Author: Jason Davies-Redgrave

With a sigh, Julie put down her shopping bags. In all her years she couldn’t remember seeing weather like it. An old newspaper streaked past and whacked into the side of a rubbish bin, pinned against the dirty metal for a moment before being pulled down the street. Julie turned to the elderly woman stood next to her. With a nod to the wildness on the street she said, “Have you ever seen the like?”

Emyr is a boy alone, cast adrift, a lone figure facing…

Energies rotate and build, turning and folding around themselves, a twist of melody here a spiral of incandescence there. The Harmonicus Universalis moves in stately time crystal sphere pushing itself over crystal sphere, sparks rain down from the heavens. Galaxies parade and dance, planets spin into eternity, the pulsars and quasars and magnetars burst with penetrating radiation, pushing life into the void like a virus. 

*Scene: The Youngling joining with the Artefact*

The sun’s light was pale and thin, it flattened the cityscape, smudging any hint of definition in to bland greyness. From their vantage point above the scant, bitter clouds The Brother and The Sister rode the icy winds. They both welcomed the peace that the strong, clean currents brought, and a sweet calm took refuge in their hearts. To be any closer to the ground would have meant exposure to the fetid air, the dirt and the noise. They would have been drenched in the overlapping, syncopated beats of the myriad people and their squawking, filling The Fang with taught, prickly anxiety. From this vantage point they could survey the whole city with peaceful and a watchful eye.

A flock of gulls wheeled and circled below the Sister, rising up from one of the back alleys where the birds had screeched and argued with each other over discarded scraps. The Sister watched her brother drinking in the clean air, for the first time since this hunt had begun, he looked at ease; more like his old self, from the time before hope had turned sour. She recalled their earlier days surfing the massive, curling gravity swells, surrounded by their kin. Feeling the adagio of the cosmic rhythms unfurl around them like a series of great waves breaking over them, one after another. She smiled and rolled over in the cleansing winds.

Join me?

Like a bewildered shoal, the words emanating from the Artefact swam round and round in her head.

When the Youngling had first reached out and touched the alien object, she had experienced everything. In a single second, she saw the majestic wash of space and time, it was as if she were watching the motion of an atom from inside the atom. Dizzying. Infinite. Incomprehensible. Terrifying in its beauty and complexity. A vast endless ocean, with new and stranger tides, chaos and maelstroms, reefs and shallows and storms and uncharted depths. It sparkled like fresh stardust and raged like a clamour of broken harpies.

These first two extra scenes will be inserted into the story at the ends of chapters 1: Megan and 5: the Clock Shop. The aim with these scenes is to establish the Sirens a little earlier – I do reference them in other scenes but it feels like they are plonked in out of nowhere with the “Aunty Carol” chapter and I wanted to show them as part of the story sooner. The last bit “Tea and Biscuits” is a new scene that will come much later in the story but I had the idea to write it this week and couldn’t resist it! J x

“Like fuck you will!” the tall woman cracked the knuckles on both her hands and looked directly at the being in front of her.

“Aunty Carol, please,” Emyr stepped in front of the Herald. “It’s the only way.”

“Sweetheart,” Aunty Carol’s lips curled into a smile but her gaze retained its cold steeliness. She held Emyr’s shoulders in a firm grip and looked him squarely in the eye. “This twat has been a thorn in my side since before you were born love. As far as I’m concerned, he can do one!”

“If I may explain,” as the Herald started to speak the line of women standing behind Aunty Carol bristled and a chill wind moaned and rattled the warehouse windows. The Herald held up its hands and took a step backward.

“The Coruscation named you human, you became last night’s prize, the final one and so, we 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!”

8: The Herald

“She was amazing,” The Herald’s edges glistened as it spoke. “Your mother’s gifts were exceptional, her songs like no other, I am sorry that she is no longer with you.”

The glistening edges dulled slightly as the Herald looked into Emyr’s eyes, then the rhythmic pulse of light reasserted itself as it straightened it’s shoulders.

“My love for her will never diminish.”

“Hang on, you, knew her?”

“Emyr, I have known everyone in your line,” it touched Emyr’s shoulder. “I knew your mother from when she was a babe in her mother’s arms, I was there for her first song, I was there the day that you were born and every day thereafter.”

Emyr shivered.

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.