The Quicksand Singularity ArQive: Array.init:0

A0T5.1 The Vampyre Syrenn (Part 1)

His brain, though, it could not make that connection, could not bridge the gap too wide. Not... yet... Yes, that too was right.

"I...can not..." he stuttered, the form of words just before the boundaries of the foreign.

"Come," Hal said, offering her hand.

Wander attempted to reach for it, but, to his surprise, found great difficulty in the act. His arm felt flaccid, shaky, as if made of jelly. The motions were clumsy, his nerves dull and delayed, signals swimming through honey. Finding the way to her hand strained his every neuron. He struggled to remember the path, to ambulation, to grasping, but when his hand reached hers, she closed hers firmly around his, gripping with strength for both of them.

"Let's get you up," she said, placing her other hand under his armpit.

There was no need of this, Wander knew this too. This mundane manner of things. Neither one was any more bound to the rules that governed reality. Having been touched by, or born entirely of the substrate of reality bent by will impressed upon it, the laws of nature were theirs to command, not to be commanded by.

Yet they did. And there, too, was a rightness to this. To achieve the same ends by the means of the banal gave unto their deeds a greater reward. A young relicborn would, in his impatience, or his desire to prove himself, use his power to manifest objects of desire his elders would craft by hand. Age and time and, with it, the weight of experience had tempered all of Soulstar's best and brightest. Centuries bleeding into millennia into epochs would make any wise to find that it was always in the journey that made its destination desirable.

To use her own strength, the muscles of her arm and back and belly and legs, to lift and hold him as he found his own, it was, to one such as her, an unnecessary exertion. Hal's wellspring had no limits, its volume boundless, its aperture infinite. Yet she did, and she allowed his nerves, long dormant and confused, to wake again in their own way. In the disorientation and infirmity, he would find his footing and balance and the memory to walk again, and would be better for it. To make of gelatin flesh, bone, sinew, and to make the constituent elements of discombobulated incoherence ambulate again was a task Wander had, across the countless times he had done so before, always done the old way.

Wander leaned on Hal's shoulder, eyes closed, head spinning as his inner ear retraced the path to balance. She continued to hum the lullaby.

Standing, with some help from Hal, he looked around, his surroundings for the first time perceptible, the fog of awakening having cleared substantially. The room was empty, but for the tank he felt he must have been exhumed from. Lit brightly from panels in the ceiling, it was white and devoid of any details but for gaps between tiles and sterile aluminium panelling.

Though all unsanitary and unsatisfactory conditions had been dispelled by arcane means in the instant of Hal's arrival, their imprint upon the space could not so easily be banished. Echoes of his extended entombment remained. He could feel in the palpable absence of dust and cobwebs and burnt out lights that the room had not been entered in epochs, ages even.

"There you go," Hal encouraged, helping him step out of the stasis tank.

"Hal," Wander repeated.

The verbalisation assuaged his cognitive dissonance.

"Yes," Hal affirmed, "that's me."

"Hal," Wander repeated again, the name associating itself to her visage more strongly.

"Yes," Hal encouraged, leading him out of the room and into a corridor.

"Where?" he asked, the act of forming words still difficult.