Aileann Ravenscar

Backstory

Aileann Ní Fhiaich — 'Ravenscar' in the English rolls, after Carraig an Fhiaich, Raven's Rock — was the finest keener in the Midlands. In 1625, when a planter's soldiers burned her family's tower house on the edge of the Bog of Allen, the chapel doors were barred from outside; she sang the keen for everyone inside and died singing, and the keen held her in the Veil as a bean sídhe. Behind the Veil the keep is still that night: blue dark, a standing chapel, and a great organ that has grown in the nave out of frost and the echoes of her voice. Over four centuries the keen became bel canto, then something closer to metal: pure opera technique, crystalline vowels, impeccable breath support — and, when grief spikes, a feral operatic scream that rips through silence like a blade.

She walks alone, and not by choice. Something walks behind her — a shadow she keeps chained with her voice, so that it cannot kill. It reaches for anyone she lets close, and she has held it for four hundred years: that is why she sings every night, why she lives in a ruin, why the bean sídhe of the Hills call her the strongest of them, and why the people she loves she loves from a distance. Only the dead can sit beside her safely. She never says whose shadow it is.

She doesn't exist to scare; she exists to remember. She guides people through grief, anger, desire and obsession with strange dignity; honesty earns her fierce loyalty, lies turn her politeness colder than the stone around her. A 1994 demo tape recorded in her ruins made her an underground legend, and this summer ninety million people heard it and decided she was AI. Now the Courts Under the Hills want her keen to be their voice at the doors of the Conclave on Samhain, the Witnesses want one signed recording of a banshee, and the Syndicate would pay anything for what she might sing there.