SONG of EMBER

POSSIBLE TRIGGER WARNING: SUICIDAL IDEATIONS.

53

WHERE DARKNESS LIES

🙜

"I beg of you," she groaned in piteous envy, "tell me only how you are doing this. I care not for the rest! Tell me that, and I will leave this place."

A frantic sort of despair settled into Ky’s heart as she spoke—for the coldest sinews of her being knew why she longed to obtain this information, and the part of her which resented it was quashed beneath her lust.

"What is possible for one such as I, rivensoul, is impossible for you… I suffered many long years to master this art," it whispered, with a note of pleasure. Yet even that sounded hollow to Ky's ears, as if it were only the imitation of pleasure, to bridge the vast divide between her meager understanding and the dark and ancient understanding of this entity. "I was not so different from the riven, once… we aligned our purposes… but they broke faith with usssss… they sought what you seek, and in their desperation… they were foolssssss.”

Eyes closed, crawling, reaching, Ky felt her way toward the wall of human relics as the snatch continued muttering and wheezing.

To itself, she thought.

“Fools… yes, fools, all. I, the last… I, the wisest. I… remain.”

"Are these souls not binding to bone and flesh, once?" Ky gulped, throat tightening. "Can you not bind one to my bone and flesh?"

One of its eyes burned brighter in the mist, hovering closer than was comfortable. The Hunger blanketed her desire, fear, and guilt, muffling all thought apart from vague notions of how she must have it, of how she would obtain it, of how she could not live without it.

"As I remain inevitable… so it seems the darkling riven remain unenlightened malcontents."

Saliva dripped from the corners of her mouth and spattered the floor. She shifted her bare foot, brushing the cool glass with her toes, and swallowed harder. "I—I am not like those who are coming here, before… I should be content with such a little piece—"

Her hand twitched toward the mist.

"GRAH!”

The jar disappeared with a scrape.

“Away with your slippery fingers, riven, if you have nothing of value to trade…"

"I—will think of something," she mused, her voice hoarse and her lips numb.

"What will you offer me?" the snatch hissed viciously. "What succor can a cracked vessel beg from a wellspring? What might a useless, quivering wretch… a descendant of failures… offer the one which remains?"

A cold draft washed over her and she trembled, ears shivering.

"A spell-song…"

The throaty laugh which answered crushed Ky's pride.

"You will sssssing for me?"

"I can be making you to feel any thing you wish," she said as stoutly as she could manage, lifting her chin. "I shall weave for you a dream of bliss, which will surely endure until forever’s end."

"Grrhm. Mortal panderings hold no pleasure for one as old as I," it burbled. "You have seen that I am not so easily enchanted as mankind. I will require something… faaaar more valuable than a simple siren song."

Ky pondered this, quailing at the implications.

“Be still, rivensoul… and we shall see… if you bring anything usssseful… to me…”

Thin tentacles of mist crept across the stone as it encircled her with its tendrilous fingers, huffed its foul breath-which-was-not-a-breath upon her skin, and in all ways encompassed her until at last Ky felt that she, too, must surely be devoured—yet she could not pull away, nor turn aside.

Feelings floated to the front of her mind, unbidden.

Memories she had long buried, dredged up like the mud and silt at the bottom of a stagnant pond. The confusion turned to muted horror as she understood that she had not called them forth of her own volition. The soul-snatch quickly pulled those particular fragments of herself—the uncertainty, the fear, the whispering doubt—into the immense fold of its nothingness, as effortlessly as one with physical form might inhale a pleasant scent or a refreshing breeze.

Worst of all, there was no chanting nor magical persuasion: its confidence, omnipresence, otherness bled into her mind as the moments of her insignificant existence flitted past, wringing old emotions from every thread of her being…

Her tongue shaped words without her consent.

“Why can I not have a taste?”

The voice sprang forth from her breast, but higher and more tremulous than her current resonance, and a pair of blurry hands reached out before her—as her vision focused, she saw that they were her own, but smaller with stubby little claws.

The hands of a child.

Blood trickled across jagged stone, dying the ocean darker with each washing wave. Sil crouched beside the body, her beautiful face stained berry-red, eyes wide with their ever-manifest annoyance.

“Because our elders have not declared you worthy.”

“They are cruel,” Ky sighed miserably, tucking her chin to her knees and watching the blood run into the sea. She stared into the empty eyes of a man who had been smiling only a breath ago, and wondered what he would think of his ending, if he were still alive.

