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TRUE THINGS

PART II

🙜

Ky drew herself out of the bath very suddenly, water sloshing over Ember’s arms.

“Wait—what—”

“My things,” she said stiffly, waving a hand.

Suddenly she was before him—dark hair clinging to her bosom. More was presented to him in that fleeting glimpse than he had seen since she ducked beneath the spring runoff on their way up the mountain. She wrapped her arms around herself a moment later, sheltering her abalone figure from his startled gaze, and cast her glance about anxiously.

Ember’s mouth opened, and then shut, and then opened again without his consent; he managed to return his attention to her face, though it required an immense effort of will to keep his eyes affixed to it.

“Um… here, you can have this.”

Blushing, he shrugged out of his tattered, sweat-stained shirt and tugged the hem free of his belt. It landed on the ground with a dull rustle.

Ky spared it a scornful glance, still holding out one insistent hand.

"Where are my things?"

Ember hesitated for a moment, blushing more fiercely, and then reached behind the leather pack and sword, tossing her worn garments into view. Ky delicately plucked the jerkin from the stone tiles; torn laces slipped from her fingers and crumpled to the stone.

"Sad,” she murmured.

Her lips were thin, the word softly spoken.

Of all the things she might have said he least expected that.

“Why?” he asked, before he could think twice.

She hesitated.

“I keep this for… a long time."

"I confess myself surprised it hasn’t entirely rotted away by now," Ember stated wryly, "given your affection for rivers and the like.”

“Not always wearing this; only when I am with your people.” Then she relented, the words tumbling from her lips almost without thought, “It is a gift."

Gifts mean friendship, she had told him, once.

"Well,” he offered, watching her closely, “I'm sure he'd understand.”

Ky's piercing stare flashed back to Ember and she tightened her grip on the jerkin. "What is your meaning?"

He shrugged, rubbing the back of his neck and gesturing to the ruined garment.

"Only that it was a useful gift and served its purpose, I suppose—"

"What do you mean, he would understand?"

Her tone chilled him; clearly it had been a mistake to push for more about Bren. Thinking quickly, he fumbled what he hoped was a sensible excuse: "These things you wear... they're men's clothes, aren't they? It only stands to reason."

She stared back in silence. Lifting her chin, she flung the ruined jerkin aside and smoothed her hand against the tattered folds of Ember's old shirt, appraising it with something like renewed appreciation—and another emotion which was more difficult to identify. Her mouth twitched and her aspect tightened as a claw snagged one of the tatters where she had snatched at his back in the hall of mirrors.

“Turn away now,” she sniffed, dipping her chin, “while I am making myself decent.”

He wondered who had taught her that phrase. For that matter, who had imparted the small bit of human culture which she seemed determined to emulate—niceties which Sil completely disregarded even in his dreams? Bren, perhaps? But it would do him little good to dwell upon it.

There were other questions in his mind which needed answering first, and he had no wish to upset her further with that particular line of inquiry.

So he sat facing the inky darkness, his legs crossed, elbows on his knees, chin propped on his folded hands.

“You said there are more true things to be spoken; I hope you intend to start with whatever happened between you and your sister?”

“Yes.”

The water sloshed and he heard the slap of bare feet on stone; her musk washed over him, more potent than he remembered; like a bruised flower.

“I will tell you what I can. Though, perhaps things are different now… for it is—" and she hummed ten quick notes "—this many summers since last I am singing with my clan.”

Ten summers.

Ember would have been a mere child, yet Ky had been ninety-two years old at the time of his vision. He passed a hand across his face, slightly overwhelmed by the reminder of their discrepancy in age.

“What have you been doing all that time, since you left?”

“Hiding from my sister,” she admitted softly. “For she does not understand. And searching for this mountain. Before he is... taken... the Elder tells me true things in secret; he whispers to me—if our clan will not hear him—that I must be finding the mountain with two heads. There, I must seek a man, a man who will return… our treasure to us—to me. I... try to speak with Sil, many times. Make her see. She will not listen. She... tells the clan, of my words... and the Elder is taken away..."

