The Quicksand Singularity ArQive: Array.init:0

A0T5.1 The Vampyre Syrenn (Part 1)

Unbound, neither could coexist forever. In divine irony, it was Whisper who was the sister of serenity. Pax deorum, the peace of god—or goddess perhaps—was not something Halcyon was born with. Rather it was cold, hunger, pain, and anguish, carried at her sister's breast for many years, that had made of the young Sedna a wild and vengeful tempest.

Whisper broke the world open and set them adrift, but those whom young Sedna despised could not be so easily kept away. When inevitability came to the shore of their vast lands, they fought, and the world ended a hundred trillion times, put together again just as it was, again and again, as the two fought for supremacy of wills. Sedna's rage, as it was always doomed to, fell short of her elder sister's tranquillity and Whisper cursed her sister. Every ten thousand years, Sedna would forget everything, but for what fragments would make one year of memory. Then Whisper cast her out of the Dark Lands, condemning her sister to live among those she so hated, as one of them, her power bound to the same curse of remembering.

As Whisper must have expected, the curse quieted Sedna's raging seas. Each erasure of the slate tempered her, made unbending iron a more molten material, until skin replaced stone, and sinew, steel. When humanity awakened the slumbering maw in the heart of the Dark Lands, tore the universe open, and spilt naked infinities across the screaming surface of reality, it was not Sedna who waited to great those touched by the glitch. It was Halcyon.

"I miss her..." Hal said, longingly, "I can't tell you how long I've spent in her mausoleum, wishing I could just wake her, to see her again."

A long and mournful sigh carried a pain even Wander could neither relate to, nor even scarcely comprehend. Whisper's sleep was something so much worse than death. Binding her desires in oblivion hymns, she emptied herself of all but the want of a world without her—the one wish she could not fulfil.

"Weathermaster," Hal repeated.

"Yes," Wander affirmed.

"I feel like there's a final question waiting for its voice," Hal said.

"Your feeling is correct," Wander agreed, "Will her moral conflicts cause any psychic interference?"

"No," Hal assured, "The Weathermaster is...a rare bird. She's remarkably resilient."

"Continue," Wander said, his gaze shifting to the man in the middle.

"That is I3," Hal introduced, "you've worked together before."

Wander felt Hal was correct in this, though the memory of any previous interactions he'd had with I3 were sorely missing.

"In what capacity?" Wander asked.

"I would have to ask Cloud9," Hal responded, seemingly as amnesic. Moving on, she said, "He's currently the only extant King Magos."

"What of the White King of Vostok?"

"If Freyja Björn didn't obliterate him, his scattered shards have still yet to reassemble themselves," Hal said.

"Yes....I do recall that now you mention it."

"How could you forget the Battle of the Pale Lake?"

"It was a long, long time ago," Wander answered, "I'm afraid I recall very little of that era. Except for it was cold, miserable, and indomitable despots were the fashion of the day. It is rare men can handle such power as the White King's."

"That, sadly, is true of everyone," Hal added.

"And yet the Tapestry of Time favours the feminine for its greatest of gifts," Wander countered, "does that not strike you a curious affair?"