Banshees are legends born from Irish and Celtic folklore—spirits who wail when someone is about to die.
But no one ever asks why she cries.
What sorrow stains her voice?
What memory keeps her howling through the centuries?
This is my story.
The one who became the scream.
My name is Hera Aisling.
Or at least... it was, before my death.
I was born to a humble dairy farmer. I was born to a humble dairy farmer in the mist-veiled village of Maigh Eo. I never spoke a word—not from shyness or stubbornness, but because I simply couldn't. My voice, like a bird caged in frost, had never taken flight
I still remember the first time I saw him—Trien O'Neil. A knight of the crown, riding proud on a black steed, silver-threaded armor glinting like polished dusk. He and his fellow knights had been sent to guard the outer rim of the realm—our village, nestled near the sea-port where traders moored their ships and whispered tales of monsters and saints.
That day, I was tending to our sheep when he rode by, asking shepherds for directions through the pass. When he approached me, I couldn't speak—so I pointed, tracing the path in the dirt with my fingers.
He didn't rush away.
He waited. Watched.
And then smiled.
Somehow, Trien understood me better than anyone. He learned to read my gestures, the rhythm of my hands, the tilt of my head. With him, I didn't need a voice—he heard me anyway..
So I did.
I herded the sheep hastily to the fence and trailed after him. But of course, a knight notices everything. He caught me soon enough—but instead of scolding me, he smiled. Slowly, like fire kindling on a cold night, we grew close. He took me to his jousting tournaments—he often won—and one day, he let me try on his armor. It weighed as much as a newborn calf, but I wore it like a second skin.
Then the Saxons came.
They invaded suddenly—steel on our soil, fire on our homes. Trien was rushed to war.
I packed his rations with trembling hands and gave them to his squire, barely able to speak through the dread choking me. I didn't want to let him go—but I did.
At first, his pigeons came—messages that he was safe, still alive, still mine.
Then… silence.
The birds stopped flying. The ink stopped flowing.
I couldn't wait any longer.
I took the steed he had gifted me and rode through bitter wind and ash-streaked skies to the battlefield where he was last seen.
And there he was.
Broken.
Barely alive, sprawled near the corpse of his squire. Blood-soaked and fading fast. Our eyes met across the carnage.
He smiled.
And then the Dullahan appeared.
The End-Bringer.
The Headless Horseman.
It burst through the smoke, astride a nightmare of bone and rot. Its whip, made of braided human backbone, cracked like thunder.
Trien never saw it.
But I did.
I tried to warn him. Screamed with my hands. My eyes. My soul.
But I was mute.
My voice failed me—again.
And then the whip lashed.
Once.
And Trien's head fell before I could scream.
And that's when it happened.
I screamed.
For the first time in my life.
A scream not born from lungs, but from grief.
From rage.
From love cleaved apart.
The ground trembled.
The skies cracked.
Even the Dullahan—paused.
It turned.
Its severed head, held in its gauntlet, looked at me.
It heard me.
It knew me.
And in that moment—I knew what I had become.
My voice no longer belonged to me.
It was grief.
It was prophecy.
It was the scream that would echo through eternity.
I tried to run. I failed.
All I could think was: Warn them. Warn the blood.
I rode back to the capital.
My hair caked in ash, my fingers frozen to the reins.
And when I gave the news... they called me mad. A liar. An omen.
The nobles saw not a mourner—
They saw a threat.
They didn't burn me. Not yet.
But they turned.
(And history may not say they hated the poor—
But they never cared when we bled.)
The capital never wanted my truth.
It was too wild. Too broken.
Too full of prophecy and pain.
They took my words—my screams—as madness.
And locked me away like a rabid beast.
But it wasn't the king who gave the order.
It was Cairbre O'Neil.
Trien's brother.
Second son of the O'Neil house.
And now—first in line.
Trien was the heir. Everyone knew that.
The golden knight. The people's protector.
But with Trien dead… the inheritance shifted.
And I?
I was in the way.
I had ridden in with his horse. His saddle.
Wearing the last trace of his name.
And when they searched my satchel, they found it—
His signet ring.
Still warm from where I'd clutched it through the storm.
Cairbre took it from me.
And smiled.
Not like Trien.
No warmth.
Only victory.
I was thrown into the depths of the castle's dungeons.
Not for a trial.
Not for justice.
But because I had seen too much.
Because I had loved too much.
And most damning of all—because I could scream.
The guards fed me less each day.
A crust.
A drip of water.
A whisper of rot.
I wasted away beneath stone and iron.
The wind never reached me again.
Only rats, mold, and silence.
Well—
Not quite silence.
In the dark, I relived it.
The whip.
The scream.
The way Trien's blood caught the light like rubies in snow.
Every night, I saw it.
Felt it.
Every time I blinked, his smile.
Every time I slept, his death.
Over and over.
I didn't remember how long I lasted.
But the last words in my mind were the ones I never got to say—
"Warn the blood."
Not just the O'Neils.
Not just nobles.
Everyone.
The Dullahan rides again.
The scream is only the beginning.
And so—I died.
Starved.
Forgotten.
Alone.
A girl with no voice.
No name.
No grave.
But that wasn't the end of me.
Oh no, love.
Because you can bury the body—
But grief?
Grief rots through stone.
Grief doesn't sleep.
And a scream like mine...
They say a scream fades with the wind.
But mine did not.
My scream shattered stone.
It echoed through the marrow of the world.
It birthed me anew.
When my body withered, my soul did not rest.
It rose—
Tethered to grief.
Fused with prophecy.
Crystallized by love I could never protect.
I was no longer Hera Aisling.
I was the Wail of What Couldn't Be.
A Banshee.
But I was not the only one.
We are many.
Women whose voices were never heard.
Who saw death before it came—
Who tried to stop it, to warn, to scream...
But failed.
Because the world would not listen.
And so, fate gave us a voice after death.
Not soft.
Not subtle.
A dirge that rips through the veils of time.
Each of us... a sister bound not by blood,
But by loss.
You may hear us in the forests before battle.
In the wind before the sea takes a ship.
In the crackle of fire before it claims a home.
We come in many forms:
A young girl in white, weeping by the shore.A veiled matron, watching from the hills.A bent crone, combing her silver hair beneath the moon.
We are all the same.
We are all the scream.
And though we may warn—
we do not intervene.
Because we learned the truth:
Some fates were never meant to be altered.
Only mourned.
So when you hear the wail at night,
Don't ask why she cries.
Ask what memory has cursed her to cry forever.