Contents
Quotes*
1: Megan
2: The Ocean and the Stars*
3: The City of the River Fort
4: The Hunted**
5: The Clock Shop**
6: The End of the Ocean*
7: The Cave*
*Additions to the text since last meeting (27/06/24)
**“4: The Hunted” and “5: The Clock Shop” were “Emyr” in the previous incarnation.
Other sections have been edited or had parts re-written for continuity etc.
“For there is a musicke where-ever there is a harmony, order or proportion; and thus farre we may maintain the musick of the spheres; for those well ordered motions, and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the eare, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony.
Whatsoever is harmonically composed, delights in harmony.”
Sir Thomas Browne
1605-1682
“We did not sense the start of corruption.
Its tempo took hold so quickly and utterly.
It waited patiently in the shadows.
We understood it too late”
from the Preface of Towards a New Grand Composition
from the Conlectoris Family Archive
“Music doesn’t lie.
If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only change through music.”
Jimi Hendrix
1942-1970
1: Megan
Street upon street of terraced houses are laid out in silent, regimented lines. Rubbish huddles in the damp corners and under the paint-cracked front doors that open directly onto the drab concrete. Front rooms seem permanently barricaded behind cheap curtains and lines of dead flies ranged on the sill like a phalanx of tiny warriors guarding the fortress within.
Anaemic light pulses at the edge of certain windows. The ghostly flickering of late-night electronic distractions numbing the lost, the lonely and the insomniacs with a bilge of entertainment.
Seeming to grow out of the torn rubbish bags and cracked food caddies – old telephone and satellite cables festoon the various ageing facades like undernourished vines dying quietly in the dark. Wires trail lazily from point to point up the tired houses, to the decaying leaves of the satellite dishes and the dry twigs of aerials These dirty vines are stretched across the streets from house to house and then to splintery telegraph poles, carrying with them the sagging webs of lost communication. Rusting downpipes punctuate the grim facades gurgling and spluttering their biliary discharge onto the rain slicked pavements.
Silence and fine rain filled the air, cold and insistent the mizzle would soak a late-night wanderer to the skin in a few deceptive minutes. Tall street lights, haloed with a sickly chemical glow, drape their thin light across the streets, reflected in the rain dappled windscreens and dull headlamps of the myriad cars crowding the narrow roads.
At this late hour these streets should be as empty as the eyes of the dead.
Yet, there they stand.
Each waiting calmly in the middle of a street. Featureless shadows, intensity personified, giving off a brooding potential under the nacreous light.
Are they Seekers?
Are they Collectors? Are they Heralds?
They are patient. They are unwavering.
They are The Many.
Headlights pierced the Stygian darkness – a taxi carrying a pair of alcohol infused lovers to the climax of their ill-advised liaison – and for a moment The Many are caught in pin sharp relief. As the light recedes, they turn as one, to face their comrade, The One who has found the door they all need. In perfect unison The Many slide, like the oil dark water in the gutters, toward The One and merge together till there is only one shadow figure standing in the cold, lustrous drizzle.
Yet again they were the first here.
The other families would blindly concede.
The door would be unremarkable to human eyes, it looks like so many others dotted throughout the terraces: animal scratched white UPVC with a small, grimy stained-glass window. Yet, to The Many, this door resonates with divine possibility. The human hallway that lies beyond is cold and dark and filled with a mess of discarded coats and shoes. However, The Many see a scared pilgrim route, a holy passageway leading to venerated stairs and beyond them, among the human dross asleep on the upper floor, lies The Prize.
With a singular thought The Many vibrate through the door, atom danced past atom. The Many slip past the living room, where a snoring human lays sprawled on the sofa, then they are up the stairs in an instant standing in front of the final threshold. A relief of carved wooden balloons is stuck to the door’s cheap veneer, each balloon a different pastel colour, with a letter painted in soft white – M, E, G, A, N.
The child’s human name is of no consequence now for The Many had marked their Prize.
