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Chapter 25 - The Singing Forest
🕑 Added 2024-05-03 00:08:00 +0000 UTCThe following chapter has one of my favorite sequences in it. Enjoy.
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The first hint that Vincent was dreaming was its incoherence. His house had a gift shop. Kris was selling miniature replicas of their home to visitors with bland, generic faces. There was a moment of surprise at such an odd scene, but he casually shrugged it off. Dreams were dreams.
The second hint was that their home was no longer next to a small pond, but rather perched on top of a large arch of red stone, inside a gargantuan open cavern. Stalactites dripped in frozen suspension from the ceiling of the colossal space, large enough to hold several homes, not just his own.
Elevators crept along their length before defying physics and levitating vertically across the air. He tried to climb into one only to find the elevators were impossibly small, smaller than his foot in fact. Seething with frustration, he grabbed the elevator in his hands and shook it, only to find that it was his cat, Skittles.
Vincent was now on his living room couch, holding the animal in his hands, tears flowed from the feline's eyes. He embraced his pet and apologized for being away so long. But he was happy. Somehow, he had projected his consciousness back to Earth and his cat was the only one that saw him.
The blue-eyed feline vibrated with happiness and rubbed her snout against his palms. But then her face split into two and a bulge rose from her back. From the bulge, an eye, gray as death, opened to stare at him through its cataract.
“NO!” Vincent yelled.
Skittles continued to purr as if there was nothing wrong with her transformation. She leapt off the couch and onto the floor, where she disappeared into the carpet. He attempted to follow her, but the floor remained solid, refusing admittance. He ran to the basement steps and opened the door. The walls were lined with excrement and mold, causing him to pause in disgust.
He was no longer in his home, but in a secret facility located on the surface of the moon. Torn wires sparked as they hung from swaying florescent lights that flickered and hummed. He could hear somebody crying, a creature with a small voice.
Every flicker of the light painted a shadow on the white walls. A silhouette of a tall, deformed figure walked over to the creature and picked it up. The creature begged for mercy. The scene continued to play out in shadows, the giant figure twisted the creature in its hands until bones snapped.
The scene changed and he found himself browsing the corridors of the laboratory on the moon. The smell of sickness filled the air, and he was totally alone. He walked past a large window and heard something scratching against the glass. He turned to look but saw nothing except for his own reflection. Still, the window vibrated with the noise.
“If you’re trying to be a nightmare,” he said, still aware of the dream, “go ahead and scare me.”
As if rising to the challenge, it tried to oblige. Vincent saw his own reflected face melt. The whites of his eyes turned orange and began to run out of their sockets. His face swelled and blood began to pour forth from his nose. He shook his head and scoffed at it.
He walked down a different corridor until he came upon a thick, polished steel door. It slid open as soon as it detected movement. Then he stepped through it and found himself in a room filled with autopsy tables and surgical instruments. Rivers of dried blood ran into drains on the floor and the air, sterile and cold, made him shiver.
Only a single florescent light illuminated the room and its focus was on the only clean autopsy table. On it laid Skittles, who seemed oblivious to the macabre scenery. The eye on her back was gone and she seemed completely normal. The scratching returned. It was the raking of claws against glass, and it was coming from Vincent’s right. He turned and saw a familiar cloth-covered cylinder resting on a shelf.
“Come on Skit, we gotta go,” he said.
He picked up his cat and headed toward the door, feeling a trill of panic as the scratching became more frantic. The door opened and he stepped into his basement. With Skittles still in his arms he ran up the steps, opened the door into the kitchen only to step into another hallway within the moon facility. He looked through a nearby window and saw the same cloth-covered cylinder lying on somebody’s desk. It twitched. He turned and ran but his legs were weak and tired, moving as if they were underwater.
In his mind’s eye, he saw the vessel tip over and roll toward the edge of the desk until it was stopped in its place by a pencil. More tapping and scratching came from inside it. Skittles meowed at him, and he felt the purring feline lick the side of his cheek. Normally, the gesture would have been affectionate and adorable, yet the tongue felt wet and large against his face, too large to have come from a cat. Startled, he looked down only to find that his arms were completely empty. Skittles was gone.
There was a crash and a patter of quick feet. In his mind's eye again, he saw the fragments of the shattered vessel on the floor, a loose cloth lay humbly among shards of glass. He did not want to see what broke out of it, he did not want to lay eyes upon the creature who now jiggled at the knob of one of the doors behind him.
