Keening

Stories tagged Keening:

• The O’Neill Banshee Aug 13, 2025

  

  There are banshees who howl like broken weather and banshees who keen like a thread drawn through cloth. The O’Neills knew theirs by the latter sound—a soft lament that ran under the wind like a river under ice.

  On the night the old lord took to his bed, a milk-grey mist wandered up from the fields and a hawthorn at the gate grew suddenly white with bloom though it was not spring. The keen began just before the lamps were lit: three notes and a fall, three notes and a fall, as if someone were teaching sorrow to count.