2: The Ocean and the Stars
Here, in the time before, we wait under a blanket of darkness for the return of The Five Benevolent Bahamût. We are impatient. We long for their song again, even though they haven’t been gone very long. They are the only illumination on this endless ocean. Five points of dancing light, burning azure brilliant and bright. Our navigation, our guides, our Mothers eternal.
Mother Collectoris.
Mother Coruscation.
Mother Herald.
Mother Fang.
Mother Many.
See their light return as they rise from the depths, having caught the etudes of ages past, ancient songs that haunt the waters running below the celestial tides. Marvel as they breach the surface, releasing melody and harmony and tempos anew, radiating across the waters that surround them, warming our fragile hearts. We are their families and we cross the waves alongside our magnificent mothers on this exodus across the celestial oceans.
Where are the Five Families going?
What are the Bahamût searching for?
Many among the us speculate and debate and postulate. In repose we propose and compose lengthy theories and treatises on the subject. Each time the questions are asked our Mothers smile, radiating their maternal cobalt joy, and simply state that they will know what they are looking for only when they have found it.
And so, we traverse these seemingly endless oceans for the aeons.
We have stopped.
We do not know how long for. Our Mothers lie still in the waters. The tides move in contrary manner, turning first one way then the other. We are all scared. We have no other reference points than our Mothers and now their light is diminishing, perdendosi, fading into the pitch-dark waters below us. We feel the edge of things but cannot look at it. Out in the void that is beyond us and surrounding us we hear a new atonal refrain; a dark and unholy dissonance uncoils its limbs.
We cry out.
Will our Mothers return to us?
Their light is all but gone.
In the Beyond, for that is what we call it now, the atonal refrain has a multitude of voices, some sing sickly sweet songs to us. Others screech and others wail and lament so we must cover our ears but even so we still hear the dissonant voices.
The Mothers are all dead.
The dissonant choir rules the darkness and seems to rise in demonic crescendo, surrounding us. We have been left on stranger tides, eddies and currents push at us and pull at us, stirred up by the creature in The Beyond.
We sense something in the waters below, like an echo or a nightmare. Something is rising. A new power of some unfamiliar sort, we know not what it is but we live in hope and fear and confusion. Then in the distance a voice calls out – Hark! They see a light! We look below us, it is yellow and distant but rising fast.
And it is not one but many, a thousand points of yellow light start to break the surface.
The choir stutters into stunned silence.
3: The City of the River Fort
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 everything 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 the Mothers’ precious stones, use Their precious ores in their devices! As if they were born to such nobility.
And plastic, urgh, plastic! Corruption made manifest, infiltrating our Mothers’ precious gifts, all living matter. The human-apes 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.”
Not long after her first hunt, Peck had come to know Jynn’s sad melody by heart. Last night The Many had won the Prize but it could have been The Heralds or The Fang it didn’t matter who won: if The Collectoris didn’t triumph these well-rehearsed 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, The Mothers fell, their blessed bodies birthed The Universe and The Beyond looked on, Peck woke to the echoes of her old School Mistress reciting the first lines of “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 human eyes.
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 Collectoris still required a certain purity of material to divine where the Prize may lay. The Heralds, as they had since the Mothers 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 stretched her back, rolled her shoulders 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.”
4: The Hunted.
we are joka the wave-born ikiyoka gravity’s children ajagara their battalions on high for aeons we flew at Mother Bahamût’s side riding gravity’s wake proud and strong till the Fall then began the orchestrations of madness the scream of The Fang the Brother and the Sister against the universe like metal ripping through metal a crescendo of blessed radiation a cry that boiled like a blood fever a tidal wave of bile and disbelief and rage and spite and the nerves started to shred we felt the ticking of the darkness closing in on all sides till gravity’s tsunami folded over into a tunnel a singularity that pulled us from shadow into darkness these times are a force of darkness that begets unforgiving darkness hear the violin kick delicate licks of suspended hope dangling over the percussion on gossamer threads the propulsive beat sways them so they dance like moths careening towards the lamplight they are dumb and dumb founded caught in a trance like an addict seeking their one true love liminal spaces extruded into scattered light and fog we are surrounded by strange animals crouching in the trembling shadows
and so we wait
The Brother and The Sister couldn’t see him yet. They couldn’t see much at all: their senses were still adjusting. Although they had been here many times this was, thankfully, not their usual dimension: it was filled with acrid smells and listless currents, it was small and abstract, like a familiar prison cell. There was something almost quaint about the size of this planet.
