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Medb is a king.
By all definitions of the word, she is a king. Because there have been queens before in history, many queens all over the world, but no matter how many men she married, Medb was always the one in power. Kings decides who their queens are-- what kind of queen decides who is the king?
It is not to say women are weaker. That is an incorrect assumption rampant in the ranks of royalty, till the point kings must conceal their gender, or have it altered after their death-- only in the future, upon their grand summoning will anyone realize the truth. But Medb never had any need to lie, because she simply never called herself a king.
“I am Queen Medb,” she would command. And her husband Ailill would always be equal wealth to her, so there is no need to introduce herself as wife of Ailill. She is simply Queen Medb, king of Connacht, and that is all there is to it. As the daughter of the High King of Ireland, she’s had enough of being known as the accessory to other men. She is the High King’s daughter and the wife of another king (only in name), but before all of those, she is Queen Medb. She knows the taste of power, and she wants more.
She is carried around the whole of Ireland on a red carriage, always scheming, thinking, plotting-- only for one reason. In the darkness by the candlelight, when her lovers are asleep, she whispers-- “I will rule all of the land, and all of its people.”
(All except one.)
---
Scathach is a shadow.
Shadows can only exist with the presence of light, and as long as light exists, there will be shadows. They cannot be killed, nor can they ever be erased from the world. Just like shadows, Scathach will exist for as long as light shines on this world; that is to say, for as long as this universe breathes, she will live.
Unlike most shadows, she is not content with simply following the will of another. She is a teacher in the Land of Shadows, and though she may not be interested in conquering the world or anything of that like, there is nothing better than a good fight.
Because, most of the time, Scathach can only exist. But when she is fighting-- when she is imparting her skills on others, and when her pride is at stake, something more fragile and tangible than her own life ever will be-- that is when she is truly alive.
“Ahh, if only you were born a few years earlier,” she lamented once, presenting a spear to someone who she had once hoped would kill her. “You are so young. So young…”
(The Gae Bolg was meant to kill one person, only one. And it failed.)
---
Medb could control all the men in Ireland except for one.
People in general are easy to manipulate. A sway of her hips, the taste of her lips after too much alcohol-- times were simpler then, when sex wasn’t an abhorrent sin and no one was afraid to use it to their own power. If Medb herself is not enough, then her power certainly is, with the vast lands she controlled and the many men who would do anything on her slightest command.
All of Ireland could’ve been hers. It should’ve been hers. There was no hesitation in her mind when she first went to war over a bull, because everything in the world could be hers.
But it wasn’t. It never would be.
The invasion was opposed by only one man.
And he won.
On the surface, it looked like a victory for Medb. She got the bull, secured the love of a former king of Ulster, and got out with her life. But she had several encounters with that man, and each time, he took something else away from her-- killing her pets, her servants, her handmaidens--
“This is the only time,” Medb hissed at the end of the war-- “This is the only time I will ever allow Cu Chulainn to force me into a retreat.”
Medb could make any man in the world fall in love with her, except for one. And that one-- that one man proves she does will never rule all of the land, and all of its people. He proves that as long as he lives, he will never fall in love with her, and she will never rule over him, never own him like she does Fergus and Ailill. Even if she defeats all of Ulster, Cu Chulainn will never be hers, not even once, like Conchobar mac Nessa was.
He proves that she is not the king of him.
But she would go mad before she accepts that.
(“I demand my husband satisfy me three criteria,” she has said to all who have married her, and all who have ever laid with her, if only for a single night. “That he be without fear, meanness or jealousy.”
All of them failed.)
---
Before she gave it to Cu, Scathach would stab herself with the Gae Bolg.
It’s not like she enjoys the pain, or anything to that sense. There is something unique about the thrill of death-- breathless, quick, time slowing but going all far too fast at the same time. The closest she can get to this is in the heat of battle, and if she didn’t hold back her own bloodlust, she could tear through the whole of Ireland.
But she doesn’t. So this is the second best thing.
The Gae Bolg works on more than just piercing flesh. It is a curse, an unhealable wound that destroys the heart and consumes the world in shadows. This spear creates a mark of death that would kill anyone but her. Scathach was always on the level of godhood, ruling the realm of the dead, but gods can die. She knows this most of all.
Yet, she cannot. She creates an ultimate weapon with her own hands, so that anyone it pierces shall be delivered unto her lands immediately-- and it could kill her too, but instead of granting her the afterlife, it would grant her nothingness. Absolute erasure.
Except, at one point, she turned her head and said, “Ah. I can no longer die.”