He was still aware that it was a dream, so he could create his own rules. He reached toward the floor and willed it to open. At first, it did not seem like it would obey, but then he tried harder. The tiles slid aside, and he floated downward into darkness. Above, he saw the hallway as if the floor was made of transparent glass, and he was looking through its tiles.
He waited, expecting one of the doors to open and for something unfathomable to escape from them. He floated away, putting distance between him and that creature. It would never guess where he had gone, and it would never be able to follow. So into darkness he floated, protected by the tiles which slid back into place to conceal his passage.
But then his feet touched solid ground. Surprised, he looked down and saw tile and broken glass. He looked a few inches to the right of his feet, and he saw the cloth which, until now, had covered the jar. He was now inside the laboratory where the vessel had shattered. The door was wide open, and he had only moments to close it. Already he heard the frantic pattering of feet echoing down the hallway, rapidly getting closer as it sensed his presence and doubled back for him.
Before he could do anything, something small and dark darted through the doorway and he felt the tickle of limbs scurry up his legs and up his side. A dead face with both equine and amphibious features leered at him. Vincent thrashed around until something grabbed hold of his shoulder. He opened his eyes and saw the outline of a creature with a triangular countenance kneeling over him.
“Calm yourself, Vincent Cordell,” Slade said, “you were having a nightmare.”
He unleashed a stream of muttered profanities, apologized, and then set his head back down. Slade walked back over to Holan and lay back down, the single white stripe running down her snout caught the red and purple ambiance of the celestials lurking above the forest. Vincent looked above her at the unbroken vessel hanging from Holan’s side, half expecting to hear something rattle inside of it. Then he closed his eyes and fell back asleep.
“It is only a nightmare!”
The skunk from Bambi looked up at him with green eyes before running off to join his forest friends. Vincent decided to follow the critters and join them in their music, even though he couldn’t sing. But he wasn’t the only one who wanted to do so, other kids wanted to cut in front of him. There broke out a huge fight. He threw fists, but none of his punches landed. His fists traveled slowly as though he were fighting underwater.
Meanwhile the green-eyed skunk was getting away, leaving him behind. Several incoherent scenes continued to play out before he managed to fight off the other kids. But the fight was in vain, for a man with a cowboy hat stepped out of the woods, shot the skunk and ate it.
“The hell?” Vincent murmured as he woke up.
It took a few moments for him to shake off the disorientation before he looked around. Holan was a few meters away, chewing on a large tree branch which she had snapped in her mouth. That must have been what inspired the gunshot in the dream. Slade must have poached two more of those giant lizards that he saw skittering across the treetops. They were impaled on stakes right above a smoldering fire. Morning sunbeams penetrated the rising smoke, creating ribbons of light. At her prompting, he grabbed one.
“You have vivid dreams,” she said.
Vincent scoffed at this. “You have no idea...”
“This morning,” she began while he forced himself to eat, “we will travel through the depths of Molan Tierre, and this path will lead us to the Gelen Highway. Which in turn, will take us to the Naikiran Gate of Meldohv Syredel. After we reach our destination, I will hand you off to be questioned.”
At this, Vincent’s mood soured dramatically. An acid anger ate its way through his chest when he heard the word “questioning”. Whatever Falius was, it had already shown it was capable of inflicting pain. What would this questioning entail? Slade told him about some magical artifact that would make him speak the truth. He was in a foul mood from the moment she spoke of the questioning, to the moment they began to pack up.
Even though these creatures were inhuman, and he could only take them so seriously, the thought of being put on trial made him sick. How many times in his life had he been put on trial for simply existing? The fog of forgotten memories came back to cloud his mind and though their images were hidden from him, he could tell they were not happy ones.
Holan groaned in protest when Slade yanked the branch she had been chewing on from her mouth. Vincent was surprised the landrider simply didn't toss her owner aside, she certainly had enough strength. After they both mounted the beast, Holan begrudgingly carried them deeper into the forest. Vincent’s immediate anger began to soften as they penetrated the woods.
Molan Tierre was beautiful, to be sure. The trees were tall, perhaps a hundred feet in places. Vines crawled up their trunks and bloomed yellow and red flowers. They emitted a fruity scent. Branches curved graceful arcs towards the sky, holding on their ends giant leaves large enough to wrap around Vincent’s body. They blocked out most of the sunlight. The result was that the forest floor darkened as they traveled further into the woods and continued to darken as the trees became more densely packed.
