Old Sol slept and would not wake,
While all the world went sideways;
Clouds grew dark from all the hate,
Washed away by tide waves;
So when slumber shook
Old Sol to stir,
appraised of all that passed
His gaze was stern,
The world did burn,
Big Bright, Good Night, X-Class!
-children’s playground rhyme
The notes in her head never fell silent.
Rather, they chimed, and they chirped, and they whistled, all with the insistence of a quartzite-driven metronome[1] given to unending oscillations. And while her notes might, on occasion, fall hushed, or become subdued, they never suffered to stillness, and they never went unheard.
This constancy was served by an agreeable demeanor, of wind-bells rustled just askance of calm. In that way they framed their host’s felly mood; good vibes met by rippling melodies, like songbird mimickery warbling at advent of dawnstricken Sol. But when pressed, or stressed, or afflicted by blessings of neutrality, they stirred to tempestuousness, uncoiling into a static-charge harmonic suggestive of a tinny whine.
They were companions, truespoken; for as long as she could remember, they had been with her, and they were as familiar to her as the sound of her own voice. Factually she found them more naturalized aven than that – for she clarily recalled the strangeness of hearing a brief snippet of her own speechery, imprinted onto a Voxcoil Cylindrical[2] then played back, for the novelty of it. Her hollow-found voice, so deprived of vibrations granted by bone and flesh, it was not something she cared to averren hear again.
‘Breathing is breezy. Speaking takes thought. Lanterns light easy. Wielding has cost.’
She was ten orbitals pledged to this seckrotative vocation… in dedications turning to masteries… notes turning to studies… as she learned to manifest the cacophony beheld within her head into the gravity-bound strata: into a four-settlement of mercurial glowing lights, presumptively symbiotic, and belonging to a curious atmospheric phenomenon known by all manner of descriptive phrase:
wisps,
fae or kin,
djinn,
lanterns and torchies,
emberings, or embralities (more formally),
tonalities…
welderry, to steez an archaic for it…
To her, they were simply her sprites. And she wielded them in the ways handed down to her, from the World of What Was Before, to the World of What is Now.
There were many who mobbed suspicious of these seemingly benign things. Concerned by a presumptive lack of provenance traceable to these entities, to zag one prem claim for it. Azzef pinning down the cartographics would smother smog somehow:
'Did they come from the enternet, maybe? An isolow pocket, somewhere, that survived the Brighttime? There are syntheticals in the far Eastarden, mine blood dun swore to it ahno. Could be artifactuals, sumzan like that. Or probben the lot springs from Old Sol heynself, squeezed out the fusion heart and dispatched as compensation for his wrathful adjudicating. Maybeyn they are harmonically derived? Or, heysa, possible they come from the electrogrammatik spectrality itself! From way out there, seen, like thirty hertz. Stick your head in the skywave long anuff and gahn here a voice in it, frack my ass to split iffen ish not the truth...'
Folkloric stories, sorted she typicko enjoyed. Not that she believed any of it, but she liked to imagine the kind of word where such things might be true. Espeshen any bit featuring a cryptozo. But the rest she detested, these pointless questions left idling. Glimpses of truth to each, she supposed. And what matter of it, aven if? Sayn they were the ghosts of computers past, in the direct employ of that right Bastard Sol?
Aven if… why should it matter to her?
She was young, in ways recognizable by her furious resistance against growing older. Fiery, moody, solitary: all words used to describe her by others. She did not care to be described by anyone. But she was perceptive, in the way of those who would rather watch than talk; meaning she was not unaware of these things noted and whispered about her. Vague intimations… mainline about her anvil-storm temperament. And almost always blunted in the balancing. ‘So blessed tho. So much talent. Sol given, and yet still shaded.’
All of which is to state the obvious: she was a Witch, born of the Wielding Gift, and hers was a life dedicated to the Unassembled Verse. And so, she came to be cloistered away, in the way that all Witches were held apart from the Manifest Governance, which was not that diffiden, relly, from the way that any Merik would be held apart, if deemed ineligible for Case Rites under Process Control. So goes, so she went: ensconced behind the dense-jungle Versity walls, among the overgrown chambers and sublayn corridors of the Hydeaway Botanick. Having nahn spoke nor nayn to say in the matter, she made pledge to ensuring they leastway remembered the name:
Atheenya Juneyear Douglass.
