Beginnings
from the Preface to Towards a New Grand Composition
“We did not sense the start of corruption.
Its tempo took hold so quickly and utterly.
We understood it too late”
City at the River Fort
12th Dominant Glacial Overture
60552/24th Fluvial Mineral Minuet
It had been a cold, wet and fruitless night, Peck failed to suppress a yawn.
“Since The Beyond tasted their malleable wits the human-apes have been slaves to its perversity.” Jynn looked to the cloud filled sky as if her thoughts sailed the cold dawn winds. “They mutilate every thing that they lay their grubby paws on, it is like an addiction for them. Earth and rock and metals transmuted to their will? Unthinkable! They adorn themselves with trinkets made of Mother’s precious stones, use Her precious ores in their devices! As if they were born to such nobility.
And plastic, urgh, plastic! Corruption made manifest, infiltrating all Her living matter. They even putrefy their own bodies with the muck. It is a heathen bio-chemical nightmare that will one day, mark my words Peck, will one day suffocate every last one of them.”
Soon after her first hunt with Jynn, Peck had come to know this sad melody by heart. When The Many or The Heralds or The Fang beat them to a Prize these tired and indignant verses were hauled out, for anyone in earshot. A means to lessen the sting of defeat through the judicious application of medicinal words, like calendula on burnt fingertips.
“Of course, glass is their utmost abomination! The utmost audacity! A flagrant desecration. They think it possible to halt the motion of sand! Burn it, petrify it, make it immutable for eternity? The grains yearn to move, to pulse and to flow as they have done throughout time.
All this music needs to be heard, transposed and understood.”
“Avarice and stupidity have taken the apes by the scruff of the neck. The Beyond poured lies into their simian ears and then blinded them,” Peck looked up at her tutor, hoping to speed up the rhetoric. “They have no sense of Mother’s music anymore.”
“Exactly!”
In the beginning, Mother fell, her blessed body split revealing The Universe and The Beyond, Peck woke to the echoes of her old School Mistress reciting the first lines from The Grand Composition. The school taught everyone that The Grand Composition had brought strength and harmony, to Peck and some of her fellow pupils, it had always felt fragile and faded. As if the substance and vivacity had been leached away by time and bad luck.
The shelter they had slept in stank, animals and bugs had taken all the juicy bits leaving only grease, a chemically sweet red gloop and dank rainwater in the corners. You may call it an abomination Jynn, thought Peck. But you’re not too grand to sleep inside a plastic box to hide from the daylight.
She gathered her things and quickly bundled them into the pouches on her belt. Luck had certainly not walked with them during last night’s hunt, nor on any other hunt that Peck could remember. Since first venturing into the world, she had never won a Prize. Fewer and fewer Collectors won these days as the elements became harder and harder to hear.
Unlike The Many or The Fang, The Collectors still required a certain purity of material to divine where the Prize may lay. The Heralds, as they had since Mother fell, did as they pleased. According to Jynn and the rest of her ever-complaining generation, humanity was so entwined with The Beyond’s corrupting influence that everything they touched defied true hearing and interpretation.
Peck tightened her belt and unfurled the delicate lace of her wings as she clambered over the broken rim of the food container. Next to her, like a sentinel, stood a large metal cylinder. Huge human glyphs curved around the metal edifice, surrounded by loud bursts of painfully artificial colour – S, P, R, I, T, E.
“I feel the great pain imposed upon your delicate song,” she whispered to the cylinder as she delicately held her ear to the smooth aluminium. Peck tuned into the music hidden in the metal wall before her.
“I hear the heat, the noise and the machine hammering. Torture! This is not the original voice of your element, your tone has lost some of its purity, the tempo and pitch are irrevocably altered but you, my sweet, sweet darling, can still sing!”
Jynn watched as the youngling tuned into the cylindrical wall. Any intimacy with the manipulated metal worried Jynn: the songs were still there, of course they were, but these new compositions were not natural and should not be trusted. If The Collectors wanted to avoid the fate of The Many the new songs needed to be studied with great care and by those with far more experience.
As the towering humans blundered past them, oblivious to the scene in the pile of rubbish at their feet, Jynn touched Peck’s shoulder. For a moment Jynn felt the new song coursing through Peck’s body and her wings rippled to the degenerate rhythm.
“We need to move,” Jynn pulled Peck away from the metal and spat the foul taste of the music onto the concrete. “Night is coming fast. The Humans begin their retreat and another challenge will be announced.”
Be First to Comment