Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Posts

“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.