That part of the story was familiar to Ember, but now he realized she must feel some degree of responsibility for his death, after confiding in her sister. He wondered if she had personally witnessed the Elder's execution.

Hatred for the red-haired sirena swelled within him, but he swallowed it.

Angry words would do little to console her.

So Ember sat for a long while, arms crossed, but there was only silence. At length, Ky made a sticky noise in the back of her throat—a sound he recognized as distress—and he felt compelled to say something.

"...after he was gone. Then what happened?"

She let out a faint breath, as if his words had reawakened her.

"Soon after is the day of my becoming.”

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“Your becoming?”

“Ah,” Ky huffed, her claws anxiously tapping. “I do not know how to say it. My rising up? When you are no longer lesser—become your own self. Become... of the clan.”

Ember shifted uncomfortably on the stone; the sentiment reminded him of the morning he had been taken into the woods by Alden to hunt his first deer at the age of fourteen. Despite an entire summer of determined practice, it had taken him several arrows to finally fell the stag. He would never forget the way it faltered and collapsed in a heap, dark blood soaking the soil as the life drained from its body.

Alden had proclaimed him a man that day, and Ember had never again gone hunting with a bow.

“I think I understand,” he decided quietly. “What does this ‘becoming’ mean for you?”

“It is different for each of my kin. Most become when they have not seen so many summers.” He heard her fidgeting behind him, wriggling into his shirt. “Those who become sooner bend more voices within my clan. I am not permitted when I am younger, for I am not fit to have a voice, then.”

"Why not?"

Her voice dipped lower in sorrow.

Or shame.

"Sil does not find me worthy."

Ember frowned into his hands. “Why did you listen to her? What does she know?”

“We are the last of our kin, and I know no other guardian than she. Sometimes I think that perhaps, because she is the eldest, she is granted too much wisdom and there is none left for me.” There was a gentle ruffle of cloth, and Ky sniffed again. “I am decent.”

He glanced over his shoulder with a quickness that embarrassed him, but she was not looking back.

Instead, the sirena knelt on the gritty stone, dirty fabric draped across her thighs; she tugged at the sleeves—which he had always kept rolled—until they came down over her knuckles. Only the ends of her black claws gleamed in the glow of the stone.

“Understand that to become is to prove your worth as a hunter; that you are worthy of tasting the... forever song.”

She looked down, shoulders tense beneath his shirt, and hesitated.

"It is... the song of men, of which I am speaking."

The forever song.

Ky was always speaking of songs—songs of the earth, songs of her people—but he felt somehow that this was different. An echo of her recitation filled his mind, memories from the hall of mounded treasure where they had found the ancient siren, the words of her own tongue etched forever beside the heads of Ember’s fallen kin:

We wish their bones will find no rest in the lands beyond—no sacred rites, nor mourning of their kin. Death is come to this place of curses, and death abandons us. We spare them none, for they are jealous of their hearts.

Ember murmured the rest of it aloud: “We, the deep-dwellers, must forever eat their songs.”

“It is so,” Ky confessed, still avoiding his gaze, "What I am to tell you, Ember, you will not like to hear."

He cleared his throat. "Then oughtn't you to tell me quickly, and be done?"

She fidgeted, and her breaths came quick and shallow. "My people are hungry... always we hunger. The humming of your flesh… the drumming in your hearts… of this, I too am partaking... with others of my clan.”

He was about to say he had expected as much—after all, he had witnessed Sil's coercion in his vision—but before he could remark on this, she spoke over him.

“We who have no voice must fight for what remains, after the hunters devour the hunted, and content ourselves with the echoes of their song. I tell you before, I am never killing any man—for I take what Sil leaves for me, then. The voiceless are not permitted to eat while the blood runs warm and the song is fresh... not until the becoming.”

Ember stared at her, aghast.

“What… is your becoming?” he demanded, his voice croaking.

When she spoke, it was quick, with grim resolve.

