49
RESTORATION
🙜
Ky’s frantic spitting and muttering ebbed to a tranquil hum.
It calmed Ember, though not enough for him to loosen his grasp on Fishbiter. At length, she shifted into a series of achingly sonorous tones, most of which resounded long and low, reaching deeper than he had thought possible for one with such a fair voice as hers: each breath bent existence around him, whispered to the blood in his veins.
He felt strange, at first as if he were floating—and then as if his heart had begun to beat backwards. She blurred before him, wavering like a reflection in the river on a misty morning. First one apparition, then three, then four, infinite figments of the dark-haired sirena smearing together at the edge of his focus. It was the strangest melody she had ever sung in his presence, yet somehow he understood it.
It was the song of Ky’s corporeal form: everything which made her the whimsical sirena, a creature now more known to him than any of the villagers he had left behind, spun round and round in a few whispered notes.
Ember was loathe to interrupt but he could hardly stand to listen, haunted by the allure of a thing forever out of reach—the melody was entirely beyond his mortal ken, and still he moved with it…
Wished for it…
Yearned for the looming madness of her musk and magic to finally overwhelm him, that he might lose himself forever to the loveliness of an otherworldly woman from the river.
His fingers twitched and he coughed against the sudden emptiness within his chest, pulse fluttering faster. After a moment of confusion, he willed himself to withdraw, shuffling across cold stone tiles until he huddled in the darkest corner of the baths. He wiped his damp forehead with the back of his hand as the mirage of many sirenas faded and his pounding heart resumed its normal rhythm—if somewhat more erratically than before.
She paused her humming and the shimmer disappeared.
“Is that… a healing song?” he asked, his voice shaking faintly.
“I suppose that is what you will say; but I will say it is a suggestion.”
“A suggestion?”
“My kind have not the power of those melting stones you found, but I know all the songs of the earth. I know what should be and is not. I remind these twisted things,” she explained, licking her finger and sticking it to one of the stubborn blemishes, “that they are not meant to be.”
The tree-stone flickered and danced as she returned to her humming, light heightening and hushing as she moved through different melodies. Ember stared, mesmerized; its cadence reminded him of bountiful fruit and sweet rushing water... the garden they had so foolishly left behind.
“I think—” he hesitated "—that siren we fought, when he started chanting—was he also—"
"I do not know of that." Ky hissed, lip curling. "He speaks black words I am never hearing before, and I do not like them. Let us not remember such a thing."
Ember was unused to this quick-tongued side of Ky, which took offense so carelessly, and it rattled his composure. She did not lift her head again, but continued her search for new imperfections with her fingers and sharp eyes.
One final blister smoothed beneath her touch.
She passed her thumb over it several times, clearly basking in the return of her unspoiled beauty.
"Why did you stop?" he asked, disappointed in spite of himself.
“I am tired,” she admitted, and surprised him with a gusting sigh. “The rest will fade, in time.”
He observed her for a moment, noting the cast shadows beneath her inky eyes and the way her mouth—which curled toward a smile even when at rest—now seemed to droop slightly at each corner. She did appear tired; and he wondered if the magic she had spun to cure her wounds had taken something in return.
Then her glance brightened, latching onto him with a startling intensity.
He couldn’t tell what exactly her black eyes had affixed to, and was startled when she slunk toward him in a crouch, fingers curling toward his throat.
Ember put a hand over it and leaned away.
“What?” he snapped.
His neck ached suddenly, and the touch of his own hand brought back a rush of instinctual fear: Bony fingers snatching his throat—a whirl of red hair—spine cracking against the bole of a tree—furious shriek—the fog of his last gasp drifting away into the woods of a cold dreamscape...
“Am I the reasoning of this?”
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He shook off the memory to see that Ky’s gaze had darkened.
“What do you mean?”
She beckoned him, the intensity of her expression softening as her sweet scent melted his resolve. He reluctantly lowered his hand and she lightly tapped two fingers to the hollow of his throat.
"There is a mark." Her lower lip tightened. “I grab you, there… yes?”
Ember remembered, now—it felt like so long ago, but it had only been a day and a night, or a little more. Yes, Ky must have bruised his throat, in the hall of whirling dust. It was silly of him to think first of a nightmare.
“Right… yes. You did. I… it’s… ”
He shrugged, and swallowed the word fine.