Being put into the Throne of Heroes while still alive is a strange feeling, and only one other can testify to that-- a certain woman who ruled the lands near Ireland, wielding a sword instead of a spear. But it is undeniable, a strong flick of a switch inside her that she understands completely, even without explanation.
And it was in that moment, watching her students train and knowing that she would outlive all of them, that she first felt so profoundly lonely.
So she stabs herself with the Gae Bolg, both to test out its function and solidify her fate. It doesn’t kill her.
(Scathach can have power over the entire world, and it would mean nothing when she has no power over her own life.)
---
Cu Chulainn defeated the army of Connacht.
It is not a victory for Cu, and not one for Medb. With the death of Cu’s sworn brother and the fall of Medb’s army, the endless on-and-off skirmish between Ulster and Connacht has finally ended in this result. Medb is thrown from her horse while attempting to retreat, strewn in the mud with nothing but the clothes on her back, and in that moment, she has never been more powerless.
“Can you walk?”
And Cu Chulainn does not kill her.
He is fearless, even whilst staring down at the eyes of the woman who wants him dead more than anyone else in this world. While she is weakened and unarmed, it would be easy to just wring her neck while she struggles to fight back-- but he doesn’t, for no reason that Medb can discern, apart from the fact that she is a queen. And he treats her like anyone should treat a queen.
(But she is a king--)
He says nothing when she spits, does not fight back when she tries to scratch his fucking eyes out. He simply keeps her at arm’s length with not a single drop of meanness, using only just enough strength to keep her from murdering him. If Medb was once a woman who could charm any man in the world, she’s forgotten that now, because there is nothing more enraging and utterly despairful as having all your power ripped away from you, and yet, to have your enemy do nothing to make themselves the villain of the story.
Because if this was a story, Cu would be the hero. And that is the biggest loss Medb has suffered on that day, when Cu Chulainn returned her to her homeland with a new set of clothes on her back and not a single scratch on her skin. He asked for nothing in return, and maybe he does detest her too, because she is the reason for all the troubles in his life, and eventually, it is her machinations that will kill him. Maybe he would’ve reacted a bit more differently to having her under his control, if he’d asked Scathach for more details on how he would die.
But he didn’t, and though Cu had all the power in the world to make Medb suffer, he chose to help her instead. And that is a grave insult, one that strikes the very soul, because Medb was treated as a queen, a dependent, not unlike how someone would treat a small, wounded animal.
And it does require some kind of mental fortitude, not to take revenge on the woman who sent dear friends marching to their deaths. Cu possesses a kind of power Medb has never seen before, and never will understand, because she has never desired it or even thought it possible. Heroes of legend should remain in legend, and yet Cu exists, right in front of Medb’s eyes.
Yet, she does not own him. She will never own him. She can dig her fingernails into his skin and take his life, but not for one fleeting moment will she ever own him. He may concede his life to her, but never his power.
If he holds any jealousy towards her wealth or beauty, he doesn’t say it. He is without envy when he sees all her servants tending to her, quickly taking her away the moment she returns to Connacht. It fills her with so much disgust that she wants to puke. So then, why is she also filled with some sense of desire--?
(“I demand my husband satisfy me three criteria,” she has said to all who have married her, and all who have ever laid with her, if only for a single night. “That he be without fear, meanness or jealousy.”
Cu is the only man who has ever fulfilled this, and the only man she would ever allow to be her king. But since he does not want to join her side, that was an impossible dream.
But if only he could rule alongside her. If only the one man who could not own would, instead, simply give his hand to her and be her equal. If only Cu Chulainn could love her, and he would lend her all the power in the world as her husband, because the only person the both of them cannot ever own is the one sitting on the throne next to them. if only--)
---
Scathach, on the other hand, does not quite have the time to dabble in such childish affairs.
She simply remains in the Land of Shadows. One day, Cu Chulainn’s son Connla makes his way in, and with her power of clairvoyance, she knows perfectly well that her beloved student will end up killing Connla without realizing he is his own son till Gae Bolg has destroyed his heart.
But she trains Connla anyway.
If Scathach would not train Connla for the sheer fact that he will die young, that destroys her own purpose as a teacher, undermining whatever principles she’s placed upon herself and leaving her even less than human from what she already is. And if Scathach would not train Connla simply because he would die to Cu Chulainn’s hands in a fight later in life, that would do nothing but take away Connla’s true fate as a warrior. One could say that if she does that, instead of Cu killing him, she would be the one that slays him before he even gets to live.
Besides, she is an immortal. No matter how long these men live, either one day or a thousand years, it is always far too short. People die, and even if she does not say it, she spends the rest of her life missing them. That is the price of eternity.
