Valentia

"Valentia" (sometimes appearing as "Valentia (1994)") is a short story by Caitlin R. Kiernan in the Cthulhu Mythos genre, first published in the 2000 anthology Dark Terrors 5. The story, which involves the discovery of strange fossils on the real-life Irish island of Valentia, highlights Kiernan's interest in paleontology and deep time.
The destruction of the 385-million-year-old Valentia trackway advances a common theme in Kiernan's fiction: that paleontological evidence of the true history of Earth has been suppressed.
The anomalous artifact found in the trackway--a seven-sided metal disk, "ice cold to the touch"--displays "runes or an unknown cuneiform set around the image at the disc’s center –- the tentacled face, its parrot beak, the dragon wings". This may be interpreted as an image of Cthulhu.
The final phrase Maire utters, “Theena dow’an", is revealed by an invented quote from a real book (Lady Wilde's Ancient Legends of Ireland) to be a phoneticization of Daoine Domhain, Irish for deep ones, which Kiernan links to the Fomorii, giants from Irish folklore. "[P]erhaps the most feared of all the water fairies", the quote notes, they "dwelt in Ireland before the arrival of the Gael. They...are rarely spoken of aloud."
==Characters==
*Morris Whitney, a paleontologist who discovered the Valentia trackway in 1993 and came to a mysterious and tragic end in 1994.
*Anne Campbell, the story's main character, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, with an apartment in Tribeca. Long ago Whitney's lover, she travels to Ireland to see what she can learn about his death.
*Arthur Randall, a colleague of Campbell's at the American Museum. He is 60 years old.
*Maire, a student who worked on Whitney's dig. She is described as a "pale, coal-haired girl from Dublin with...tourist-brochure eyes". She is Catholic but is familiar with older religions.
*Billy, another Irish student who worked on the dig with Maire.
== Publication History==
After its appearance in Dark Terrors 5, edited by Stephen Jones and David Sutton, "Valentia" was included in Kiernan's 2005 short story collection To Charles Fort, With Love, and their 2019 Mythos omnibus, Houses Under the Sea.
Category:Caitlin R. Kiernan works
Category:Expanded Mythos Works