“I know you were hungry.”
She hugged herself, retreating from his gaze.
“Can you—” He hesitated, suddenly abashed.
She met his eyes again.
“Can you heal this?” he wondered aloud. “I mean, could you? If you wanted to?”
It seemed a personal thing to ask, but she was already shaking her head. “There are some within my clan… who can do such things, among our own kind. I have not such a talent, and your human song is... strange to me.”
“What about memories?” Ember ventured, thinking again of Sil’s words about Bren. “Thoughts, emotions. Can you ‘mend’ those, too? Shape them, or make them disappear?”
Ky did not answer him right away.
“To be making something take a shape which is not its own…” She hesitated. “...to unmake a thing… that is a harder task, yes.”
“But you can do it? Shape a person’s mind?”
Her weary gaze flickered to and fro, and when it chanced to touch his, it dropped to the stone. She swallowed visibly as the corners of her eyes tightened. “I think, maybe, that is a song for another day.”
❧
“Open,” Ember commanded.
Ky flinched.
He spoke with an edge, sometimes, which hadn’t been there before. Or perhaps it had been there all along, and she had never noticed? She had some blurred memory of his wrath, when the echoes beguiled them; he scarcely knew her then and thus it had afflicted her little more than the punishments of the wretched Book.
Yet ever since he shouted those angry words in the garden, she found herself intimidated by a voice which had always before seemed so soft and gentle.
The tongues of men, too, possessed power.
Regardless, it should not afflict her so—Sil would never have allowed him to speak to her thusly.
You allow it because that is what you deserve.
A strain of whispering magic shifted beneath her feet, fragile as a silver thread, and the door grumbled, scraped, and retreated into the wall. Eager to be gone, Ky shoved past him—
And something crunched underfoot.
Bones.
Ky hissed as a breeze touched her legs, but reassuring fingers brushed her shoulder and Ember tugged the tattered shirt so that it hung more neatly about her neck.
“We can always come back,” he promised soberly, “if we meet with another windstorm.”
She wavered, and then carefully stepped around the outstretched skeleton.
"If you say it is so, then it is so," she muttered, snatching one of the flasks from his pack and shaking a few drops water over her hands and neck.
Ember walked on as the door rumbled behind her, and she was beset by the fleeting idea of darting back inside and vanishing into the pool forevermore—but before she could act upon it, the door thudded shut and she was trapped outside, with only Ember’s steady presence to comfort her.
Ky's clan had no religious rites or ceremonies dedicated to any deity but themselves, and certainly did not believe in begging Ember’s ‘maker’ for breath. Were they not, as Sil had often boasted, the most powerful creatures in all the mortal realm? Had they not made themselves, long ago?
They were the masters of their fate.
That is why I am weak, Ky thought bleakly, shivering. Seeking aid from others, when I should seek answers within myself, as any faithful siren would. I am least among the faithless of my kin…
Still, she could not help but pause to observe the fallen wretch, and a strange feeling welled up in her heart at the sight. For it was this end which—above all other ends—she most feared: he had found no treasure in the mountain stronghold and, with not a single drop to wet his withering throat, had passed alone into the Greater Darkness…
Darkness as the dark of a siren sleep.
Ember was already moving ahead, leather shoes whispering across the mosaic of tiles, but pity rooted her there; Ky quickly knelt beside the ancient remains and pressed two fingers against the unfortunate siren’s forehead, claws tapping the dusty skull.
"Sleep, brother,” she breathed in her own tongue.
The gems above her flickered at the potent words, voices hushed, and a few lingering breezes defiantly nipped at her ankles.
When she glanced up, her Ember had stopped at the turn of the hall and was waiting patiently, the stone-light casting its soft radiance across his face. Ky shivered and hurried after him, bundling his shirt more tightly around her shoulders.
He was very bold with his looks, now, she noticed. He did not turn pink or glance away, or pretend that she held no fascination for him until he thought she did not see. And Ky liked that. She no longer frightened him, and that frightened a small part of her—but in some unfamiliar way, she found she liked that, too.
He held out a hand.
She hesitated, impressed by the memory of that hand reaching out from the darkness. Their fingers clasped, a familiar touch, and he offered her a tired smile.
“Soon,” he said quietly.
She was not sure what he meant by that, but felt compelled to return it.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Soon.”
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Hello!
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~ Saf