Quaint but not at all pleasant. The air was thick and choked with grot; it wreaked of decay; the sky was a cesspit, even the clouds were chemically tainted. The Brother and The Sister wondered what it would be like to live permanently tied to the ground, close to the source of the disease. This place lacked true energy and freedom.
The Fang hung in the cold grey air, high above the ugly stone and metal construction. None of the humans looked up, even if they had it wouldn’t matter: the human creatures beetled about their daily lives oblivious to the realms surrounding them, they barely noticed their own. The Fang remained shrouded.
Next to the structure, large multi-coloured metallic tubes rattled by, each one on wheels attached to metal lines embedded in the dank ground. Some of the metal tubes rushed past at an almost delicious speed, the air whirling around them causing fragments of dirty human ephemera to dance in their trailing vortex.
Other metallic tubes slowed down as they approached the far side of the building and stopped. Through the holes in the side, The Brother could see humans squashed against each other and the sides of the tube, each one trying to smile and be civil but he sensed that they would rather fight each other to the death.
The Sister called out and gestured to the building’s entrance and there he was, the adult human, an unusual choice to be certain but tonight’s Prize none the less and in that instance, the distant music began…
the prize will be running soon enough
we
must
hunt
the violins kick with delicious pyrotechnic repetition
glissandos avariciously chipping away
then the hungry percussion builds like a wave
the greedy rhythm of his footfall in the echoing streets
and the bridges of ancient wisdom turned sour
growling cellos grind low and ominous
is this the pursuer?
is this the man?
is it us or a sad devil come to show us the way to a cathedral door?
time is present
it is fractal
it is darkness itself
it colours our thoughts like notation lost to pain and indecision
like the distant call of the horns
can you hear the whispers?
the longing cries?
the desolate yearning?
the strings will sweep him away
a single vibrato note sustained on gravity’s crest
away and away and away
till he is down in the depths
the pits and the pot holes
the darkness
the solitude
suddenly he has all the time in the worlds
it is piled up around him in
a cavern of clocks and faces and spinning hands
minutes seconds hours days and millennia
all piled high with relentless knowledge
ticking with foresight
it doesn’t serve you now
now you must survive
and in the hallways the drums beat out a hideous tempo
a waltz for the damned a tango for insanity
the final flourish
a charade really
a game of fallacy and fallibility and fable
you’ll lose the game eventually we all will
or we’ll win another chance should you
in this life at least
think such a thing is possible
what are the odds of being reincarnated into a being that doesn’t believe in reincarnation
and time is restless in the half-light
the clocks are ticking again
always with the tick, tick, tick, tick, ticking
with the relentlessness of an atom
they can’t stop though they have tried many times
clock works run like clockwork and the damned spring never falters
they want to oh so much they wish they could
just for a second
rest for just one measly second
Please?
Please!
Pretty please?
5: The Clock Shop
The Human struggled to stay upright; his chest burned, his calf muscles were wracked with cramp and his feet were numb. He’d run from the cold concrete plaza of the City Terminus to the silence of the Bridge of Trees and back around to the River Church to try and evade them but he had found no sanctuary. They had worn him down.
It felt like he had been running for a lifetime.
But he could see all of them now.
Through the hole in the roof of the abandoned clock-shop The Fang circled above him, their scales glinting iridescent in the moonlight. They dazzled like the stuff of legend and bewildered like his endless childhood therapy sessions. Just as he had imagined their eyes were swirls of colour and dancing light, beautiful and brutal as his nightmares. He would never have thought to see gravity’s children riding the earth-bound winds above the City of Forts.
