SatM: Lovers
Author’s note: this excerpt is set in a different tense than the others. This was written as a flashback set in a different short story and now I’m too lazy to change the tensing of it so it will read better in this month of short stories. I have no regrets. Enjoy!
Harmony sat at the edge of Valahnúkur cliff in Iceland, staring into the crashing waves below her. At the start of October, the wind was already biting though it carried the scent of the ocean and grass to her nose. The hood of her jacket was pulled up high to cover her face from any other visitors of the picturesque landscape even though she’d made certain they couldn’t see her. Tears streamed down her face and joined the salt water below. Her whole body ached, though she knew it was just her heart.
It had only been a year at that point in service to the Wards, running out of portals and through the Edge’s enchanted doors. A year suffering the harsh tongue of Phantasma and the indifference of everyone she came across. Her hands were scarred with burns and cuts, marred here and there by some small token of her learning in the form of an easy cantrip tattooed permanently on her fingers. Staring at them now, they seemed like someone else’s.
She knew the rules, if you weren’t back at the door by the time the shop closed, there would be no admittance until it reopened the next day. Never mind that everyone else in the family had a key to come and go at will or access to a hand mirror that would take them straight inside as needed, Julius said she couldn’t be trusted yet.
It was only a moment’s hesitation, helping a mother with a baby carriage get her kid up a set of stairs had cost the girl her return trip home. She was stuck for as long as it took for the Wards to realize she wasn’t at the shop, something they were sure to pick up on. Harmony wiped her face with the heel of her hand, smearing dirt across her cheeks. They would come for her. They had to.
The wind transformed into a high voice, coasting over the crash of the distant waves, inhuman, as pure a sound as one someone drew from glass. Slowly, Harmony raised her head, as if in a trance. Tears still streamed from her eyes, but she didn’t notice them anymore, instead she scanned the world around her for a trace of the singer. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of who she was looking for, just the faintest glimmer of a person made of mist.
A ghostly figure, pale, wreathed in sea spray, stood on stone outcropping far below Harmony. Her hair seemed to come straight from the mist that shrouded her feet. Hey voice echoed and grew, reaching a perfect chord alongside the rush of the water. The very air around her wobbled and crowded around her, painted the blue of twilight’s onset even in the final blaze of the sun. Her voice seemed to split, reaching towards the depths of human hearing in imitation of a whale even as it soared like the gentle plink of rain on a china cup.
And then Harmony was falling, the air tearing at her her face and the churning water seeming to open up to swallow her. Her tears were a trail on the wind she left behind as the only clue for where she went before plunging into the depths. She felt the embrace of something cold, dark and overwhelming and Harmony opened her mouth and eyes to take it in entirely.
Later, she would remember that the ocean hadn’t simply waited for her body’s entry, rather it had reached for her and cradled her fragile form like a mother to a baby. Later, she would remember how that beautiful song had transformed into a distressed shriek that took hold of her and erased everything else.
At that moment though, the darkness ebbed away and was replaced by a pale vision of another world. Eyes slightly too large to be real and completely black, a nose that barely existed and a mouth full and plump with lips the color of a dawn sky. Her skin was the color of seafoam and her hair really did dissolve into seaspray at their tips. And she was crying.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry! What have I done?” and she cradled Harmony close to her pebbled skin and boney shoulder. She was cold. “I shall never sing again I shall never do such harm again-”
“Please-” Harmony hacked a cough even as her savior pulled back in astonishment. “Please you can’t stop singing. I haven’t heard something so beautiful in my entire life.” Harmony smiled weakly, starting to shiver in her wet clothing as the night drew close. Her tears continued to flow freely down her cheek, mingling with the seawater and leaving her vision blurred. It didn’t matter. Not at that moment.
The girl frowned and lay her down on the rock they sat on, diving into the water with a silver flash in the corner of Harmony’s eye. The tears came faster without the stranger’s presence there to ease it, instead leaving the empty void filled only by the chorus of the tide. It was not silence, it was worse.
With the sound of a bubble popping, the girl reappeared and drew with her something similar to a loom. Mesmerized, Harmony let her tears dry as the sea breeze and water vapor were drawn into the shuttle and woven into place. The color of the dying sky dyed what would have been white a deep indigo. It rippled with the movement of the waves and the stranger began to sing in time with the beat of water on stone. Unlike the airy, cold song of before, the lyricless tune spoke of the warm embrace of the water, the shimmer of sunlight off tide pools. Within a few minutes, the weaving was finished and Harmony was wrapped in a blanket the color of twilight that seemed to leech any warmth from the air to radiate a heat meant only for its bearer. For the first time in the hour, Harmony felt fully lucid.
“Did I….” Harmony rubbed her temple, still wet with sea foam but a normal temperature instead of the cold and clammy skin of a corpse. “Did I jump off the cliff? To get here?” The pale stranger’s lips twitched before she broke out into a full blown laugh in imitation of seals.
Fianola leaned forward and kissed the girl who had been willing to die for the chance of hearing her voice and breathed a song into her lungs that could never stop playing.