you have hatched...
Assipattle fights the Stoor Worm, and fells it.
The tail thrashes up and down, up and down - parts the lands, splits Britain from Norway and Sweden.
Then Assipattle stuffs her liver with burning pear - to kill her, see? - but she clenches her body in a ball, and sinks into the sea.
In her pain she vomits out her teeth: Orkney, Shetland, the Faroes... The water springs up hot in Iceland because of the peat still burning inside her.
When she shifts herself, the oceans overwash the shores.
And when she wakes...
When she wakes, she'll eat up us all and drink up the sea from here to the Baltic. Maybe three months, maybe three years.
Meantime, the rocks under her keep on hatching - more and more - hatching out things as haven't hatched for centuries, things folk have forgotten to fear, things folk don't even believe in no more! Hardly a man remembers how to fend them off...
Time was, people paid their tributes - salt, corn, blood. Debts to the Old Magic. Not any more. The tributes have stopped. Folk don't honout their debst.
The saints go unblessed; harvest gets taken without a word of thanks.
It's like a wall: you got to keep it mended. Yoy got to keep plugging the holes, or the enemy can get through and at you.
Now the Hatchlings are coming, and what's to shield us from them? We've starved our glashans, bricked up our Domovoys, forgotton the magics...
The Hatchlings. Black Dog, and bugganes and the dracs and barguests. Picktree Brag, the boas, the triton, the ushteys. The whole nestful! Corn wives, the nuckelavee, the boobrie. Redcaps! Merrows! Cobbolds! All of them!
Your great-grandparents knew! Your great-great-grandparents! Why didn't they warn you all? They did warn you, I'll swear!
But people stopped listening. No respect for the old Wisdom.
Now the year turns about like a weather vane, any old how, and the glashans aren't fed, and the yew trees are grubbed up, and the witches sniggered into nothingness, and never a piece of iron put up on a door... Well, they can all come down on us now, can't they?
The Hatchlings.
