Discordant Note: Crescendo | TBATE

Chapter 280: What the Pages Whisper

Thank you to my beta reader and editor, GlassThreads!

Toren Daen

The oceans burned in my dreams. The Sea of my Soul flashed and churned with angry torrents as time slipped by meaninglessly. Sometimes I was drowning, thrashing through a mist of memories as they blackened my heart. Others, I managed to tread water, gasping for air.

I saw flashes outside. Dark walls and the scent of iron and copper. Rough hands, warmth and worried voices.

Then I was submerged again in that boiling sea. The spire of banishment made everything hot, made my heart beat in my chest as if it wanted to tear its way out.

More flashes. Onyx eyes and severe, pale skin. Silver hair and the scent of roses. A hand over my forehead.

I screamed in my dreams. A severed sun, bleeding the love of his mother. A turbulent, raging star that was riddled with scars. It pulsed with every inch of tremorous pain. A dark moon with no more masks. A weakly pulsing shield, littered with cracks. A crown of family and steel, halfway forged into a sword.

Chul. Aurora. Seris. Cylrit. Arthur.

More and more, these images crashed through my very soul. I forgot who I was. Then I remembered it again, trying to pull back. But then I forgot again amidst the storm. Birdsong and the rustling of autumn leaves echoed all around me in half-known memories.

"I have more freedom here than I enjoyed in an age."

"A birdcage of oaths for one of silver vines and autumn leaves?"

"I love you, Chul! Let us stop this madness!"

The screams of innocents dying, dying under my watch. Their heartfire scraping at my bones.

Pain. Pain and agony like I had never known. The sea became blood as I drowned. That scent of copper and iron became an overwhelming sensation as I sank like a stone in the unending tide of red.

My Sea wasn't water anymore. No, it was blood.

That red burned everything. It boiled away my skin, sinking deep into my muscles and tearing at my nerves. And when I opened my mouth to scream, to beg for my mother, only an infinite tide of sloshing curdled crimson. It squeezed itself through my pores, in the spaces between my eyes and my skull. My wings shattered and broke, splintering and adding only more to the unending flood.

Nobody came. I was alone as that boiling sea drew me deeper in, as my very soul devoured me. Not-thoughts came and went as the bloody abyss reflected itself above the surface beside a reddened, broken sun.

But as I drowned in my very soul, space warping and twisting into things that should not be and thoughts that could not be known, I... started to hear it.

In between the weaves of sorrow, agony, and darkness, there was a... flow. Even in how I drowned, pulling myself about my own ravaged soul as I struggled not to be overwhelmed, there was a cadence to it. A rhythm in the stars and sonata in the blood.

Every cry for help and anguished pulse of my heart only seemed to add to this echoing symphony of despair. Each pulse was a note that pulled me over and under and through.

I was naught but a tapestry of bones as the hateful crimson boiled my flesh away. And when the mortality had been scoured away–

I opened my eyes, like a corpse that lived again.

My senses flowed back toward me slowly, each one taking painful time. The sloshing of blood in my meat puppet of a body. My breathing in my ragged chest, my ribs rattling. The ache of my core and every single muscle as they squeezed. The distant sounds of chugging, rugged steel.