Ana played her violin. Not as she had during rare free hours in between managing Sanctuary and sleeping. Ana played. She opened up her soul and poured it out into the world. And the world responded. She felt it stir around her; the energies moved by sheer expression. It all built and built, coming back to her little by little as she walked back out of the darkness with Sentinel Tower as her guiding light.
She still wasn’t sure of the details by the time she was walking the city streets again. She didn’t know the name of her enemy or the exact context for this conflict. But her heart understood. In the core of her being that was made up of fundamental energies she was beginning to feel the truth. And the more she played, the more skill she recovered, the stronger the feeling got. Conscious understanding would follow soon enough.
By the time she saw Sanctuary in the distance she’d rather lost track of time and place. She wasn’t quite sure if she’d followed the same rigidly straight path she’d used earlier, but rather suspected she had. And there had been no need for climbing or leaping. The music that was her soul had shown the way.
Ana slowed her pace, walking with greater purpose as more and more came back to her. She had an audience: Faces appeared in windows and up on balconies, and soon enough people were stepping out their front doors. She walked in the middle of the road, and her audience formed a gauntlet on either side. No one spoke, or approached her. The tones and the power she was summoning through them had the same effect on them as they did on her. A certain shock was to be expected.
As she crossed the final stretch to Sanctuary the power of the music began coursing through the air, like blue glowing strands, spinning from her bow and twirling through the air in no particular pattern. As Damia opened the front door further barricades broke down in Ana’s soul. All the exhaustion, all the despair and the guilt over not being able to do more, the crushing weight of the world’s ills... it lifted from her. And with that burden gone from her spirit the glowing strands stopped flying wildly and swirled around her.
Her clothes shifted. The cheap, worn old dress and the jacket over it moulded together into light, which then turned into an elegant skirt and blazer combination of cerulean blue. White embroidery matched the pattern of the glowing, twirling strands, connecting with the white ruffle collar that encircled her neck, and the lace cuffs that her sleeves ended it.
It was the beautiful work of true artists, made from power every bit as much as it was made with cloth and tailoring skill. It was the outfit of a champion. It was her regalia, back at last.
The music hung in the air after she stopped playing. Or rather, the power did, though there was little difference. Damia stood staring in astonishment, but also a certain confused recognition. Good. Ana’s song had reached her heart as well.
“Ana...” the woman started before stumbling over her words for a few gasping seconds. “What is...”
Damia shook her head, as if not entirely sure that she was awake. Ana suspected it was the correct instinct. She allowed herself a moment of closing her eyes, craning her head back, and just revelling in feeling this ray of light. Of freedom. But then it was back to work.
“Damia, we have been deceived,” Ana said, and stepped up to her friend and assistant.
“Your violin...” the woman commented, and Ana took her first good look at it since gaining awareness. It had changed, reflecting the same artistry and grace as her regalia.
“Yes. But focus on me, Damia. We have been deceived. None of this is right.”
She shifted the bow into the same hand that held the violin, so she could put an empty one on Damia’s shoulder. It did seem to focus her a bit, but her eyes remained wide, awestruck and not a little frightened.
“Ana... that song... it has done something to me. And... and you look like a queen or something.”
“No,” Ana said, firmly but gently. “I am not a ruler. It is...”
She hesitated as her mind sought to connect two pieces it had suddenly become aware of. It didn’t fully succeed, but another hint of a memory came back.
“It is a rule, I think. This power is not for ruling. I aid. I protect.”
“I don’t understand,” Damia said.
“Neither do I,” Ana told her. “Not entirely. But it is coming back to me. To you. To all of us.”
The rest of Sanctuary’s staff came out behind Damia. With a sweep of her arm Ana indicated them, then continued the motion to encompass the people gathering in ever-larger groups outside of their homes.
“The threads in this loom are coming loose,” Ana went on. “We just need to keep pulling at them. But let me tell you what I know with absolute certainty: You have long stood by my side. That is no lie. And you always prove to be stronger than you give yourself credit for. Your weakness, your fearfulness... that is the lie. Your good heart overcomes any such obstacles.”
Emotion now added to the confusion on Damia’s face, and Ana gave her a reassuring squeeze and a smile as a tear slid down the woman’s face. She felt emotion hit her own heart as well, but got it under control for the sake of living up to her role.
“What now?” the woman asked in a slightly raw voice.
“We do what we do, Damia,” Ana said. “We give succour. We heal. But right now, what people need more than anything else is inspiration.”
She looked over Damia’s shoulder at the growing group of people coming out of Sanctuary.
“Sam,” she said, catching the man’s eyes, his usual toxic bitterness replaced by confused wonder. “Old Alma. Grego. All of you. I need you. Come with me. Let us recover our city.”
