The Quicksand Singularity ArQive: Array.init:0

A0T5.1 The Vampyre Syrenn (Part 1)

Decrypting was never an easy task. Wander pushed through, and with each laboured firing of a synapse, ever enlarging portions of the real world returned. When he could open his eyes, he felt sight like a kitten opening its eyes and seeing the world for the first time. Blindingly bright, unfocused and blurry, everything a washed-out deformation. His eyes strained for the memory of their muscles, to blink a task of great pains, to gaze into his periphery an exhausting effort.

As sound coalesced into coherence, his ears remembering how to hear in the real again, he heard a mellifluous voice softly singing a lullaby. He knew the melody, but could not place its origins, the words too lost to him. An attempt at speech, to ask of the unfamiliar and blurry silhouette at his side, fell short of his desires. The forming of sound and words an action his present state would not abide.

"Who is that?" Wander asked, when his vagus nerve had finally awoken and, with it, his tongue and larynx and the symphony of lesser but essential components whose work only in concert could make of basal groans and intonation speech. His voice, though, was, as all things in the waking world—a hoarse and unrecognisable shadow of its true form.

"Hal," the voice replied, as Wander's vision came back into focus. "You've been travelling a long time, haven't you?"

"Yes..." Wander said. "I should think so."

"I can fix your body," Hal said, placing a hand on his forehead, "but you'll have to remember how to use it on your own."

Between blinks, Wander found himself sitting up, half-immersed in a viscous fluid he only vaguely recognised but could not find the words for. Without thinking, the instinct drilled into him, he reached to his chest, to where moments before, in his breast pocket, he would have found a paper crane imbued with the smell of heartbreak and toska dulled by the millennia into no more than razbliuto lingering on like the last fragments of her fragrance. His left hand found only bare skin, the ring on his index finger striking his rib if only to remind him of what was all too painfully clear.

Beside him, hands dripping in the same viscous and semi-translucent fluid, a young woman sat, resting on her knees. She possessed a queen's mane of jet black hair, straight, and which poured over her shoulders, pooling in her lap. The dress she wore was made of the fur of some majestic creature whose name, like so many, Wander could no longer recall. It was long extinct, though. A beautiful, wondrous denizen of a dark land, it had been obliterated like the past when rewound around the knotted recursion of time unravelled and knotted together again in a kite string tangle of the infinite.

A knife of obsidian with a hilt of antler hung from at the young woman's hip, and, besides this, she adorned herself with a collection of necklaces draped with pieces of carved bone and wood, some painted, some not, and a crescent of ivory, intricately carved with words of power in an unknown language, hung from her septum.

As he looked up and into her face, he could only vaguely recognise its features. Her nose bore a scar over the bridge—a thin line tapering to a point over the inner portions of her eyelids—a mark only made by specific intent and hands more skilled than the greatest of whom decorated flesh with scars. Her brilliant green eyes were of a shape seen only among tribes of Dark Sister whose names had fled his memory. From her forehead to her cheeks, two lines of paint the colour of sky had been drawn, contrasting against a dark, olive complexion. Every detail of her face was familiar, but though Wander reached into the deepest recesses of his mind, he could not identify who she was.

"Hal," the woman said, placing her palm over her chest, "I'm Hal."

There was a rightness to what she said. Though the knowledge came to him, that she was Hal, her face, the dress, the knife, the necklaces, the scar and septum ring, the eyes piercing and green, the blue paint streaked over them from brow to cheek, it was her, unmistakably. These were the emblems of her image, the icons of The Second Silence, Mother Sedna, Progenitor of Witches, Sister of Whisper.