SONG of EMBER

54

THE SEA, THE MIST, AND THE MOON

🙜

Ky pressed her hands to either side of his face, invoking restoration, life and vigor; it was not until she wandered into the simple arrangement which had most often turned his head and curled his lips into a smile—the melody first taught to the youngest of her clan, and that which she had hummed upon his doorstep what seemed so many moons ago—that Ember's pulse fluttered beneath his skin, thrilling her fingertips.

His sightless eyes flickered.

She leaned close, her mouth brushing the tip of his nose. "Awake."

He blinked.

"KY—"

She flinched, but he seized the leather belt across her shoulders and yanked, heaving in a ragged breath. Ky's mouth popped open as his shaking fingers found her arm. Darkness misted the space between them, throwing up a barrier—a fog of twisted shame—and she thought to push him away, to protect him from her own folly.

But he pulled her in with such urgency that Ky could not refuse. The closeness was exhilarating—and more terrible than ever. It seeped from his skin, his mouth, with every breath. The vibrant song which had lain quietly beneath his breast, undisturbed for so many years, had been stirred up like sand in a summer storm.

He brushed his shaking thumb across her cheek and let out a strangled sob.

"You came…"

Ky averted her eyes. The relief, the wonderment—that was not for her. It was for a fantasy of his own making: a loving, selfless illusion whom Ky had eagerly fashioned with her songs and friendly banter.

Such a creature did not exist.

She never had.

Ky murmured soft apologies, wiping tear-trails from his face and leaving sticky slime behind. He grew warmer beneath her fingertips, heartbeat fluttering to life; yet even now his jaw hung slack, as if the air he breathed were not enough to sustain him.

When she slipped her arms beneath his shoulders to pull him upright, a chorus of scents greeted her, some pungent and others very faint: berry juice, honey, damp cloth, salty blood, and bitter fear-sweat. He sat quietly for a moment while she muttered and fussed with his garments, hoping to quell his shivers.

All her efforts were for naught.

At last she accepted failure, tugging him gently to his feet; he was heavy, and all the heavier after her recent struggle.

"You came for us," he wheezed, very softly.

Ky shifted, draping his arm around her shoulders.

She would not look at him.

She could not look at him.

"I—I can hear them," he choked. He kept one heavy arm around Ky, but held out his other hand as if he could touch the lights from across the room. "They're—ahhh—we're in pain!"

Ember shuffled toward the chorus of souls, and the smoky darkness swirled viciously around the shattered stone. A few black words snarled through the room and he fell back into her arms with a wounded cry. Ky soothed him, but the soul-voices swelled and rose to drown her out. He struggled to free himself from her embrace; the shadow had weakened him and she trudged toward the door, desperate to get him away from those beautiful lights: they could not have her Ember!

"A thousand years—dust—d-dust and ashes—breath and life," he sobbed, sagging toward the floor. “Breath and life!”

"Ember!"

Ky stopped just short of the corridor with a weary gasp, hauling Ember by one sweat-soaked arm, yet he continued to babble on in a mad fervor, such that she wondered if the snatch had broken his mind. Rage seared her senses, swiftly followed by regret so profound that she nearly collapsed beneath the combined weight of her guilt and his unwieldy frame.

"So dark," he moaned against her, chest heaving, eyes tightly shut. "It's so dark… so dark… we begged for death, all of us, and no one—no one came… how can you leave us here? How can you abandon us… Snail-Skin?"

Ky flinched.

Hearing those words leave Ember’s tongue stung worse than a slap to the face.

When he opened his eyes, they were bleak and bloodshot—and blazing with a golden light so fierce that Ky shrieked in horror, and nearly dropped him altogether. He seemed not to notice, sliding further down into her arms; tears dripped quietly from his chin, and a low groan slipped from his open mouth.

Shivering, Ky glanced over her shoulder.

The songs flickered more brightly beneath her stare, a silent challenge.

"Release us," Ember intoned, and without the smothering weight of the mist suppressing their lost voices, a hundred souls whispered together…

Release.

Her scarred feet carried her across the floor, one step at a time. Half against her will. Past muttering shadow, past glowing shards of stone, and through a sea of shattered glass. The nearest of the lights blinked eagerly at her, flashing sunset hues of pink and gold. She tenderly lifted the small jar. Held it above her head…

Flung it to the cobblestones.

A thousand glittering pieces scattered, and a jubilant soul flashed into the ether.

What followed, Ky thought should kill her—and, indeed, it nearly drove her mad. For she was forced to repeat these actions, again, and again, and again. Each time she hesitated, she glimpsed Ember's crumpled form, and dashed the glass prison to pieces, until at last, the final flame flickered before her; green like the sea, sparkling beneath a summer’s sun.

She cradled it for a moment, entranced.

It was a delicate bottle, and like the others, imbued with dark enchantments the essence of which she could not untangle (for they were of neither men nor siren-kind). It rested very prettily in her hands, round at the bottom with a tapered neck; a raised filigree embellished the foggy glass, in the shape of a flower she did not know.

The light wavered as a soft, effeminate song crooned to her heart. Oceans of desire washed over her then.

She sank…

Down, down, down…

Her fingers clamped around it and she drew the bottle to her nose, breathing softly.

A faint gasp tugged her attention from the trapped soul to Ember. He knelt in the shadows, his lips blue and his skin ashen. Dirt and tears streaked his face as he braced himself against the floor with one hand.

“Traitor,” hushed the voices and Ember all as one.

Ky flinched, her grasp loosening.

The glass shattered.

Dregs of ancient rose oil wafted upward, the forgotten scent misting her feet. One more soul flashed to life, swirling twice around Ky before twinkling out of existence. The room went dark, lit only by the smoldering glow of the broken tree-stone.