The scope of her studies expanded, into unasked-for routings: process governance, grammaticks & syntactics, crap, crap, crap (with maps).
They bored her to bare metal.
Wastefill of tockery, seem beyn to her assessment.
“Why does anysum care about Acclaim to CORP[3] when we ahrn aven allowed into the outbounds? We beyn Exclusion-Stamped from Firstrun Induction, and only get out to Perimeter on orthodexic holidayths. Making us learn this stuff is dumb.”
Atheenya's protestations earned her a bit of bruising to the knucks.
‘Requayn necessary, so deemed by Revcom, and so best be beamed to satisfact,’ wahn what told.
‘Deemed to do what tho?’ She could not help the reply. Came as no surprise, then, the resultant sway and bloody gash cut cross Yammit and Jammit, (right-hand index and pointer, respectively[4];) and so she let the queralyn go. Howaven many seasonals ago that had been...
ayths over ayths, and ayths made to bars, and bars made fourstack... Her notes played on, through it all, in memorizing facts and formulae and figures and falling stars until faded... she found it harder and harder to memorize anything, relly.
Chime bells rise, four notes sounding like silver singularities.
Chime bells fall, four more notes. Four notes played at four measure...
four by four...
… were they building a house, there in her head? Bizzy beyn.
What if they were building a prison?
Was she haunted?
At times – raresum, then increasing with recency – the clamoring in her head became overwhelming, and she would flee in search of a closet to hide in, her head stuffed between knobbling knees, eyes shut in screwtight fervor, pleading for just the briefest quiet, for just a few moments of unbroken, untested silence.[5]
Her cries went unavailed, like a pot of water set to heat over a bunsenburn. This feeling, of an evaporative failmode, of surface churning but never bubbling to boil, it was becoming a resentment – taken root – somewhere within the tumult of her selfhood.
She could feel it. Something ghostly stirring. She stares at her uncertain reflection in the basin of the watercoven, an unspoken challenge to her gazery. The pool stands still, she at last recognizes herself… Her sprites apparate, they loom, they start in on some sort of barbershop bullshit… felt, more than heard, up around her temples, and the waters in the basin are vibrating...
… and for first time, Atheenya finds a question so obvious, she refuses to believe that she has naverly asked it before:
Was she the only one who heard these notes ever-chiming? These notes never ceasing?
It was something she had naively presumed: that every Witch, so blessed by the boon and burden of Wielding, must share within their inhabitance these notes unbidden, kinsum to her own way of it. But the more she listened, the more she looked to seen, her balance shaken in hearing her fellow Witches describe their manifestations as little more than tools, or fungible prosthetics! As if each tonality possessed no more exceptionalism than one finger considered against a thumb. Atheenya, who loved her fingers, and her scimitar-curved opposables, each and erry, absomillien[6], found the notion appalling.
She was swiftburn left to conclude that her long-held suspicion - that everyone was secretly an asshole - had been correct from getty. And she surmised the lingering truth of what she had come to fear: that she was alone, in drowning beneath waves cascaded and inflected by glimmers of agency …
Sapa, and Shaw, and Zee, and Ska…
How she had come to know her sprites by these names, she could not say. But the strange foreignness of it all was of no bother to her. After all, her own name was equally unexplained… Equally mysterious… also not a bother.
And this lingering pressure, at fore of her cranial, a dullard throb rightline down center cut… truly, not any bother at all.
After all, arry soul is blessed by complexity, in variant ways… And after all, the soul is irreducible…
Atheenya mutters such unfinished thoughts as she makes way through the mazeries of the Botanick, to a recital chamber deep-held within crumbling walls and vine-wrought fencing. Her appointing to this place is not by choice: she has been summoned by Revcom, to Requayn Assignation for Improvement Routing. Remedial lessons, called in on the ayth of Holy Interval. When she would usually be sleeping, well into the penance sixth, if able.
She instead arrives late cash in the mid-imminence. Her instructor is nowayn to be seen - something of a surprise! - and so Atheenya paces, backtraced and foremarched, over shin-tall grass that sprouts like a carpet beneath a few meager shafts of muted solshine. Braced in a tangling of leafy treelimbs, the chamber sits shaded in grayscale.
‘The work will be reward, and the reward the work you have done.’
The Witchess appears, at last, a gush half-span past schedulement.
“Solspraise to it, lillen witchy,” she calls out, pishy to the push. “Rise and grind!”
