The Forgotten Saint
It is often said that Saint Patrick came to Ireland to drive out the snakes.
But what if the snakes were never snakes at all?
Long ago, when the mist lay thick upon the valleys and the bogs whispered like breathing things, a foreign stranger landed upon the shores of Ériu. He was no gentle man of God, as later tales would tell, but a strange figure whose eyes gleamed green like fire in a peat bog, and whose staff was carved from bone, not wood.
The druids, keepers of the old ways, saw him first. They whispered that he was neither Roman nor Briton, but something far older — a being who had walked the shifting places between this world and the Otherworld. He did not ask for shelter. He demanded it. He did not preach of salvation. He spoke instead of banishment.
“Your land harbours them,” he said in a voice that carried like thunder.
“Serpents,” he called them. But the people knew no snakes slithered upon Ireland’s soil. What, then, did he mean?
Some said he was hunting the “serpents” of knowledge — the ancient wisdom of the druids, who bent the wind and called to the stars. Wherever he walked, holy groves withered, and sacred wells ran dry. The old gods faded like smoke before him, as though swallowed.
Others whispered a darker tale: that the “snakes” were not druids, nor gods, but the Fae themselves. Those shimmering beings of hollow hills who danced in moonlight, who whispered to mortals and led them astray. He fought them with prayers unknown to mortal tongues, binding them beneath stones, driving them into the hollow mounds, locking them where no sun might touch.
But if you go to certain places in Ireland — quiet valleys where the grass grows too green, or ringforts where no farmer dares plough — you can hear them still. The hiss beneath the soil. The laughter in the wind.
And some say Patrick never left.
For on storm-ripped nights, a tall figure is seen wandering among ruined monasteries, cloak ragged, eyes burning faintly green, still searching for the last of the “serpents” he never caught.
Perhaps he was a saint. Perhaps he was a conqueror of spirits.
Or perhaps Patrick was something far stranger:
not a man at all, but a hunter from beyond, whose work in Ireland is not yet finished.
The Crazymad Writer Writes Again 