Soon, very little of the sky could be seen, only a green, glimmering canopy. Scattered about the woods were openings where sunbeams poured through, revealing glimpses of the moss-covered floor. Glistening white orbs with tendrils radiating from them grew from the roots of many of the trees. Vincent assumed it was some sort of fungus until he saw they too, grew on vines. Their shells had the swirling sheen of pearls.
There was motion ahead. Slade stepped aside to let a traveler pass them by. His head was ducked, and his mount’s gait was gentle, as if each step it took was precarious. The traveler nodded in acknowledgement but said nothing. Vincent caught a glimpse of his eyes. They were wet. After he passed, Slade continued into the woods.
The darkness of Molan Tierre was not eerie, but rather it served to make the illuminated spots on the ground seem brighter. Foliage only grew where the sun was permitted to shine, creating little islands of flowers and grass between the trees and darkness. Perhaps it was because of what Slade said the night before, but the forest’s beauty seemed melancholy. Though she had been brief in her tale, there had been undertones of tragedy to her words.
But besides the unusual trees, the exotic flora and fauna, he could see nothing special about it, nothing that separated it from the other strange sights Falius had to offer. He supposed there was a solemness present, a silence that seemed to amplify the cadence of Holan's stride, the singing of birds, and the brushing of leaves. Occasionally, another traveler would pass them by, nodding quietly. Pendants and ornaments, left by previous travelers, adorned branches within arm’s reach of the trail. But beyond these things, the forest was merely silent.
But then, Vincent began to hear something. At first, it sounded like some sort of droning hum in the distance, a single hint of a note pulsing in the air itself, steady and constant. But as the trees closed in and continued to stifle the sun's light, the note began to separate as if it were run through some sort of audio prism, its many colors slowly being revealed to his ears. It began to repeat itself, a consistent reverberating tempo. But he couldn’t be sure as to what he was hearing. Slade didn’t appear to react to it. Thinking his schizophrenia was returning, he asked her for the Triasat.
“You are not mad,” she said with reverence, “it is the forest. It is his legacy.”
The details of the note became less distant and soon, another note joined the first, alternating in unison. They were barely louder than a whisper, so they were easily drowned out by the crunch of Holan's hooves. Slowly and steadily however, as the trees dimmed their path, the melody grew in volume until he could make out the distant plucking of strings. The trees grew taller with the music until they shaded so much of the path, it might as well have been the darkness of twilight.
Several posts held on their tops the glowing crystals Vincent saw so often, illuminating the path. Meanwhile the music began to reveal a melody, a trickling of notes that until now, had remained hidden under the interplay between the first two notes. The plucked instrument carried itself like the ringing of bells and pulsed as though it were the heartbeat of the forest, changing its inflection to suit the scenery. It was an experience so surreal and so poignant Vincent could not bring himself to make his usual snide remark even if he wanted to.
Sometimes the music seemed to radiate from the trunks of the trees or fall from the leaves above. It impregnated the dirt and bloomed in the occasional island of flowers. It took shelter in the many fungi that grew along the rotted wood marking the path. It was constantly changing its melody and inflection, but never breaking the underlying theme. The source was evasive like a ghost. Whenever he tried to find it, it dodged his perception.
Sometimes, the unseen instrument sounded as raw as a flamenco guitar and then it sounded as mystic as a Celtic harp. When a brief opening in the trees revealed a large patch of sunlight, the music faded, evading the sun, teasing him to follow it back into the shade, only to abruptly return, loud enough to startle him. As they approached a rock, it became harsh as though the player were plucking near the bridge of the instrument, but faded back into mellowness as the rock passed them by.
When they found a relatively quiet break in the music, Slade brought Holan to a stop. Until now, Vincent had not realized the music was only changing because they kept moving. Now, it stayed in the same passage, repeating the same three notes over and over again. He saw Slade’s ear twitch. It wanted to be chased. It wanted to be found.
A moment later, Holan continued along the path, and the music welcomed them back into its embrace. Vincent could hear the shift of alien claws against strings, vibrations reverberating through metal and wood. The melody became more complex, more hectic, muted, ringing, and shifting to meet the shapes and geometry of the forest. It was constantly shifting, narrating the passage of the forest in every stem, bough, twig and flower. It was alive and it seemed to play with them. It died into the distance only to return and tease him again.
Fingers danced on strings as a small stream trickled by, flowers, blooming on dangling vines, became trebles to accompany the ever-growing theme of both joy and lamentations. It calmed him with its ethereal serenade, while never overwhelming the forest with its music. He wondered how many Falians were seduced by this harmony, drawn in by the rhythm and lost among the massive trunks never to be found again.
