Above Us, Only Sky

Moon and Messenger

"Good stars above, Tau," a voice murmured and echoed in the peaceful abyss of grey charcoal and unconsciousness, like the sound of rain heard from underwater. "Sig's going to be furious." There was a dim mass of soft black, a cloud trailing behind a deep, warm brown figure with soft edges and easy curves, who seemed to be the source of the hazy voice.

"At least we know she's going to live," replied a second voice with an accent that blurred some of the hardest consonants and stretched the vowels on. "I think she's awake." 

Awake, yes, but the warm caramel-thick darkness behind her was so easy to sink back into. It beckoned her back toward itself, showing her soft recollections of dreams and peaceful hours spent unaware of the pain that now throbbed in every nerve. It was so pleasant, so easy to ease back out of consciousness and drift off into the welcoming void.

But there was something, netlike, holding her in this dreaming half-awareness, and the only way out was forward.

Io tried to open her mouth to voice any one of the plethora of questions that flooded her mind, but all she could muster was an inhuman rasp that stung her throat. She tried to lift her hands to sign instead, but she couldn't remember a word. 

"I'm Iris, and this is my wife Tau," the woman with soft dark curls told her. "We're friends of Sigma's. She's been telling us about you-- she doesn't show it much, I know, but she's proud of you. We hadn't heard from her in two days, so we decided to go see what was wrong. When we got there, we found you collapsed by the foyer, mostly dead. We couldn't move you far, so you're in Sigma's room now, under the stairs. The way in is to read the invocation at the beginning of the Odyssey aloud-- she always was a bit of a narcissist."

What happened to Sigma? she mouthed, her face aching from the effort. 

"We don't know." It was Tau who spoke now: she was a few shades paler than Iris, with soft dark almond-shaped eyes, sleek black hair, and a series of smooth curved scars lining her cheeks. Dotting her arms was another series of scars: these Io recognized. They were the result of months spent having needles and catheters placed and removed over and over, endlessly. "She told us nothing, and we have no idea why she would have left." 

How easily she said 'we', as if they were truly inseparable, neither entirely whole without the other. Io thought, oddly, of Proserpina, and how the same thing had happened sometimes in her thoughts. 

Where was Proserpina now? she wondered, and something like loneliness slammed into her chest with all the force of a chariot at full speed. Did she ever think of her? Did she miss her? Did she even remember Io's name? She tried to curl in on herself, but found her limbs too stiff and too weak; tried to cry, but her body had no water to spare for tears. 

And she still couldn't understand why, out of all the questions she could ask, these were the ones that mattered most.