Читать книгу The Highlander's Dark Seduction - Joanne Rock - Страница 6

The Legend

In the most remote hills of Am Monadh, Scotland’s ancient Grampian Mountains, the forests keep secrets from bygone days. Shifting mists hide murky lochs while winding rivers can lead hapless travelers in circles. Here, a legend lingers from the earliest of times, a tale passed down among the hardy souls who carve out a living in this unforgiving land.

It is whispered that the veil between worlds grows thin in those lush glens and dense forests where progress does not tread. And on a quiet day, if one wanders onto the wrong path, the mountain mists can lure a person into the land of the sidhe, the magical fey folk who exist in a time outside our own.

Untouched by the passing years, the sidhe live alongside us, usually perceived out of the corner of an eye—a movement in the trees, a flash of color in the bushes. Occasionally, one of these lovely immortals is glimpsed as if in a dream, so impossibly compelling that most men won’t believe the vision could be real. Very rarely, a mortal can be lured into the timeless lands for the entertainment of the mystical beings that live there, only to be cast back into the real world years later, where their old existence never feels as magical as it did in those enchanted green hills.

Every now and then, a determined mortal tries to cling to that fey world by refusing to leave. One stubborn Highlander named Fergus Darroch even went so far as to kidnap a particular sidhe female who captured his heart. But down that path lay madness. Or in the case of the Darroch descendants, the curse of eternal wandering.

This is the story of one such time-walker cursed by the sidhe.