Author: Jason Davies-Redgrave

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.

we are joka the wave-born ikiyoka gravity’s children ajagara Her battalions on high for aeons we flew at Her side riding gravity’s wake proud and strong till Her fall then began the orchestrations of madness the scream of The Fang 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 on 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.

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

12^th Dominant Glacial Overture

60552/24^th 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.”

“Everything you will need will be in this box…”

When you first go into space it is the most desolate and strangely beautiful thing you’ll ever see.  There are vast tracts of inky emptiness, pin pricks of light shimmering in the infinite distance but every so often you see something wonderful that sears itself into your consciousness forever.

 Now, I can’t even bring myself to look out of the window at the gaudy lights and boiling gas of the nebula beyond the station: it looks fake, like a bad holo-reproduction. The medical centre is a vast, cold tundra of healing. All the staff are methodical and pleasant enough yet at the same time brash and thoughtlessly noisy. My room is a painfully clinical, porcelain white cell with sharp edged lighting. Even the bed sheets feel hard and unforgiving, scratching against my survivor’s guilt at each slow turn of my tired body.