“Recover it from who?” Sam asked.
“We will find out. But first we need to gather our forces. We need to wake everyone from the lie.”
“What everyone?”
“Everyone.”
Ana turned her attention back to Damia.
“I will continue to play. But making it meaningful will require most of my focus. I need you to be my right hand as we march. Talk to people. Organise them. Give encouragement with words while I give it with my violin. We will march, and gather everyone together.”
She put the violin against her neck and readied the bow.
“Against our enemies.”
Ana played. She played a song of strength, of kindness and unity, and again the strands sprang from her playing. More and more people came out, and once the moment seemed right Ana began walking again. Guided by Damia’s pointing as the woman trailed behind, the people gathered into a procession.
# # #
Myra heard some sort of thud.
She was in pain and tried to move, but her body didn’t seem to obey properly. Little bits of memory and awareness danced around in her ringing skull, more confusing than useful.
There was another thud and she thought she felt something touch her.
“Oh, are you awake?”
Myra opened her eyes, but her vision swam so much that it made little difference. She did determine that she was out beneath the sky.
“You sort of came to earlier, so I had to hit you a second time. Do you remember that at all?”
There was a thud, and now something definitely hit her.
Myra squeezed her eyes shut and tried to focus. Her jaw hurt so much that she wondered if it was fractured. She blindly attempted to move her legs, and did manage it, although they were strangely heavy. Her arms were pinned beneath her and simply wouldn’t move at all.
“What?”
“A bit of a bother, this,” Brown went on. “But then, it couldn’t be too quick and easy. That’s the whole point.”
Alarm made its way through the hazy confusion. Myra remembered High Town, Petyr, and the Bomber. And the moments afterwards.
“You hit me,” she mumbled through her swollen jaw.
“I sure did.”
Her vision came into enough focus to make out Brown’s silhouette against the darkened sky. He was standing over her, but a bit above. She was in a hole.
“It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” the man said, not deviating at all from his usual calm, dull tone. “But you started catching on. I don’t know how, but it doesn’t matter. The point of all this isn’t death. The point is to suffer. You are supposed to choke and despair in your very own hell. So this mustn’t be quick and simple. So here we are.”
He brought the shovel into view and dropped another clump of earth down on her. Myra realised she was already mostly covered in a modest layer of dirt. And her wrists were cuffed behind her back.
“What the hell are you doing!?” she shouted, defying the pain in her jaw.
“My job,” Brown replied plainly.
Another load of dirt landed on her with a thud.
“You shitsnake!” Myra screamed and fought to move under the accumulated dirt.
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He threw the next load into her face.
“Yes, Myra,” he said. “Thrash and shout. He wants you to.”
She shook and coughed, trying to get the dirt out of her nose, eyes and mouth. Brown dumped a big load onto her feet, cutting off more of her mobility. Sheer panic threatened to overwhelm her, but the strength it granted wouldn’t be enough to do her any good. Not in this situation. Still she tried, and the only result was one clump of dirt after another. He didn’t throw more onto her face, but the weight on her chest started to cut off her air.
Think, a small part of her insisted. Sheer animal force wasn’t accomplishing anything as her terrible death piled higher. Think!
She desperately sought solutions; any kind of angle through which she could slip. Anything that could save her. Even if she could move her arms she wouldn’t be able to reach her handcuff key, even if Brown hadn’t taken it. If she started screaming he would just silence her. Bargaining wasn’t going to get her anywhere.
But the Bomber... what had happened with the Bomber? And that conversation with Petyr, about a grand lie. Some of the fragments came together in her fuzzy mind. A surge of strength coursed through her like white light, and with a single painful jerk she snapped the cuffs. The surge subsided almost as quickly as it had come, but she used the fading embers to sweep her arms about and thrash her legs, dislodging the blanket of dirt.
Brown stabbed the shovel down at her, but a combination of his awkward position and luck on Myra’s part let her twist to the side and evade. She grabbed the shaft with both hands, clinging to it with all her strength. Brown pulled up with all of his own, further helping her get loose. He abandoned the attempt after a couple of seconds and simply released the shovel. The man fell back a couple of steps and went for his coat flap as Myra rose.
She used the shovel as a cane, pushing herself to her feet. The hole wasn’t nearly as deep as a proper grave; Brown hadn’t had time for such labour, so as his hand closed around his service revolver Myra sprang up onto the surface. Her hurting ankle nearly betrayed her, but she got her good one beneath her in time and staggered into a run.
She didn’t see the gun come out, but she heard the metal slide against leather, and the safety being flipped off. The shot rang out as she made it around a tree, and chips of bark flew about.