Looking into the corner of the shop, the Human smiled, “You should stop hiding in the shadow. I can see you too. Do not fear, for I will have need of your skills soon enough.”
The Collectorai slowly emerged from behind an ornate grandfather clock, tension held their delicate wings tight and ready, their talons were out.
“You did well to keep up, I am impressed.”
“How does he know us, see us, recognise our music?” the dragon’s voice entered their minds from afar, like a distant drumming.
“Is that, The Sister?” The Human looked up into the whirling mass of dragon above him. “I’m not sure how. I can remember only snatches, it’s like pulling a dream through a sock… I know you are The Sister; he is The Brother.
I’m afraid I don’t know your names,” he turned to the Faerie, “But I know your Family and its gift for song and I have need of it.”
“Be careful what you wish for, human,” the older Faerie stepped forward. “I am an Elemental Song Mistress; you have no conception of our power. And who are you to ask our names?”
The Man frowned as if about to answer then held a finger to his lips. Slowly he pointed to the dusty window. The Fang had ceased their motion, they hung silently in the space above the shop, coiled and ready. Nausea rippled through Jynn’s wings as she turned to follow The Human’s finger. In the shadows beyond the display of cobweb strewn clocks, on the other side of the dirty, broken window a series of shadowy figures merged to become one.
The Many stood in the moonlit street pulsing with the darkest anger.
The Human looked at Jynn, fear and hope behind his tired eyes. Above them The Fang bristled in the cold night air. The nebulous figure moved silently toward the window, a darkness expanding into shadow and the window began to shimmer, vibrating together finding the right resonance.
Jynn’s wings shimmered and she disappeared, reappearing a moment later on The Human’s left shoulder.
“I’ll do what I can human,” she whispered in his ear. “But remember this, you are the Prize and nothing more.
I am Jynn, an Elemental Song Mistress of the Family Collectoris. I claim this creature as my Prize. I make my mark.” Jynn sliced her mark into The Human’s cheek with a razor-sharp talon.
“All others families must now concede.”
Jynn stood resolute and triumphant.
The Many did not stop.
The Human staggered backward, away from the ghostly shape in the window, his back hit the counter. His hand scrabbled across the dusty top finding the reassuring hardness of a screwdriver. Like a spear hitting its target The Brother’s head appeared in the hole in the clock shop roof. “The Prize has been claimed. Concede now!” as the basso voice rumbled a wave of dry heat echoed around the room.
Jynn steadied herself, talons ready and looked to the grandfather clock, she nodded for Peck to stay back. The apprentice held her mistress’s eyes for a moment longer, apology etched into her young face. Her wings shimmered and Peck blinked away only to reappear at the window’s edge. Jynn called out but Peck was already reaching out to the grimy glass.
She placed her ear to the dusty surface, followed by her right hand. Peck sensed The Many already starting to penetrate the glass, vibrating it to a sickening rhythm. She closed her eyes, took in a calming breath and sang to the glass. Its answer was loud and caustic and scared: what The Many was doing was a violation.
“Then together we must fight back!” Peck whispered to the glass.
She focussed her attention and pressed her fingers harder onto the surface. Peck could feel The Many were close, mere atoms away her own skin and bone. She reached deeper into the glass, feeling the duet of limestone and soda ash and below that, in almost perfect counterpoint, the song of the sand. She exhaled and joined the two songs in her the tips of her talons, they danced and wove round and round each other until there was a moment of brilliance and Peck’s mind filled with a piercing harmony.
The window buckled and cracked; jagged lines radiated out from Peck’s hand in fractal fault lines that spider walked across the dusty pane. The glass ceased to be solid, exploding into a multitude of flying shards.
“Peck!” screamed Jynn as the Human ducked behind the grandfather clock.
Silence filled the old clock shop. Shards glinted in the weak light; some littered the floor; some were embedded in the walls and the display of clocks. The Many were gone. Jynn held Peck in her arms, head bowed in silent prayer.