“To enchant a man, tear out his heart while he yet lives, and consume it before all the clan.”

He looked into her eyes, wide with fear—and glimpsed his own shocked reflection pooled within them, his much harsher features faintly aglow in the scant golden light of the stone.

“Ky does not lie to Ember,” she gasped suddenly, snatching his wrist. “Not killing! Only eating! Please believe Ky… she does not lie! Never lie to Ember!”

Not killing.

Only eating.

There was a frantic fervor to the words, as if they rendered her somehow less culpable for knowingly gnawing the bones of his kin. But it was true; she had not lied.

Bile soured his tongue… the illness inclined toward bitterness, which swiftly became disgust. She had lived long amongst a fiendish folk who celebrated the desecration of mankind—indeed, not only celebrated, but it seemed almost a necessity. They were drawn to it for some unholy reason, desperate to taste these songs which so delighted them.

He remembered the look in the undead eye of that ancient creature, peering out from beneath his dark cowl with an insatiable hunger. Lusting after Ky's immortal beauty and the song of Ember's flesh.

And then he bleakly wondered what she wished most to hear.

It doesn’t matter?

I forgive you?

Thank you for telling me the truth?

In the end, all he could manage was a strangled: "I know."

Her eyes darted away, and he could no longer see himself reflected within their inky depths.

She shivered, lashes fluttering and ears twitching.

“But, after you left,” Ember said slowly, his heart squeezing beneath his ribs at the thought, “when you traveled alone... did you complete your becoming, then?”

She had devoured his kinfolk of her own free will, perhaps by the hundreds; whether she had murdered any of them outright should hardly matter after such a revelation. But it did matter.

It mattered because he wanted to hold her to her word. Without that fragile foundation of trust they had rebuilt, stone by stone, they would never find the gate, never free themselves from the clutches of the accursed mountain.

He could already feel that foundation cracking, crumbling.

If it shattered a second time, he would never trust her again.

Ky's neck was rigid; he could see her pulse at her throat, beating more swiftly than his. She contorted her mouth to hide her fangs again, which faintly muffled her reply. The words were carefully chosen: “I have not partaken of the songs of men since I ran from there. But my folk are not to be speaking with yours. Such is the way of my clan, such it always is, and wretched in the eye of Sil I am. So I think to myself, ‘I must strike out alone to find such a one.’”

He allowed himself a faint sigh.

Not relief, but something like it.

If she had completed her becoming, would she have cared enough to seek out the Elder's rumored mountain? Perhaps she might have fallen into lusting after more and more songs, like her wicked sister. He recalled the voracious hunger he had witnessed in the garden, sticky fruit juices dripping from her mouth and chin, smeared up to her elbows...

It was all too easy for him to imagine the red syrup of his own veins spattered across her face.

Ember waited what he felt was a courteous length of time before asking wearily, “You mean, me?”

“No." Her breath was chill, and he shivered, despite the distance between them. “There is another. Sil wishes me to fetch him for the becoming. I know that I cannot eat his heart—after all which I have heard. And so I... ran away.”

Ember pressed her fingers between both his hands and waited, but she offered nothing more. At last, when it was clear that she was finished, he said honestly, “That was very brave of you.”

Ky snatched her hand away.

“Do not speak such things,” she snapped—with such uncharacteristic fury that Ember lurched backward, placing a hand on the hilt of Fishbiter. Froth flew from her lips with the venomous words. “I am not brave.”

The sword buzzed faintly beneath his touch, like an angry bee.

For the first time since they had met, her fangs flashed in a snarl instead of a grin, but she turned away from him so quickly that he could scarcely comprehend what he had seen.

So he shuffled further into the corner and stared in heart-pounding silence as the sirena hissed and spluttered quietly, combing her claws through her tangled hair and pulling out a few thin strands; these she wound around her fingers. After a few moments of this strange self-soothing gesture, she wandered off into garbled siren speech, but he caught two muttered human words.

Familiar, soft, and dark.

“Never satisfied…”