a queen beheaded before.  He wondered if it would feel the same as seeing a headless king?

But king or queen, he didn't get to chose.

He knew this.

He chose very little.

This, he decided, was fine.

He'd simply follow the glow.