The Quicksand Singularity ArQive: Array.init:0

A0T5.1 The Vampyre Syrenn (Part 1)

Silence had fallen over this totem for what he knew was the longest duration yet. So long had it been that he had very nearly forgotten about it entirely, his memory only retracing the path, and with great strain, when its altitonant trill interrupted his guidance of another forlorn soul on a journey to some lesser measure of peace.

Though to his ears its cries thundered on high, the ancient man knew no others besides him could perceive its presence. He had made it that way. He knew this, but like its age, he could not articulate why, only that it was right to be so. He departed the young man whose wailing and torment he had heard from afar, and to whom he had come as sad replacement for the want of a Virgil. The young followed as the old approached the telephone, hidden behind a patch of cloud.

He, the ancient, turned to the young man before opening the cloud door and said, "Go on without me. I'll not be long."

The young man nodded, and then drifted away on his own. At first he went tepidly, like an infant taking their first steps, before, having found his footing, greater command of his flight was seized, and he went off, soaring like the great skorðhawk of Trønheimer. With pride, the old man's heart swelled. He watched the young man go, the telephone still ringing. After offering his gratitude to the Elder One, he turned his attention again to the telephone.

The old man opened the door revealing behind the patch of cloud a cabinet of weathered wood. Its dry and greying timbers flecked with patches of peeling white paint, held in its centre a red telephone with a black ring. His eyes having no more than fallen upon it silenced its alarm.

The old man lifted the handset and, placing it to his ear, greeted whomever might be calling him, "Hello? Who calls?"

"This is Hal," a woman's voice replied, "I need you in Soulstar."

"I am presently occupied," he said.

"I've had to pull Ravenheart," Hal mentioned.

"Who?" he asked, eliciting an exasperated sigh from Hal.

"It's serious. I need you."

"Send your envoys," he answered, "but I will not abandon my task until it is complete."

"Give me an ETA, Kvôrrím," Hal responded.

"Kvôrrím?" he reacted.

"Not again..." Hal groaned.

"I apologise, I am not following."

"What's your ETA?"

"Who is Kvôrrím?" he asked.

"You," Hal answered.

"Is that so?" he mused. "Hmm...I...do not recall that name...."

"It wouldn't be the first time you've forgotten your own name. What are you going by now?"

"Hmm..." the ancient traveller pondered, "Wander, I should think."

"I should have suspected," Hal sighed, "what's your ETA?"

Wander looked around the endless, cloudswept sky for the young man he had been shepherding but could not find him. Squinting, he peered deeper into the dream, into the young man's inmost heart. There he felt was right, and there he found him. In the place of his deepest anguishes, the young man rested on his knees before faceless creatures shrouded in shadow.

"This one has no further need of me," Wander answered, hanging up the telephone.

A daisy lay in the young man's palm, outstretched as offering to the figures who had tortured him so.

* * *

As was the usual course, Wander woke with all the struggle of a moth breaking free its cocoon. It was slow, exhausting, agonising even. His mind so weighed by the dreams he cast, to shake them off and rise was an effort no less than a half-measure of Heracles. Sounds in the real came to him as distorted echoes and grotesque shadows of what they ought be. His ears were filled with cotton, everything dulled and muffled. His respiration brought no tastes, no smells, his skin barely sensate, and what there was, could only be felt as confused and jumbled—an inchoate, primordial fog.