A tree. She was in some park or another. And the tree was only barely big enough to hide her. Brown’s footsteps were coming around and all Myra could do was to hobble for the next cover in an awkward crouch. Brown fired again as she made it to a modest clump of trees and for a moment she was certain he’d hit her. But the branch that had caught on her back swayed away and she kept on moving.
Thin, low-hanging branches got in her way, scratching at her face as she pushed through in sheer desperation. She had no idea where she was going except away. Myra stumbled over something, probably a sturdy root, and now her ankle did fail and send her to the ground. She decided to take it for an opportunity and hurriedly scrambled in between two trees that stood closely together. It seemed to take her through a bush, or possibly really low branches, and on the other side she found a relatively clear area.
Brown was still coming, his passage marked by creaks and snaps, and Myra painfully got to her feet so she could break into a run again. She’d only gone a few steps when she came upon an iron fence. It was half again her height and crowned with spikes.
“Wrong direction, Myra,” Brown said, and she had to agree.
She’d trapped herself. Her partner was coming to kill her, nothing made sense, and her pistol was a terrible absence against her chest. Her mind frantically searched for options, and almost on its own her hand went into her outer coat pocket. The peach was still there, and, at a loss for anything else to resort to, Myra took it out and sank her teeth into it.
The taste burst into her mind. Memories and notions spun before her like a zoetrope moving too quickly to make out the images. But one thing stood out, and as Brown’s silhouette came into view Myra held her palm out.
White lightning shot out of it, striking him in the gut. The momentary flash showed him fly backwards in a burst of sparks, and the gun dropped from his fingers.
For a few breaths she stood there in numb shock, still holding her palm out. Then Brown groaned. It was a long, low noise that changed in character as it went on, becoming something... else.
“Fine,” he said, unseen amidst the trees, in a warped version of his voice. “Fine. So it’s coming back to you. No need to be subtle.”
The voice spurred Myra into action and she strode straight towards it, holding her hand out and only feeling a little bit like an idiot for it.
It both was and wasn’t Brown that she saw rise up. The figure was larger, with stretched-out limbs and sharp fingers. And sharp teeth, through which an aggressive rumbling noise came.
Myra tried to repeat her earlier feat, but a moment’s thought about how exactly she’d done it allowed the Brown-thing to dart to the side. When her blast went out it hit a tree with a great boom and more sparks, followed by a loud groan as it began toppling. She hopped out of the way, the tree came down, and then Brown ran at her out of the darkness.
She raised her palm up again, but a swat from one of those grotesquely long arms sent her aim to the side and the lightning simply hit another tree. The other enormous paw came at her in a swipe and Myra bobbed and weaved as her boxing instincts kicked in. The claws tore into the tree at her back and tore a chunk of bark loose.
Myra countered with an uppercut, hitting the misshapen, snout-like jaw with strength she hadn’t realised she possessed. His head was thrown up and back and she followed with a hook to the face. He was knocked back, but his far greater reach let him get another swipe in before she could get close enough for a finishing blow.
The claws came in low, slashing at her belly. They slid off with a loud scraping noise and Myra held her palm out at his face.
“Oh, come on,” Brown growled an instant before the lightning blast hit his mug.
He fell heavily up against a tree. The small fires left by her missed shots provided a little bit of illumination. It showed both how utterly inhuman his form truly was, and how much of a burnt mess she’s made of the head.
He moved a little. Perhaps it was life, or perhaps the body was simply settling in place. Either way Myra aimed her hand yet again, and this time she didn’t waste time with thought or any attempt at figuring this out. She just let the blast come with the ease of experience, and blew the head completely apart.
The body crumbled away. The sight put her in mind of a log burning impossibly fast, and with an invisible flame at that.
Myra looked at her hands, turning them every which way and wiggling the fingers. They looked as they ever had, and yet it was as if she was seeing them for the first time. And then there was the coat. It had been replaced. Or perhaps she simply saw more clearly now. Either way, she was wearing a long, cream-coloured garment. Picking at the fabric made it clear why it had stopped that powerful claw-swipe; the fibres were like lightweight steel, and yet rather soft.
Now that Myra had a moment to think, she realised the taste of that peach was still in her mouth, and it occurred to her to find the damned thing and finish it. But so much was already coming back to her.
“I have been a fool,” she said to herself. Then she chuckled a little.
# # #
Ana’s procession grew. Her people from Sanctuary, headed by Damia, acting as lieutenants of sorts, keeping order as they walked down one major street after another. Her music and its power preceded them, and by the time they passed by a residential street those living there would walk out as a group. Men, women and children, the youngest being carried by their parents or pushed in strollers, walked to the tune of her song and joined in.
