“Hello?”
Élyren doesn’t know who they’re talking to. There’s certainly no one to hear him, not in the Ashen House. It’s dead, it’s a grave, Luna always said. The biggest tomb in the world. And yet he finds himself unwilling, maybe unable, to raise his voice higher than it is, just slightly above his normal register. Like there’s someone he might disturb, but then, he’s talking, isn’t he? Silence would be the least disruptive, surely. But he is equally unable to simply say nothing. There’s a gravity to this place, pulling on his throat and forcing out words like the moons pull the tides.
“Is anyone there?”
Hearing no reply, he takes a step, allowing the heavy, steel-reinforced door to creak shut behind him. The sound of his claws on the stone floor echoes like snapping talons, startling him, but only for a moment. Recovered, he glances around the room, barely registering the table and chairs or the boxes in the corner huddled under a shredded tarp, because his eyes are somewhere else—the wall to the left, the dark, curved metal wall lined with alcoves. He can’t see past the curtains, but he can smell what’s behind them by their syrupy, coppery tang. Bones.
Stars, no one ever stopped talking about the bones. Don’t look at them. Don’t even think about them, his Uncle used to say. And his son would add, Never, ever touch them. It seemed silly, then, like a Song-Night story. And it was, alongside whatever other stories they’d tell.
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But that was there-then, and Élyren is here-now, and the Song-Night stories are no longer so untouchable. Because the bones are here, real, where Élyren is, only talonlengths away, and no longer in the words from Uncle’s jaws. Their scent is in his nose, he can taste it in the air when he flicks out his tongue.
Unbidden, his hand reaches out; he’d never told it to, but there it is, inching closer and closer and—
A drumbeat, harsh and sharp, louder than Mother’s roar, and Élyren freezes solid like a statue. It’s a snare, he thinks absently, hit with a draikha blade or something equally as brazen. Came from the right, down the hall at the back of the room.
Another, just like before; the exact same beat, and this time it snaps him awake. He shudders, and after a moment of struggling forces his head to turn, and in that hallway there’s… someone, he can’t tell who. A Draicyrí’s figure, no doubt; it’s tall, like his, but thinner, more curved and graceful.
Élyren swallows, and speaks again:
“Hello?”
“We see you.”
The voice is… his. But… off. Not wrong, but not quite the same, its sound more feminine, its tone, sharper—much sharper. And that drumbeat, he can still hear it—in its voice, a bizarre echoing of its words… her words?
“We see you, Élyren Antumbrai,” it continues. “do you see Us?”
He swallows again, and as the figure steps into the light, he does indeed.