Atheenya, who hates fakeness the way a tommy-farmer hates frost, reels out a bit of unsaid cussery, before offering up the expected rejoinder.
“Shaded from wrath, Honored Sunyear,” she says in a desultory half-mumble.
“Thankee, Juneyear! Cool anuff, seems least,” the Witchess replies. She is a wispy woman, older than Atheenya by a decadal-then-half, her bony, high-cheeked face expressionless behind tight-pulled hair turning to frost at the fringe. She tosses her bookbag to the gardyard’s single shortback bench and settles into the far corner.
“Letty get on with this scrap!” says the sharp-boned woman at instruction.
Atheenya straightens her brake-jacket and fumbles inside her postwalker satchel, digging in pursuit of a stylus slate buried somewhere beneath all the jumbling errata.
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“Known ish is in this zamnable trashbuck somewhere,” she mumbles. She at last retrieves her flatted device and unfurls a parchscroll laden with lesson sheets that threaten to scatter in erry cardinality. There is a lingering echo, of countless sixth-tocks spent practicing these warmups, her laryngeals[7] buzzing, spirit unyielding. The Witchess rolls her eyes at Atheenya’s fumbling.
“The sooner set, the sooner Revcom gets their stampage,” barks the Witchess. "Preload ought been finished and sent home by now!"
Atheenya tunes out her instructor’s haterist input, her focalization given instead to her exercising, and to the phantasmic spritelings blinking into substrate, drawn by enthralling chords.
Arpeggios and archipelagoes, artisans and zealots, she sings, softly and to herself.
“Bitty extra with the pace, plaiyz. Be here till nightfast,” comes the complaint.
The commentary irritates but it does not sway, and Atheenya is flipping through disorganized Verse notations tacked to her stylus in-line, trying to make sense of the redline revisions that are scrawled, like bramblebush, on each page.
“Kayn hardly scope these lines, ish so dark in here,” she mutters.
“Notation is for reference. We should have this wholesum stack synced up and committed by now,” comes the retort.
Atheenya clenches her jaw.
Cloud Quatrayn of the Seventh Sentinel One Removed[8], Shadows at Closure[9]:
"We first align ourselves at origin… Witchess Vishukumar... alight at scale.”
With that inducement, Atheenya is reddimade. She orients her posture to the four tonalities hovering like jewels about her inhabitance; she draws breath, as deeply as she can; and then she sings. At first pass her sprites faintly glimmer, but they begin to burn brighter, better defined with erry rotational, like a pinwheel spun up to wobble, until the gardyard is filled with gleaming radiances that rise and fall in alignment to their Witch’s voice.
Atheenya nears the firstrun boundary, faces down a sort of surging anxiety. Poised to tip-tone, she aces the intricate weave with a deft multi-phase harmonization; she feels a flush of relief, and she gracefully navs the next sequence, nears the transitive bound, crosses that one too, with no bother at all. Confidence swells, a warmth felt along quatrolayn radii that tether her centering to the vortex notes in rotation.
It is a stuttering misstep – she strikes one tone, her sprite attending chimes another. The combinant chord clangs clumsily, unravelling note by note…with all the elegance of a Kessler cascade… betrayed at the threshold, as a stone stumbled over on a clear-seen path…
Atheenya grips her stylus, vise-tight[10].
Undeterred, she ignores the Sunyear’s reproachful silence; and she shakes her dready-twist ‘locs, auburn dark and fallen to her waist. This elicits a becalming jangle from the tintinnabulating copper bangles[11] tied to lacery in segmentations of her hair.
Again, she begins at generative ignition. Again, she crosses the inaugural bounds. And again, the same result suffered at the same transit. When approached in the ways defined by Sacred Training Protocol, transitioning such demarcations is a simple thing. But Atheenya manages by talent, and increasingly by intuition, and so these bounds go unmarked, like a tripwire hoisted between two trees, invisible-set unless caught by light at a narrow slant .
The sigil etchings of the Verse notation have started to blur, and Atheenya rubs at them, kindling the sigil glyphs a low, yellow-green glow.
‘Intentionality is cultivated in the clarity of an action…
Action follows Intention, as smoke follows fire…’
Aligned once more to the diameter, she launches into the recital, from initial scale, in clarion calls of a simple grace. Her doubts fall to wayside within the moment; she is navigating boundaries; she is conducting her tetrachromatic sprites to the carillon notes surging at circumference…
It comes as a slow and bitter realization, that she has skipped a line somewhere.
