through the clearing. Khault’s body tensed, his back arched in pain, and blood streamed from what remained of his ears. A sword ripped through his chest and tore at his pale skin like a knife through paper.
Uthalion stumbled, his sword falling from his hand as he spied the bloodied face of Brindani at Khault’s back. Deafening roars shook the clearing, rippling outward in waves from the struggling pair as they fell back in a tangle of blood, steel, and thrashing flesh. Khault screamed in denial of the blade that worked its way through him. Uthalion tried not to see the details of the half-elfs injuriesthe limp broken arm, the hideous wound across his stomach, or the exposed section of scalp over his right eyebut his eye was quicker than his good judgment.
Uthalion fell to his knees, his hands clasped to the sides of his head as the ground quaked and the air hummed. The’endless song embraced him through it all, caressing his tired limbs with a soothing melody, a silken thread of beguiling voices amid the chaos and blood. He glanced down into the cavern, and the flickering shadows of nightmare clawed at his ability to resist as he fell forward and crawled to its edge.
Howls carried softly down through the cavern, an uncanny compliment to the song as the dreamers raised their voices in either sorrow or exultation, Ghaelya wasn’t sure. Tessaeril shivered on the rocks, weak and almost frantic with barely hidden impatience, her blue-black eyes fixed on the sword at Ghaelya’s side.
The dreamers were here first… They despise the Choir… and rejoice that one of them has fallen…
The words were quiet and muttering, absent thoughts drifting through the song as Tessaeril reached out tentatively, her fingertips crawling toward the sheathed blade then drawing back. She shuddered and twisted her bound torso, her eyes pleading for release.
“Does it hurt?” Ghaelya asked as she let her hand slip to the sword at her belt, feeling the rough surface of its leather-wrapped handle and pulling clear the fastening loop of the sheath.
No… not anymore… There is no sleep here… not for me… Her dreams are all I have, all I see… endlessly… The sword…
Ghaelya’s body was numb, moving slowly and almost of its own accord, distant and mechanical. A handspan of blade cleared the sheath, and Tessaeril looked upon its edge almost hungrily, her lip quivering at the sight of a promised freedom from the sirine.
“I love you, Tess,” Ghaeyla said. The words slowed the steady pull on the gleaming blade. The steel reflected the ethereal elow of the sirine’s bodv like a beacon. Her sister did not answer, straining as the song rose and fell, shaking her frail body and digging deeper into her nearly translucent flesh, her once strong fire drowned in the sirine’s grip.
The blade continued.
“It’s always blood,” Ghaelya whispered softly, remembering the previous night’s dream and speaking the words that had been spoken to her. She swallowed hard, and the blade fell free, scraping on the rocks and shining brightly. It blurred her vision, and she blinked, releasing the tears that had collected there. “I’m sorry.”
There’s nothing to be sorry for.
Her arm struggled with the sword’s weight, and she tried several times to lift it, to break it free of her every impulse to cast it away. Inexorably it rose and hovered over her shoulder, tapping lightly on the leather guard. Her arm obeyed her commands, though her heart had not yet joined in the necessity of the act.
“I want to believe that,” she said, her voice breaking. “Forgive me.”
There is nothing to forgive.
It seemed a gentle push, lifting the blade and letting it fall. The steel blurred at the end of her arm and buried itself deeply in weak flesh, breaking easily through brittle bones. Ghaelya couldn’t breatheshe didn’t want to. She cursed the pulse that pounded in her ears and the sudden inability to close her eyes, to not see the strange dark blood and the slowly withering expression of shock. Vines shook and twitched, ripples flowed through the sirine’s mass, and the great dark eyes turned in their slumber.
Somewhere inside of her, ice-cold and overpowering, there was a scream, but she couldn’t find it. The sword fell from her hand.
And the sirine screamed for her.
Damps rocks cooled Uthalion’s palms as he stared into the ethereal blue glow, the song’s endless tide washing through his body. He pulled toward it, enthralled and unable to resist. At the bottom of the cavern entrance he found Ghaelya sitting with her back to him, a nightmarish mirror image slumped on the rocks in front of her. Dazed, his eyes wandered to the sword lodged in the lifeless body. Whispered words echoed over and over through the song, growing faster and faster as they blurred together, ripping through the air at a frantic pace until they were little more than a discordant keening.
“Forgive me.”
There is nothing to forgive.
Gods have mercy, he thought, as the song was unleashed.
Whatever veil had kept him from the true force of the sirine’s singing was lifted. He gasped at the exultant power and thought his heart would burst. A single wave of perfection flooded his senses, a thrall so deep he never wanted to be free. And he was ashamed at the meager, imperfect soul he brought to lay upon the glowing altar at her feet. Every muscle in his body flexed, and his back arched painfully, assaulted by what seemed an entire lifetime of memories in a long, rattling breath of transcendent joy and sorrow.
When it ended, and the taste of blood filled his mouth, a gaping pit of oblivion filled his mind, swallowing the heaven he had found hiding in Tohrepur.
The song withered to little more than a whisper, a faint longing that floundered weakly in his ears as it trickled through the cavern. He resisted it easily, as a man once caught in the open sea withstands even the strongest tides of the shore. He sat up, rested his head in his hands, and averted his eyes from the ethereal glow and the slumped silhouette before it.
Though the translucent form and haunting melody of the plaguechanged sirine filled the cave, it was Ghaelya’s stilled silence that dominated the murmuring song.
“The flesh is strong,” he whispered under his breath. “The flesh is strong.”
Emerging from the cavern they found Vaasurri, awake and kneeling beside the prone form of Brindani. The dreamers had dragged away the carcass of Khault, fighting over it and tearing it apart among the forest of glittering spires, but they had not touched the half-elf. A few sat by watching curiously as Ghaelya knelt at Brindani’s side and gently closed his eyes.
Mist-grass rippled around the pair, its deep green dulled by splotches of rust red.
Uthalion joined Vaasurri some distance away, sensing no threat from the beasts as they padded peacefully to the sirine’s cavern. They settled into the mist-grass and formed a circle around the mouth of the cave as it whispered and sang to them. Several licked Khault’s blood from their faces, and they growled if anyone came too near the cavern’s circle, a behavior that assuaged Uthalion’s concerns over the sleeping sirine. There was a cruel, possessive intelligence in the dreamers’ expressionshe supposed they would not so easily lose their dreaming Lady again.
Darkness still reigned over Tohrepur as they exited the crystal forest, the other end of a night that had already begun its slow journey toward dawn and a new day for the restless ruins. There was no sign of the Choir, though Uthalion imagined he could hear pained moans from deep in the city streets. The sirine’s vines still blanketed the stone walls and cobbled avenues, though the life in them seemed withered slightly their flowers were less red, the scent not as sweet. At every corner they met the tortured gazes of the sirine’s thralls, the Flock.
The pale citizens of the Choir’s doomed cult stared strangely at one another, curious and dazed. Some made their way to the spires, frantically seeking for the song that had ended so abruptly, its river now a trickling stream. Others babbled incoherently, frustrated as they tried to form the words they had not used in so long, their minds shredded by restless nights and endless waking dreams. Still others sat and wept, rocking back and forth on street corners and inside the hollowed buildings, quietly mourning either the shattered thrall of the sirine or the slowly returning memories of lives lost.
Uthalion barely felt the weight of Brindani in his arms, carrying instead the heavy burden of the half-elf s memory as the hauntingly quiet stride of Ghaelya led the way out of Tohrepur. The journey home would be long and difficult, but he would sleep when he was tired, and he would dream of his wife and daughter.
Starlight glittered through the crystal forest long after the moon had set, and the dreamers could not yet