From the darkness, joined a new sound, the cry of a cello joining Molan Tierre’s symphony. Slade brought Holan to a very slow walk.
“A caelist plays ahead of us,” she leaned back to whisper in his ear, “they often come here on pilgrimages. Do not interrupt her meditation.”
Vincent didn’t need her to make such a request, in fact he wasn't sure he could speak at all. He could not see the “caelist”, as Slade blocked his view, but the closer they got, the louder and more poignant the instrument became.
Eventually, a beam of sunlight pierced the trees and illuminated a ghostly figure sitting on a rock. A blindfold covered her eyes and her snout was painted with a pale white pigment, making her look like a phantom. Embraced in her form was one of the strangest-looking stringed instruments he ever saw. Made of both metal and wood, it sat propped up against her like a cello.
Resting against the ground, the body was formed from a glossy metal that looked as though it had been inflated rather than forged, a round bubble of nitrided steel that had been later coaxed into a teardrop shape. Instead of having a traditional sound hole simply cut into its front, the edges of the sound hole abruptly turned inward, distorting the reflections of the forest into a ring around the opening.
From the main body radiated four long, thin, arched, spine-like necks that held in their parabolas a pair of strings each. Between these lesser necks arose the main neck, a large, fretted fingerboard of blood red wood which was taller than she was, incremented with frets like the neck of a guitar and strung with eight strings. It rested on her shoulder while the other necks spread to her left and right. Wooden wings above the body at the base of the neck allowed her to rest her feet as she played.
The caelist was not yet playing the main chorus of strings. Instead, the mournful wail he heard was being produced by the creature's wings, which were rubbing against the strings that were stretched across the smaller necks. A fine white resin powder fell from the strings as she extended her webbed limbs, using the membranes between her digits as a bow.
The blindfold she wore hid her eyes, so the only indication that she was aware of their presence was a slight twitch of the ears. The caelist was too immersed in the voice of her instrument, which radiated with a sorrowful, undulating reverb to answer the forest's melody. She paused for a moment, bringing her wing to a stop, then she raised a hand to the frets on the main neck.
At the same time, one of her feet, which had been resting on the shell of the instrument, brought a resin-covered claw down until it struck, initiating a new rhythm to answer the forest's request for dialogue. The percussion was satisfyingly raw, yet resonant, amplified by the hollowed curves. Its throaty cadence was only a prelude to the performance to come, a little teaser before the main melody erupted to life. When it finally did, Vincent felt goosebumps crawling up his arms and legs. As her claws danced across the strings, she seemed to enter a conversation with the forest's lamentation, which extended to her, responding to her prompts.
The cael's voice eluded words. He heard the soft trickling of a harp superimposed over the harsh tang of mandolin. He heard the sympathetic resonance of drones accompanying the undulating wail of a cello. She swept a wing across a swath of strings, producing the harsh rasp of a sitar as the strings sizzled against metal. She lowered her hands, and the instrument sang with the dignified inflection of a theorbo. All the sounds came together in the strange metallic shell above which she rested her feet, and poured forth into the trees.
It was not a performance, it was not a score, it was alive. It was an ethereal riposte and rebuttal, a dialogue of agonies and tribulations with the music of the wood. Vincent felt the power of the instrument vibrating the clothes against his chest. Her movements, subtle, graceful, and fluid hypnotized him as she answered Molan Tierre’s forlorn warnings with her own interpretations.
He was grateful for the darkness afforded by the canopy overhead, for he had never heard an instrument with a voice so poignant, it made him shiver, it made him emotional. He wanted Slade to stop, he wanted to stay and listen to the wordless exchange between the caelist and the wood. They passed her by just as the cello came back into the score, a slow wave washing over the rapid dance of plucking digits. Her music drowned with the distance until it was absorbed into the forest.
Molan's phantom melody lingered among the trees like a nuanced pulse of sound. With every passing shape, it continued to reveal new ideas, enchanting him with playful little jingles. It played new inventive little melodies, and hard raging arpeggios. Phantom claws drummed out a punchy melody against a carapace of metal, yielding an aura of shimmering harmonics.
It was difficult to tell how much time had passed when the canopy began to open. Molan Tierre's performance began to dim and quell, making Vincent yearn for its return. The strings began to fade from existence; hiding behind the brush of the wind until one last note remained, repeating indefinitely until it too, faded into a drone, before winking out beyond his range of hearing.