“Is she alright?” asked The Human.
“She breathes,” whispered Jynn.
“We need to leave here,” said The Sister as she circled overhead; The Brother flew higher watching over the city. “No one from a Family has attacked another member of a Family before. Ever!
That being said, The Many acted unlawfully. Clearly, they were not first to the Prize. Yet, they did not concede.
My brother and I need time to think.”
“They knew who I really was,” said The Human. “That is why they did not concede.”
Jynn looked up into the human’s dark eyes, “Who are you?”
“My name is Emyr,” his smile fading at the sound of police sirens getting closer. “Where do we go then?”
The Sister grinned, “I know a place.”
6: The End of the Ocean
The Five Mothers are dead! Long live the Five Mothers!
From the depths of the ocean, from within their precious bodies came entirely new songs. Precious melodies and fresh harmonics. We look on in wonder as the thousand suns rise and spread their new musics into the darkness. Slowly followed by the means to create life itself. The yellow heat of the suns transforms the ocean into something lighter, a sustaining aether, a pulsating miracle. This light pushes back at the darkness. We can see the vastness around us and we watch the last benevolence of the Bahamût grow and flourish. We navigate and we nurture and we name all of this new composition and call it the Universe.
We give it the Harmonices Mundi.
We feel the absence of The Five Mothers but we revel in the joy of their gifts and the felicity between our five families.
For the first time we stand at The Edge and we look at the void and the monster – The Beyond.
By the amber light we peer into the void and see the dark creature that writhes and cowers in the hideous shadow. Despite its bulk, this leviathan is trembling, we think with fear, we surmise it is aghast with this dazzling new light and the resounding symphony of the new Universe.
We congratulate ourselves.
In the darkness It coils its limbs.
It watches. It waits. It is patient.
We are not prepared for the madness to come.
7: The Cave
What a cliché, Jynn shivered in the dripping twilight. She never understood how The Fang, who professed such a deep love for surfing gravity’s tides could be content to curl up in a cold, dark and damp cave. Yet there they were wrapped around each other like a couple of old cats in front of a fire. Their scales glowed with a gentle pulsating rhythm as they communed.
Peck lay on a dry rock; she was wrapped in a blanket made of a handkerchief that the human had pulled from his coat pocket, a surprising gesture for one of his kind. Jynn knelt down and held the back of her hand against Peck’s cheek, her apprentice was closer to her normal temperature. Whatever fever had entered her from the bastard songs in the glass was passing. Jynn had chosen Peck for her strength and resilience, it wasn’t the fever that Jynn feared.
The human, Emyr, sat against a large slab of rock. Jynn straightened her shoulders and fluttered her wings appearing on the rock next to him. His breath clouded in front of him caught in the same rhythm as the softly changing light. Jynn couldn’t read his broad features but there was a faraway look in his dark eyes, like he was tumbling through memory.
“Thank you,” she gestured toward Peck and the makeshift bed. “It is a kindness I had not expected.”
“Oh,” Emyr looked down at his hands then he looked up and smiled. “It’s nothing, really, considering that I think she saved my life!
That other being wasn’t going to stop, was it?”
“They should have! But no, in this instance it appears that The Many would not have stopped.”
Emyr touched the mark on his cheek, “Does this mean you need to take me in?”
“Take you in?” Jynn looked at the strange smile spreading across the human’s face. “Take you in?”
The human held up his hands palms facing each other, wrists held together, “To the big guy!”
“Big guy?”
Emyr laughed, the clouds of breath rolling across the cavern like steam from a tea kettle. “Sorry – too many cop shows as a kid. My Grandma loved to watch re-runs any chance she got, Kojak, Starsky and Hutch, Hill Street Blues.”
Jynn shrugged. The dragons uncoiled a little so they could face the human.
“Tell us more of your life,” The Brother’s voice was deep yet soft like the rustle of velvet. “We need to know your lineage.”