Familiar sadness twisted her insides. At first it had been sadness for herself, but now all things were colored by the presence of a being which would never breathe again.

Ky leaned closer to touch his still, pale face with her dark fingers.

“Someday I will be worthy, sister. I will be like you…”

A bony hand smacked her arm away and Ky cried out in pain, recoiling.

The smoldering fury in Sil’s eyes frightened her. “You will never be like me! Speak such another lie, and I swear to you upon my locks that you shall never speak again!”

The snatch lost interest, sweeping past as the flash of pain in her wrist turned to incoherent wailing.

Ky gnashed her teeth.

The memory rushed past with a fury, growing louder in her ears as the current swept her along.

Enchanting notes of laughter drifted through the whispering trees as Ky stalked her sister’s footsteps. She peered out now and then at the red-haired sirena and her three crooning friends from behind scant shrubs and thickets which hedged a lonely deer trail. The song of the ocean rushed nearby, calling her back to the friendly tide pools.

Ky was uncertain of finding her way alone—she always managed to lose herself in these pines without Sil there to guide her. Now she was beginning to thirst and hunger, but she dared not reveal herself. It was far too late for that. Her sister would be angry. Desperation clawed at Ky’s mind.

Why had she followed them here? Why had she not lingered to gather shells in the cove, as Sil had instructed her to do?

A twig snapped.

She gasped quietly, ducking behind a graceful poplar as cold fingers gripped her wrist. Ky looked up into her elder sister’s familiar mask of calm distaste. The scent of bitter pine and sage blooms overwhelmed her—comforting and dreadful.

“Were you spying?”

Ky gave no answer; none was necessary.

“Do you know what we do with spies in our clan, sister?” There was no getting away from her bruising grasp, and it would be worse if she ran. Sil leaned forward until their noses touched, and her lower eyelids creased into a smile. “We hang them.”

She tried to wrench herself free from the memory, but the snatch rumbled in pleasure as her world tilted upside-down.

Ky screamed.

Vines bit her ankles as she cried after her sister’s retreating form, compelling her to return, even as Sil hushed her with a word of silence. How was she to know that her childish fear of isolation would be the end of her? Now Ky rocked herself back and forth, swinging wildly and struggling to curl her weak body upward to grasp the bonds at her feet.

Though she thrashed until her ankles were tattered and weeping, her fingertips barely brushed the surface of the murky pond.

Again and again she lunged for the cool, still waters.

Yearning, hoping.

The sun set. Her pounding heart began to slow. Her sniffling breaths grew fainter, and her head throbbed. Night breezes cracked her delicate skin.

I’m going to die, she decided at last, despair settling into her heart…

Water splashed her face.

Ky spluttered in shock, licking her lips and opening her eyes.

She gasped at Sil’s upside-down grin and let out a cry of fear, elation, and relief.

“Half-wit—did you really think I wasn’t coming back?”

The snatch shuffled past more memories of fear, relief, fear, relief… the rhythm of Ky’s younger self, as familiar to her as the pattern of her own breathing… and all the while she muttered and moaned, speaking, reliving, weeping, shrieking, and swaying to and fro…

She wished for an end to it all.

But she knew, as confidently as she could predict the rising and setting of the moon, that it would never end. She had set out to find the ending, and there was never any ending to find; it was only an unkind amusement of the fates, the winds, the changeless tides.

There—

—a glimpse of solace—

—she clung to it defiantly, splashing back against the rapids—

The creature's sunken face was terrible to look upon—disfigured by time and toil, battle and bruise, leathery ears tattered by long cold winters and one eye clouded with age and decay—but Ky was not afraid of him.

He, the oldest of the Veli clan; he who had Endured.

She rested her chin on his knobbly knee, his tunic of kelp and beads and loose fibers of braided hemp dancing about them both in the current, listening as he wove together colorful strands of long-ago times with his song—strands of great battles won and lost, the sundering of a mountain stronghold, and her favorite golden thread which she begged for him to sing, again and again and again…

The heartspun magic of mankind.

Forgotten tales of a kingdom under a mountain with two heads.

A power which could banish the gnawing pain in the pit of her stomach.

The elder did not speak to her as if she were a child, he listened to her sighs without reproach, and he sang softly to her. In return, she whistled the tunes she had learnt from the birds to balm his aching joints. She wondered if this was what a father was. Had her father ever woven pretty songs for Sil?

