Empyrean

Chapter 18

Chapter 18-Fenix

Zenith One, Palace on the Palace

Midday, 7th of Pachon, Year 612

            Serena has been here for a day now. Most of yesterday she just tried to talk her way out of staying here. At about sunset, she either got tired of it and gave up, or thought of a plan to escape. I am led to believe this because there was an instant; I remember it well, where she changed her point of view on the situation. She stopped asking to be let free and started asking about us. How long we have lived up here, how much we eat, where we learned to read and the like. Eris said that Serena was ‘not her problem’ so I ended up watching her for the whole time. Sometimes Echo would come in, but I still don’t trust those two alone yet. I don't think it’s offence, or even disappointment, but I was a little unnerved when I realized she didn't recognize me. We had only met once, but I know that those few minutes were more than enough time for me to completely understand her. Whether it went both ways, I can’t say.

            “In any event, that is how I spent my fifth birthday. It’s probably different than how you spent yours, but would you mind telling me?”

            “Sorry.” I reply, having only caught the first and last sentences of that monologue.

            “Nothing to be sorry about.” Serena says standing up from the one chair in the room. “I have some memories that I wouldn't want to share too.”

            That is not the response I expected from her. She is sometimes very, very bullheaded. But at others she is as earthly as Gaia herself. “Great. Then are we done telling stories?”

            “What? Of course not! You have to at least tell me one more. I came hear to find out more about you people, and that is exactly what I intend to do.” She sits back down again. Being cooped up in this house for the past twenty-four hours has done nothing for either of our restlessness. I know that if I let us out now, she probably wouldn't run. But that would also do two things that I cannot allow. It would tell her that I trust her, and it would mean that my initial gauge of her intentions was wrong.

            “Ok. I will tell you one more story.” I stop leaning on the inside corner of the house and walk over to her. “But that means I get to sit in the chair.”

            “Fine.”

            She moves to the ground in front of the table and sits crisscrossed on the floor looking up at me. I place both of my hands on the table and begin the story like a children’s tale. “Not too long ago there lived two people, a boy and a girl to be exact. In reality they never should have met, but Fate tends to pull the wrong strings sometimes. In any event, the boy was a poor and the girl was rich. Unbelievably rich she was to the boy. She had everything, status, money, family, but most of all a future.” I am in the middle of a wide swinging arm motion when she interrupts me.

            “I thought we were telling stories about our pasts! You are telling some cockamamie children’s fable.”

            “I am.” I say intentionally masking the meaning behind my words. It is always funny to me when words can mean nothing. Sound doesn't innately mean anything anyway. When it becomes apparent to someone else though, that is my pleasure.

            “You are what? Are you telling your past, or a cockamamie children’s fable?” She, despite her obvious disturbance, doesn't move from her spot.

            “Yes.” She seems to know what I mean, so I continue. “She had a future while he was left to be a street rat. The boy had been captured not a week before and not for doing anything real bad either. He was just in the wrong place, reading the wrong book, at the wrong time. Anyway, the authorities had captured him and he was to be used to examine the mental capacity and state of the girl. They were both thrown in a dark room alone together. The only things keeping them company were the ants marching on the floor and the slight drip in the far corner of the room, but even those were subtle and hard to reach beauties. The game was like this.

            “The girl had been woken up in the middle of the night and told that there was a prisoner that had gone insane. That he was spitting treasonous words and curses against the authorities. He needed to be put down. This was to be the girl’s job. When the two were inside the room. The boy said to her that her whole world was a lie. He said that what the girl was trying to be only ended in a sad anti-climactic whirl of dust on the ground. He said that her life had no meaning, that she was just the product of the random causality of life and existence… a wave on the open ocean if you will. She had no reason to be there, the wind just so happened to push in a way that gave birth to her. There would have been no record of her. She was unimportant. The only thing that was significant about her wave was that it existed, and maybe rolled along longer than the infinite number of waves that did not.

            “When she heard this from the boy, she at first thought him sad, lost, confused even, but after a long silence, she became to accept this. She accepted that there was nothing special about her and that she would die one day. She would probably live without a reason and die sans one as well. Even if she did manage to find one, no purpose is immortal. No country, person, fear, war, or love had ever lasted forever, and none ever would. She accepted that her life was a grain of sand on a seemingly infinite beach of lives and deaths.            

            “With this in mind she listened to the boy. She listened to his story, where he really came from, his real name, his real people, and his real family. She heard him tell of how he had run away from home and lived alone and with friends for years before becoming strong enough to go back and kill the two whom he hated so. She heard him speak of how after he had done this deed he could no longer stay with his new friends, that he had to leave and live alone again. The boy knew a lot about the world that the girl had never dreamed of. He knew of the outside world, beyond the walls of the city she called home. He knew of the countless treasures of the world, things that he had learned to love, like music.”

            Serena stops me. “What, exactly, is music?” Perfect timing.

            I know that her memory has been wiped, but it still surprises me that someone so old, my age, could not know what music is. I open my mouth to answer, but before I can, as if ordained by some humorous being that lay in a superior plane, Eris’ voice carried into the dwelling filling the air with the beautiful vibrations.

I’m walking down that road for all to see

The sunshine and rain be battlin’ over me

Don’t know where I go or what I am to be

But the sunshine and rain do do battle over me!

            “That,” I say. “That is music.”