“Well, I never knew my dad.” Emyr turned to face the dragons. “He was gone before I was born and Mum didn’t like to speak of him. It hurt her too much. But Mum was amazing, full of love and stories and music. She would sing all day long if she could.”
Emyr hunkered down among the rocks, despite the chill there was a childlike glee in his voice, “I know she got in trouble at work for singing on more than one occasion, but she didn’t care! She would make up lyrics, seemingly on the spot. One time, I must have been five or maybe six and a group of older girls had picked on me at school all day, so on the walk back home she sang me a song of how the girls couldn’t feel joy in their lives because a tentacled sea witch had locked their hearts away inside their chests with bands of iron and light! So, they hadn’t really wanted to hurt me, they just wanted to know if my kind face was the key to the locks.
No matter what happened she always made me feel special and safe and strong.”
Emyr looked into the depths of the cave beyond The Fang.
“When I was seven the dreams started and quickly took over. Day or night it didn’t matter, they came over me so completely that I thought that they were real. It was like crossing a threshold and finding yourself in another world.
When I tried to explain what was happening my teachers quietly freaked out.
I was assessed. Mum was assessed; as a single parent she was scrutinised and prodded as much as I was. She never said it to me but I know it upset her: I heard her on the phone to Grandma one night when I was supposed to be asleep,” his eyes focussed on something even deeper in the cavern.
“…But how dare they question my ability to raise my own son!” she cradled the phone to her ear, tears streaming down her face. “He is my son – yes Mum, I know – well quite frankly they can fuck their paperwork! …Sorry… I know, I know – yes, you’re right, of course. He is so, so special to me – it’s not just about them!
I just love him so much!”
Emyr looked down at Jynn, tears misted his vision. “Anyway, that’s when I started to see the counsellor, Abigail. She was nice enough, professional, she listened and smiled, it was her job and she wanted to help, but I couldn’t stop the dreaming.
It happened once in a session and she managed to get me to talk to her about what I could see. She wrote it all down. When I woke up, she asked me what I could remember; as ever it was just snatches, feelings and glances and sensations. I remembered waves, I remembered joy, I remembered the most beautiful music all lilac and gold.
She never told me what I said during the dream.
After that the sessions changed. We started to look at triggers and underlying issues and ways of recognising them and navigating them. Abigail and my teachers and Mum had a series of little chats about all the options and Mum refused medication “He’s seven years old for heaven’s sake!”
Mum and Abigail eventually agreed a plan and we worked on mindfulness and breathing and stuff and eventually the dreams didn’t come as frequently. By the time I turned twelve they had stopped all together. So, I started to build my life. I did okay and now I’m a music teacher believe it or not!
Then Mum died, out of the blue. One wet Monday her heart simply stopped. She sat in the living room with a cup of tea and a packet of hobnobs while the tumble dryer was finishing the last load of laundry and she fell asleep and that was that.
We had her funeral about five weeks ago and the dreams came back with such sudden force. The first one was at the wake, I was sat there for what must have been only a minute or so but when I came back to the room, it was all still so vivid to me.”
Emyr turned to The Brother and The Sister. “I sailed gravity’s tides with your kin – The Grave and The Constant. We danced around planets and stars that I had never seen or heard of before and my soul was filled with the most colourful music!”
“So, we now know why they want you,” said Jynn.
“Indeed,’ intoned The Brother.
“These are powerful visions in one of your kind,” The Sister uncoiled further. “You are not what I expected.”
“I have some questions for you then,” Emyr stood and gestured to the Fang and Collectorai alike. “Why are my dreams so important? Why were you all hunting me? What is this all about?”
For a moment the only noise in the cavern was the echoing drip, drip, drip of water.
“The Coruscation named you human, you became last night’s prize and so, we all hunted you.”
All eyes turned toward the new voice and a figure stepped out from a dark crevice. Emyr pulled his coat closer, Jynn shivered, even The Fang rippled: it was as if the figure took what little warmth was left in the cavern and kept it hidden for themselves.
“Shit,” whispered Jynn. “A Herald!”
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