Jealousy and sorrow knotted together for a moment before the elder combed away her grief, gnarled claws trailing through her tangled hair as he murmured strange and savage tales of an age long past, abandoned by all but the one who Endured.

—before time and memories spun on, and the elder vanished from them, as if his frail gentleness had been wrenched from her arms anew—pouring through her grasping fingers like dry sand—and another face appeared.

Ky clenched her fists and gritted her jaw, struggling in silence.

But the wild shapes, colors, scents, and songs were flying by faster now, and the impetus pulled her along like an errant tide—

“I see you, there,” laughed the man, lodging his axe in a nearby stump and brushing off his hands. “You can come out, now, little bird. My name is Bren! What is your name? Are you lost?”

But Ky could not come out—she had never been spoken to by any such mortal, and she found his focus strangely upsetting. When he glimpsed her otherness, he would be afraid, and run. And then she would never taste his song, nor sup the blood of his veins, nor that of any mortal man. And Sil would mock her, and the elders would banish her forever from their rituals…

She must not become one of the seianach—the eternal unworthy.

Bren’s eyes found hers in the bushes.

He went very still, and for a moment, it was Ky herself who suddenly wished to run.

Instead, she sang to him of sleep, and he fell as if dead upon the mossy ground. Sil need not know she was a coward—that she had not looked him in the waking eye when she supped of his song. But as she put out a hand, her claws pricking the skin of his neck, she hesitated.

Clandestine meetings by moonlight—the slow and methodical unraveling of a man—

The sting of failure—hot soup—bitter herbs—

Ky retched.

Fleeing from her sister’s wrath—flashing faster now—

First glimpse of a mountain she had never seen, hardly hoped for—a stubborn door covered in runes she could not understand—

Now a little wooden nest in the woods, clever-woven nets with fish aplenty—

A pretty stone gleaming in the sunlight on a rotting wooden step—

They had almost come to—

It had almost come to—

No—

Must not remember—

“Nnnyyyaaaagh!”

Memories scattered with the mist, and a chill force lifted from her along with a weight she had not known was there.

Ky knelt on the floor, gasping for air, her hands still pressed to the sides of her head. Hollow panic touched her heart, for her mind was empty and her ears rang loudly, as if a bell had been tolled—but one by one the stolen memories trickled back and her chest ached as the heart-wounds rent afresh, such that she wished for the emptiness again.

The misty threads still danced around her body, lingering in certain mundane places she did not think worth lingering upon—her hands, her arms—and whispering across the folds of the dress. When it had finished its unsettling exploration, the snatch drew back with a grumbling hum.

Inky darkness blotted her skin and clothing wherever the tendrils had touched her.

She stared at herself, whimpering.

The viscous liquid dripped from her shaking fingers to the cold stone floor.

“I… see you… now…”

It released a whistling breath which almost sounded sad—or, she suspected, possessed a semblance of sadness—whether feigned for ill or molded such to simplify the complexity of its feelings for her less ancient mind.

"Grrrhmmmm," it muttered, and the fell-fire eyes appeared behind their shroud of darkness. "I should not have been… so hasty…"

Her heart leapt within her.

She held fast.

You must have it! You cannot leave without it! After all you have endured, what suffering shall dissuade you now? Here at the edge of your despair?

"I will be giving you…” She coughed, pressing her fingers to her throat. “Whatever you desire."

It drifted closer with a low moan. "Whatever I desire?"

"If I am possessing of it, and you wish for it, then it is yours—even my life and breath—only, you must be weaving this soul to mine first!" she said quickly. "Else we have no trade."

The eyes blinked at her.

Perhaps she had caught it by surprise.

"You would trade your breath for this boon?"

Ky's throat constricted.

To die was solitude and silence.

Ember would be lost to you forever.

But Ember was not the reason she had come. He was here only to avail her eternal suffering. She had sought this from the beginning—an end to the ravenous Hunger—and whether by man-magic or the magic of this dark entity mattered very little so long as she was sated in the end.

Nonetheless, her eyes burned, and she found it difficult to speak the words.

"You truly know nothing of Hunger," whispered Ky, "if you believe it is a long life which I seek."

"Still, perhaps you should content yourself with immortality, as I do," it creaked, another laugh bubbling under its airy voice. "Your hands are empty, your riven soul worthless… and there is but one desire which remains to the one who remains."

"Name it," she panted, edging closer, a groveling, slavering wretch.