“What kind of man is my father?”
Scathach does not need to think much before answering that question. “When you finally meet him, you will realize he is one of the greatest in this world.” She does not ask him what Connla has heard about Cu from Aife, his mother and the woman Cu Chulainn held at swordpoint as he commanded her to bear him a son. She does not mention that Aife is her sister. In general, she does not quite like to think on the fact that Cu won a fight which she should have won, and left her own sister completely powerless and begging for her life.
(Oh, how Scathach would’ve loved to be in that position. But she would never beg, would never keel, simply look Cu Chulainn in the eye and die as she should’ve. That is why Scathach is the Heroic Spirit and not Aife, and that is also why Scathach can never have the honor of death.)
“That’s a cop-out answer,” Connla laughs, and Scathach tries not smile.
She knows she’s going to miss him when he dies. It happens to all who pass through her hands, sifting through her fingers like the sands of time as their lives turn to dust.
But she continues. Even if she is nothing but a shadow in the grand, overpowering light of all the lives that she manages to touch, she will continue to exist, because there is no greater power or honor than creating legends, even if only through her students.
---
“Ah, so as it turns out, you’re stronger than me.”
Those are words Scathach wishes she could’ve said to Cu, the real Cu Chulainn, and not whatever abomination was standing in front of her, red marks on his face and the smell of a Berserker all over him. He spares her no words of his own, lacking all the snark and bite of the normal Cu, and when she retreats, there is a wound through her chest big enough to kill anyone else.
But not her. Not a woman who has made the Gae Bolg with her own hands and tested it on herself. She may want to die, but she refuses to die to him. If her death is not a fitting end to her life of shadows and raising legends by her own hand, then she’d rather just stick to not dying at all.
She would’ve never imagined herself to be a ‘Servant’, even though she’s long accepted her position as a Heroic Spirit. It feels weird, having to resort to follow a Master and their own little army of Servants just to beat Medb back to where she belongs. In fact, when Scathach sees Medb, she can just barely recall where she’s seen that face before-- somewhere in the midst of her visions, and through the passage of history. She has led the souls of many greedy kings into the underworld, after all. Their features blur together after a few thousand years.
“Oh, you’re still alive? That’s surprising,” Cu Alter declares when Scathach shows herself once again. The two of them, Medb and Cu Alter, have already created luscious thrones for the both of them before they’ve even taken over America. Their arrogance is child-like.
Medb saunters from her throne, throwing off her white furs and putting on the airs of a queen. “I am Queen Medb,” she introduces, as if no one knows already. “And this is my king, Cu Chulainn.”
But Medb is the king, because Cu Alter is nothing but a fake construct born out of her mind, a desperate attempt for power.
And so, Scathach has no respect for either of them. Medb is nothing but a little girl who got her hands on too many expensive toys. Cu Alter isn’t even real.
Scathach stares down on them with annoyance, but also some semblance of pity. She does not have any strong emotion on her face that would signify actual investment in this battle, or this pathetic little war, not unlike the Cattle Raid of Cooley. She looks at them in a way that people would look down on animals smaller than them.
(And this is what Medb has dreamed of, where she finally has power in her hands, where she finally owns Cu Chulainn-- this is the closest she’ll ever get, to finally having a king who fulfills all her criteria, who lends all his power to her, who loves her--
Because that’s it in the end, right? Her only criteria was really just for her husband to love her. And none of them did.
Medb had power over the emotions of so many men, and yet could not will them to love her so completely that they would be accepting of her faults and understanding of her many affairs. In the end, did she have any real power at all? If she did, then why would she be so desperate as to create a facsimile of a person just to convince herself that at least one version of him must love her, or at least, give himself to her? If she had power, why would she need Cu Chulainn’s approval, the attention of the one man who made her realize she could never conquer the world?
It’s too much. It’s all too much to digest, too much to bear, and Medb has spent too much time of her life in humanity and in spirit chasing after imaginary constructs of power, because they were all she had ever known. She has never known love. And now, it is too late to think on it.)
Scathach turns her spear towards them.
(But fleeting things like power struggles are of little real consequence to Scathach. She even treats her own life callously, don’t even begin talking about the lives of others. All these petty conflicts of human interest are beneath her, and they make her stronger.
It also leaves her absolutely lonely, as if she is the only one of her kind on the planet, and her one wish to die at the hands of those she has once trained will never come true.)
“Brace yourself,” she commands, and then she charges.
---
When Medb dies and Scathach does not, in the end, they are both cursing the world.