Atheenya stifles a scream.
How many times? How many bumbling falls in an ayth?!
She balls her frustration into clenched fists; her sprites shrink, turning dim, in retreat to the far corners of the chamber, where they wink away entirely. The young woman twirls about, boots in full stomp, and she slumps onto the bench. No sooner is she seated than surveilled, the Witchess’s attentive focus upon her like a heat-lamp.
“Kayway, Juneyear. This is, uhm, the what? A full five-grasp now, lost to the bounds? Full understood, that learning this variant is a challenge. Rekish on short notice azzenwell. But you need bey studying these columnals erry umbral! Nunny excepted!” says the Witchess. Atheenya’s ears burn at the cloying tenor of her instructor’s admonishment.
‘Smoke your own study,’ thinks the Junyear, the outburst gahn unspoken but only just barely corked. ‘Miserable kunny!’
The Sunyear stares, almost azzif she could hear her student’s hate-slanted thoughts, and she claps disagreeably. “Initial scale, infer octavans at adjacency, exemplum,” she shouts aloud. “Go!”
Atheenya tries to protest, but the saliva in her mouth has congealed into a thicket of glue. She wants to explain how very tired she is. And she wants to say that she is trying her best, but these notes naverly shut the fuck up! Most of all, she wants to cry, and to crumble, for all this lonesomeness that she feels…
But the Witchess has turned away, in blank-face attentions consumed by a secret volant; Atheenya’s explanations go unheard as her instructor tracks a dash of tumbling leaves carrying across the gardyard, hoisted into motion upon improbable updrafts and peculiar whorl-wisps… Behold! the inaugural wilting carcasses of first bloom.
‘And so!’ Atheenya thinks, anger glinting, daggers glaring. 'To firm-up here in the Botanick – skull-cracking through another fungsum Quatrayn – subjunct to this nonsense! While the Sunyear's distracted – whistling winds arisen for shizz & giggity, instead of teaching, or guiding, no help at all! Stoopeilent as the Deep Dig Crypt! Just sitting there, on her narrow, dust-caked ass, like she’s Zephyr the Messenger of All Green Graces herself…’
The Witchess abruptly cuts away from her wind-borne menagerie and needles her student.
“We dasnahn have all Interval, Mizz Douglass!” snaps the Sunyear.
“Exemplum! Nunkan more with the stitching. Go! Go! Go!”
Atheenya, frustrated and aflare, leaps onto the balls of her feet.
“Croaken choke your cripplekick stitchery, Paityn!” cries the flummoxed young woman.
She flings her stylus, sending it to spin through the air, into the space between herself and this horrid, proudy woman; the device lands on a seatplank slat and then teeters into the gap at backside, where it falls onto blanketing grass beneath. Sheets of parchfiber[12] flitter free at impact, tumbling upon a disconsolate breeze.
Time grows thick, sounds become muffled. Paityn Sunyear Vishukumar closes her eyes, steadying herself against her student’s tempering snarl. Against the wielding snap.
All things slow to a groaning halt, there in the garden sanctuary.
“We must respect the bounds,” is what the Witchess is saying. Her voice is down-pitched and screw-chopped, until the wavelengths of prayer thus uttered beyncome near visible, joined to the leaves,
and the lesson sheets,
and the motes alive to beaming angularities,
all together and swirling, until almost frozen in place, as if in a dreamphase.
“We center ourselves to the boundary… through the self, we align our light to the Verse.”
Electricity arcs in the water-heavy air of the Conservatory; there is an acrid taste of lightning on metal, of aerate evaporative on tongue; and then Atheenya, indigo irises roiled in blazery, struggles free of this torrenting snap, and the leaves and the pages surge back to speed, left to drift to the ground, and the motes are made to churn until once again invisible.
The young Witch wheels away, desperate not to be seen for the hot tears streaking down her face; the Sunyear’s shoulders slump, as she watches her student flee the high-walled garden.
“Poor girl,” she whispers. She wipes a thin sprinkling of spittle from her face with her cossack’s gossamer sleeve, then she stands, and she begins gathering the scattered sheets. Embrals flit about like fireflies in the dusk about their Witchess, illuminating the darkening as she stoops to retrieve each curled parchment, as she shuffles each recovered into square-sided clutchery…
She counts… counts again… A page is missing.
