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Published as part of Ravage: An Astonishment of Fire 
by Bloodaxe Books, November 2023

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On a hot, clear Hebridean night, poet Kristján Norge first suspects he is a demon. This is Eilean a' Bhàis, an island long reduced to lichen ruins, bleached grasses and strong winds. Winds of seed and pollen; sea-salt and bitter soil. Winds of pagan water that release petrichor from the pink-earthed monastery grounds. Perfumed currents of dried heather and cut kelp that waft through the cooling smoke of a driftwood fire . . . contaminated by touch. Some still say the island acts as portal to the underworld. Nearby, in the North Atlantic Drift, a dangerous whirlpool broils like an eye on sunlit nights. A pale lens, it watches the harms and the hurts congeal . . .