Their ranks swiftly rose to the hundreds, and swiftly again into over a thousand. A systematic sweep through the three outer districts brought their numbers up to thousands more. It was far less than a city this large ought to have held, but then that was all a part of the lie: The depressing, dehumanising vastness of grey concrete and dark brown rock, and its teeming horde of people. The illusion came ever more apart, and so did the phantoms that had helped maintain it. Only the listeners remained. And the truth became ever clearer to them, and as they gradually neared the river Ana sensed purpose in the people she was leading.
She also sensed something else; the discord at the edge of her music, attempting to disrupt it, attempting to maintain the illusion. It was reacting to her efforts. She set foot on Long Road. Running alongside it was the river, and in the middle was Champion’s Bridge, the way into High Town. And uncomfortably close to it was Lion Station, and the other half of the efforts against her efforts.
Chief Matew’s police officers had gathered in force on the street, facing off against her army. Their disguises flickered a bit, disrupted by her playing. The battle for the city was about to become an actual battle.
“Damia,” Ana said breathily, the passion of her playing making it into her voice. Her friend hurried over and Ana spoke to her without looking away from the obstacle ahead.
“Children and elderly in the rear. Arrange a guard around them. Arrange for people to move wounded through the lines and into the back. Go.”
Damia dutifully hurried off to tend to her task, calling Sam and Alma over to aid her. Ana continued to lead the procession at a steady march, even as some of her people actually started speaking up, voicing outrage at the tricks that had been played on them.
Their foes were ready for violence. She ignored their threats and commands, verbal and otherwise, and let the music be her voice. They didn’t have much of a response to it. Once she could actually make out faces, and make a rough count of the officers, she stopped. Behind her waited the power of the people, stirred and ready to be unleashed. Beyond the line of foes waited Champion’s Bridge.
Ana switched to a war song.
# # #
Petyr walked in the centre of the empty streets, just because he could.
The fascination simply refused to leave him; the one that gazing at the towering buildings all around caused in him. Looking at his surroundings at the right angle, or rather, with the right mindset, just about dismissed the lie.
The buildings, the parks, the streets... he could almost see the truth of them. There was a reality behind the lie, and it hinted at itself in styles and angles and colours. Much of the fascination came from how equally enthralling and frustrating the experience was. He was so close to understanding, and the final pieces yet eluded him.
His journey had started with a slow stroll out of that empty apartment, but somewhere along the way he’d picked up the pace. It hadn’t all come back to him. Not quite yet. But enough to develop a sense of direction. Of purpose. And the feeling didn’t exactly diminish as he heard a din in the distance.
The eerie emptiness of High Town made listening intently very easy. He simply had to stand still and hold his breath for nothing to obscure the sound save for distance itself.
It had the tenor of music. And much like with his surroundings, Petyr could almost make out enough to identify its meaning. He thought about breaking into a run towards the din, but just before he put his foot forward he realised that it was growing, with no input needed from him. Whoever was playing was getting closer, and so was the mass of people accompanying them.
It was far, far too distant for him to make out words, but there was an intensity here. An urgency. And his heart responded. Even at this distance the music eased a few more of the blocks within him, and once again Petyr thought he heard hoofbeats. The rhythmic clopping noise seemed to emerge from the rest of the din, slowly taking on an identity of its own. It even took on a source of its own.
Petyr turned to his right. He’d been passing by one of High Town’s little neighbourhood parks when he stopped. He was drawn to the dimly lit spaces between its well-tended trees, and gave in to the impulse.
If asked he would not have been able to describe what it was that changed about his perception as he crossed the boundary from concrete to grass. Somehow things simply felt sharper, in spite of the lower light. He didn’t know if it was happening in his brain, his eyes, or his environment itself. Whatever it was had a very distinct sense of clarity; a sharp kind of clarity that seemed to sharpen a little bit more with each beat of a hoof.
After circling the edges of his awareness for however long in this interminable night, the horse finally trotted out of the darkness. It was a magnificent steed; tall and strong, with a rich brown coat and a silver-coloured mane, and intelligence gleaming in its dark eyes.
The horse walked right up to him, and some of the last walls in Petyr’s mind went down. He reached out and smiled as he gave his friend a pat.
“Savalan,” Petyr muttered in wonder. “Old friend.”
He stroked the horse.
“Finest of steeds, bred on the Windy Plains,” he went on in the same tone. “Where have you been?”
Savalan nickered softly and rubbed his nose on Petyr’s face.
“Or is the question: Where have I been?”
The horse snorted. He was drawing Petyr’s attention elsewhere, and he realised that the distant din had changed. Now there was a sound of violence.
“Shall we go?” Petyr asked, and got an acknowledging nicker in reply. “Of course.”
He stepped up to Savalan’s flank, but just as Petyr lifted a foot the ground moved beneath him. There was a rumble, and a rattle of everything that could rattle at all.
“Well, this isn’t good.”