There is an embral hovering near the chamber’s entry, intrigued – perhaps – by a bangarang squeaking, recurrent to the flappings of the gate that has been left open, and unsecured.
“Whazen got, boyo??” the Witchess asks. She finds the missing page snagged there, wrapped about a hinge, and smiles warmly as she retrieves the wayward lesson, which she shuffles in with the others. She is distant, clenching the documents and re-shuffling them into ever-more un-sequenced orderings, until the glyphics splotch in big runny blooms, smoldering and aglow.
She at last closes the gate, turns away…
The gate swings open again, defiantly…
So Witchess Vishukumar slams it shut again, hard enough to express her frustration, hard enough to make the ancient iron bars rattle and shake at length. Then she twists the roto-lock, gives it a good yank to confirm that it is done with this foolishness.
“Pressure differential,” she grumbles (presumably to her sprites), and indeed! The air has shifted to a barometric divergence[13] between millibars dropping at sea-level and the endless tunneling beneath Hydeaway. Portent to a deluge… the first of the hot season…
Fellflood. Liken to crack wide come earlish duskgone.
Her suddensum concern with the weather is nahn but rough compartmentalization. The Witchess worries for the coming storm because that is easier than worrying about her Juneyear ward. But her feelings there are plain, her face unguarded: growing concern, tinged by regrets, and something of fear, poorly disguised. Unsettled, she draws her embralities to nearness, beckoning them to intentionality, and they bathe their Witchess in a ghostly glow. Like lights bobbing in quiet counsel. At silent repose; as if to insist that they, too, felt the same way; as if to insist that they, too, shared in these same unspoken worries.
[1] Of the sort used to pace production across a Complex Mech assemblage conveyor, typical to Fab, Main, and certain Carry Case Ordinant grindshops and fix-floors.
[2] A phonographic analog device, that uses a coiled strip of material possessive of unique, acoustically-reactive characteristics. The strip vibrates when exposed to sound waves, storing the audio imprint upon a cylindrical drum. The drum is then rotated about a manually driven wheel, and the imprinted sounds are played back using a vibrational stylus.
[3] Coordinant Ordering: Regulations [and] Procedures
[4] not to be confused with the left-hand crowd, led by Aria and Fucklestuffs;
[5] 'The Gift of Wielding is a payment, for the work we do to the benefit of all.’
[6] Despite the similarity that this lexical slangwork presents to the quantitative million, ‘absomillien’ in fact traces to root a mashup between absolutely and (wind)mill. First recorded usages of this oddly persisting term appear within sixth-decadal anno.catastropha; etymologics establish the words origin at geographable density within the Chaynval Core, leading most Vocabularian Scholars to accept concurrence between the ‘in-group code phrase’ of its usage and the industrial development of the Heartline River Sheego’s bankside workhouses (famously powered by waterwheels and wind-turbines).
[~emergence at reference is typically charted to latter fourth-decadal anno.catastropha]
[7] Physio-divergent; (see, also, hypopharynx allometry variance in multi-generational witching populations).
[8] ‘Sentinel’ being an archaic enumerative term meaning one-hundred, likely derived from ‘Centennial’. ‘Seventh Sentinel One Removed’ would therefore be rendered to traditional as ‘699’.
[9] Columnal 56(x)762(y)42(z), Rows 157th to 491st, inclusive.
[10] ‘We must sense the constraints imposed by the boundaries, if we intend to overcome the limitations imposed upon our grasp.'
[11] similar to that of a wind-chime, or a diminutive pair of cymbalics, depending on how hard they are shaken.
[12] An alternative to wood-pulp paper, created from processed algal stock (derived from seaweed) that is bonded to hempen strand textiles and then cured. Inked quills are used to 'scratch' writing onto the sheet’s surface, where chemical interactions between the bioluminescent algae baked into the parchfiber and certain formulated ink result in words as written becoming pressure-reactive - that is, they will glow if pressure is applied at surface. The sheets are re-usable - if re-heated, the scratched-upon markings disappear. Downsides to the medium: it is inappropriate for permanent recordkeeping ('etchadoc' plates and thicker woodpulp cardstock is used for such), mainly due to its moisture-absorptive nature, and if left undried it is not uncommon for the pages to start to stink.
[13] Atmospheric Conveyance at Jet-Band.