The path they had taken deposited them onto rolling hills of soft grass. The breeze made him aware of a moistness underneath his eyes. Although the forest's melody could no longer be heard, the hypnotic pulse still resonated through his mind, as if it had been programmed into his memory. He hoped Slade wouldn’t ask any questions, otherwise he would have stumbled over his words. Has this ever happened to him before? Had he ever listened to a performance so powerful it left him shaking, left him unable to speak?
With her path clear of trees, Holan took off across the flattening hills. Warm winds grazed his ears carrying with them the occasional hint of sea salt. The familiar scent brought back fragments of memories: His feet sinking into sand as the ocean water crashed around his ankles, his mother holding him and his sisters still while she applied lotion to their backs, a rainbow kite dancing against the sky.
But those memories vanished behind the fog of amnesia. Soon, a crest of shimmering water revealed itself in the distance, an ocean obscured by columns of rust-colored rocks. He wanted to go closer to the water and simply stand on the shores and stare into the endless expanse.
The forest's melody still haunted him. In a way, it had been the most dangerous thing that had happened to him since he came to Falius. It was wonders like that which would seduce him into falling in love with this place. He needed to make fun of this world, but he had nothing, no words. All he could do was breathe through his mouth as he tried to recover.
Slowly, the forest's spell began to depart as they rode, though it still left him shaken. Slade veered inland, away from the water and soon the path they trotted on joined a wider dirt road. Holan weaved left and right as they passed other travelers. Her pace slowed as the road congested too much for a full sprint. Vincent simply gawked at the reptilian creatures, gaping at their colors and their surreal emulation of humanity. Up ahead, he saw a large highway populated with carriages, wagons, and landriders. He assumed it was Gelen Highway and Slade soon confirmed it.
“We will travel on this road for a while,” she said as she pulled Holan into the traffic. “It will take us through the Meldohn storm ward, erected by the Culluinar shortly after Thal’rin’s ascension to the seat. When we pass through its influence, you will see the majesty of The Naikiran Gate and of Meldohv Syredel.”
Vincent clutched onto the Earthly garments that he retrieved from Holan’s sides and whispered his identity to himself. The road began to sink into the land, carving its way downward as cliffs rose on both sides. Traffic flanked them on all sides and he could catch the scent of beast and cattle, of sweat and cotton, of salt and seaweed.
Up ahead, he thought he saw a mirage stretching upward into the sky. Images distorted as far as he could see. They reflected the cliffs and the traffic so that they appeared to be slowly approaching a tall, imperfect mirror. He thought he must be hallucinating until he heard a nearby youth express wonder at the sight.
Vincent watched as landriders and passengers passed on through it. He expected ripples to spread from the places where they broke its surface but instead, they simply disappeared from view. He also expected the distortions to grow larger as they closed in on the phenomenon. Yet they appeared to stay the same size as they did hundreds of yards back. It confused his perception of depth and the only indication he had they were getting nearer to the storm wards were the surrounding rocks, the traffic, and the cliffs that passed them by.
The wall of distortions extended into the sky like a future of uncertainty, hiding its secrets behind a haze of magic. He suddenly wanted to turn around and take flight, to lose himself in Molan Tierre's darkness. Nobody would ever find him, nobody would ever force him to stand any sort of trial or invest in this lie. Every intuition told him that if he passed the storm ward, there would be no return.
Ten landriders stood between them and the threshold. Then there were nine, then eight, then seven and six. He should do it, he should take his chances and run. Slade wouldn’t notice his absence in the noise. Five landriders left, then four. They were going to accuse him, they were going to torment him with their proclamations! Three landriders left. He held onto the hoodie clutched in his lap as if it were a talisman against madness. Two landriders, one landrider, finally, it was Holan’s turn.
The wall devoured Slade before it washed over him. His eyes were forced shut by an immense pressure and in a matter of seconds, he felt as though he had gained an additional twenty pounds. Then he felt weightless, followed by a sensation of static. But as soon as it had begun, the sensation was over, and his breath returned to him.
“Okay that was weird,” he said, shaking out the ants crawling in his limbs, “I wish you would have given me some sort of warn...warning.”
All ideas of speech left him. No words could come out of his mouth when he saw what stood before them both.
Comments
Joseph Sikorski
Yeah, I’d be weeping in a forest like that. God what a chapter. Less sublime, a repeated “as if”: [Above, he saw the hallway _as if_ looking into _as if_ the floor were made of transparent glass tiles.]
NightHarlaw
God, as much as I’d love to read all of these chapters I don’t want it to end 🥲