In that moment, Ky understood that she despised herself.

She had always been unworthy—even now, she knew it was the enduring elder who deserved the sustenance he had sent her in pursuit of. It was only that she had never acknowledged it before. A not-memory flashed through the stirred-up silt of Ky’s mind, and she had suddenly, in her reckless fancies, impaled herself upon the pretty sword.

At least she could finally surrender herself to its runic summons.

What sort of end might that be? Perhaps there would be a moment of shining, shimmering ecstasy. A moment of frantic relief, before she breathed her last—

No, that will hurt too much, too soon!

She bowed her head in shame and her stained wrists rolled limply upon the floor, fingers twitching. Drool dripped down the front of her dress. Diminished, and wholly uncaring that she had been diminished. For what pride was left to be rent from her, now? All bravery she had once thought to own…

It must have been vanity.

No, she could never bring such a death upon her own self, and sweet Ember was not here to witness her treachery. He would end her misery with one fell strike if he knew of the words she had spoken. But she was far too cowardly.

Too cowardly.

And too close.

"Name it,” she repeated, “and it shall be yours."

"Bring me another soul for my hoard," sighed the snatch, "and I will sssssee if I may grant your request."

"You will see?” Ky licked the drool from her lips, hissing. “I must be having of it. What good to me is a possibility? You promise my people, once, long ago—are you powerful enough to do this thing, or no?"

If the snatch failed to amend her emptiness, and yet she walked away from this place with a soul for her own, then all would not be lost. Surely she could shape it, bend it, or break it, until it fit the empty place she loathed.

"Grrmmm." The not-eyes appeared again. "Such a thing… it has not been done before—it is possible, in the realm of the unknown, as it was possible when your ancestors made me a pact; I do not squander my arts. Fetch me another soul to sup, and you may or may not receive ssssssome reward for your efforts."

"If you cannot make me a vow, neither shall you get one," Ky spat, shoving away all thought of Ember’s gentle, honest eyes. "A soul for a soul! And you must be binding it directly to my heart!"

The snatch exhaled, lofting loose strands of hair around Ky's forehead.

She choked on the fetid stench.

"Bring me an unspoiled mortal, darkling riven, and I promise I shall try… we both Hunger, you and I. We know, aaahhh we understand. Their warmth, their light, it calls to us, as it has ever called to us from the founding of the world.”

Ky rose unsteadily to her feet, wondering at the tremendous age of this entity.

“Then you will be doing this for me?”

“Mistake not amusement for ignorance. I have nothing to lose, and you, it would seem, have everything to attain." Before she could speak again, it added, "Keep these words in your heart, my sweet darkling: what other could render you sssssuch sacred rites?"

The mist dispersed.

"None other…"

A whispering wind touched the back of her neck, and was gone.

Ky turned toward the door, half-expecting to see a wisp of darkness slam it shut—but it appeared that she was free to depart. When she glanced over her shoulder, the room was dark and quiet as before, and the echoes had hushed. Not even a hint of mist swirled above the stone tiles. She scurried into the hall, struck by a creeping dread as wintery coldness shuddered through her bones. For the first time since leaving her ocean nest, Ky wrapped her arms around herself and wished that she were warmer.

There was no need to tell Ember all that had transpired.

Not yet.

It would needlessly frighten him, for she did not intend to see her end of this bargain through. Only to trick the snatch into restoring a piece of magic which ought to have been hers, by rights—she no longer felt she deserved it, but perhaps she never had… and anyway, it had been unjustly wrested from her ancestors, long before his people’s kingdom fell. Surely even Ember could see the reason in that, if he knew all the truths that she knew.

And yet you will not tell him? Her thoughts flitted frantically to and fro, and she bit her tongue to silence them all. What is a truth if it cannot be told!

"No understanding, no telling," muttered Ky under her breath, scurrying down the hall. "He will not understand."

If he could understand, of course she would tell him. Yet who else but another siren—or an entity such as the snatch—could ever comprehend her misery? Such reckless words would only chase him away before she had decided what must be done. Yet even pondering such possibilities as those which now lay before only wrought a deeper misery.

As she tracked her recent footsteps, the mist rose up thicker than she remembered from her first journey; at times she could hardly see through the greenish fog, finding her way by scent alone.

The day that I first glimpsed him, walking alone on the river path, we were both of us undone…

Ky dug her claws into the woolen dress, pricking at her ribs until they bled.

The fool and the coward.