And all the tension drained from Ember's tired silhouette.

Fear of bringing him to further harm was the only restraint that kept Ky from screaming until her throat bled, and her ears heard no more, and her voice cracked into a thousand irreparable pieces like the ill-enchanted glass.

Instead, she lifted her chin, wrung her hands, and passed quietly through the broken remains, treading lightly on the tips of her toes to avoid cutting her feet—though the distraction of pain might have been a small mercy. Ember grasped her gently when she drew near, and though his touch tormented her, Ky returned it. Together, they half-crawled and half-stumbled free from the ruined hoard.

Without the misery of men to feed its strength, the snatch had shrunk to the size of a large rat, its watery form so condensed that it appeared as a fragment of black night sky against the liquid sunshine.

Panting, Ky dropped Ember's arm and grasped the iron-bound oak.

It resisted at first, creaking and grinding, but she finally managed to swing the heavy door shut with a hollow boom—and a sense of profound relief fell over her.

She stood before the door for a moment, wondering how she might secure it. When nothing occurred to her, she tugged Ember forward and helped him totter down the hall. They made it only twenty shambling paces before he collapsed, and Ky was too spent to help him up again.

It would have to suffice until the morrow.

❧

Ember opened his eyes as the mist of a nightmare faded. The remnants of shared knowledge and clamoring voices spilled through his fingers like water, and he found he had retained none of them… though he had the distinct impression that he had been speaking with someone else—perhaps many someones all at once.

They had vanished along with the forest of his dreams.

Or had it been real?

Or, worst of all, this was a dream—and he would awaken to the innumerable grasping fingers and boundless abyss, if he but let his weary mind slip back into the pit of banished memories.

A soft shape moved beside him, leaning over the blankets.

Two dark eyes peered down at him, and all fear faded as the scent of river crocuses and trod-upon moss swept aside the ghastly specters. More recent recollections of padding footsteps, something soft being tucked beneath his head, and a familiar voice entreating him to drink from a flask wafted back to him, dismissing the remainder of his nightmare.

I'm safe. I'm safe. I'm safe…

But his breath quickened, and his heart did not believe it, for it pounded against his ribs with such force that the blankets twitched in rhythm.

"What—what was that—" he wheezed, his voice cracking “—that—demon?”

"I do not know," Ky mused, gazing down at her hands. Her quietude both calmed him and unsettled him. She wove her slender fingers together as she spoke. "Perhaps it is a 'demon,' if that is what your people are calling it, or perhaps it is something else entirely—"

"Are you real?" he fumbled, interrupting her.

Her black eyes darted over him, flitting away again just as quickly, and he wasn't sure how to interpret the brief glance.

"I…" He swallowed twice, and curled his fingers more tightly around the blankets. Every fiber of his body ached and he felt astonishingly fragile, as if he had been torn apart and patched back together with hardly a care. A darkness pressed against his mind, threatening to unravel him once again if he ventured too close. "At first, I thought I was trapped in a dream—that thing, when it took me—but I—I knew it had to be real—I've never felt a pain like that in all my days—"

Ky's shoulders slumped, and trembled.

"—it—it did something to me, Ky." The words tumbled from his lips, faster and faster, and he clenched the blanket until his knuckles turned white. "It pulled something out of me—my breath, my life, my—I don't know. I was floating outside of myself—or worse, I was myself, but… ugh. Like—like an empty mattress on washing day. Like—like a child's doll, with the straw and bits of cloth all pulled out of it—"

Ember could not stop himself.

The impression consumed him, and suddenly all he wanted was for Ky to understand. For somebody—anybody—to take his hand and reassure him that he wasn't a madman, that this journey through the mountain kingdom was nothing but a soon-to-be-forgotten nightmare, and that all would be well again.

That he would be whole again.

Tears streamed down his face, but he hardly noticed them, caught up in the throes of his own garbled confession.

"I felt so weak, so useless… so unraveled… do you know what it's like, to see yourself, outside of yourself?" He knew he wasn't making sense, but he no longer cared. "I could have devoured the moon and all the stars, and even that would not have put things to rights... so, so empty... it hurt so awfully bad, Ky, I—I'm ashamed. I'm ashamed of myself. But I—if I could have killed myself, I might have—I would have! But I knew you wouldn't leave me there… I knew you would follow… and I knew it would be all right in the end, when you came."

A sob wracked his aching ribs, and Ember pressed a hand to his throat. A black pit yawned before him, as desolate and real as the void he had confronted in the clutches of the shadow-beast.

"What is to become of me, Ky? Ky?"

He needed to hear her voice.

He wanted her to make these terrors disappear.

But she remained silent.

"Ky," he whispered, fumbling for her hand. “I had nothing… I was nothing… it’s so… it’s so unspeakably terrible… to be empty.”

He couldn't see.

He couldn't breathe—

And then a broken trill pierced the shadow before him, and the mist wafted away to reveal Ky's pale face. Tendrils of black hair clung to her sticky forehead, and she grasped his wrist with her clammy fingers. The scent of crushed flower petals washed away the stench of death, and the look on her face struck him cold.

Shock, sorrow, a bone-chilling desire.

“I know.”

Two words.

They carried a dreadful weight.

"How do you live with it—the emptiness, I mean?" he whispered, more tears running down his face and soaking into the pillow. "How can you keep going? I—I would weep with every breath!"

He wearily dragged an arm across his eyes.

The darkness had relinquished him, but its grip had not left him unmarked. Little things—his own heart softly beating inside his chest, the way the tears tasted when he opened his mouth, the scratchy blankets on his skin—now seemed all-important and all-consuming, and he was overwrought by their significance.

Ky must have understood, at least in part, for after several moments passed he heard her voice again.

"Sirens have no tears," she crooned, a long withheld sigh gusting over his face.