CAIRN

Ch 2 - Meet

A million voices clamored from the void. Thea lay suspended in what seemed like an eternity of pale yellow. The voices quieted down when they saw her stir.

Thea's eyes opened slowly, only to be immediately overwhelmed by the emptiness of her surroundings. She twisted and turned, but lacking any point of reference in the vast expanse, she didn't know if she moved or not.

The silence was broken by one voice. It sounded as if the very rustling of leaves in the wind were making words. Along with the strange voice, the void was overrun with floral patterns. The pictures of vines and flowers twirled and grew when the voice spoke, and receded into a single point when the voice fell quiet. It took Thea a few moments to catch onto what the voice was saying.

"... would you show it to us?" she heard the voice say.

"I- I don't... Show you what, sorry?" replied Thea.

"It," said the voice, now sounding impatient, "the object you found."

Thea was still confused.

"I just... I'm sorry I really don't know what you're talking about. Who are you?" she said.

She was met with complete silence. After a few moments, a different voice spoke up. This voice was melodious, like the vibrating of many strings. When it spoke, Thea saw crystals in deep purples and bright aquas grow and shrink through the void.

"Maybe she doesn't remember what happened," the melodious voice said.

Thea frowned and tried to think back. It was true, she didn't know what had happened shortly before waking up here. It would've also been nice to know where here was.

"I don't remember how I got here, no." said Thea.

"You're not anywhere." replied the melodious voice.

"Never mind that," said the first voice, "you should still have access to things you had in your possession. Now show it to us," the voice had become insistent, its initially calming sound of leaves-in-the-wind was now more like a tropical forest in the midst of a hurricane.

Thea recoiled in fear. She brought her knees up to her chin, curling her body into a ball. As she did, she noticed she'd been holding something. Thea opened her hand, revealing the blue green stone she'd picked up. As soon as the rock came into sight, the pocket universe where she was floating descended into chaos.

Now hundreds of voices, all making their own patterns, quarreled in an incomprehensible mess of accusatory yells and claims to legitimate ownership of the stone. Thea lowered her head into her knees, hoping that the shouting would stop soon.

It took several minutes for the voices to silence themselves. No voice seemed to be able to speak above others to quiet them down, but once they seemed to realize that they had a girl in fetal position, begging to be let go, they calmed down a bit and decided to work differently.

For a while, Thea heard nothing, but patterns still sprung up around her. The voices were speaking privately, scheming.

At one point, another voice, a different voice, spoke.

"You've found something very rare, temporal one" the voice was what a gold ingot would sound like if it could speak. Metallic, refined, but almost excessive, "it's a remnant of the only thing older than us."

Thea looked down at her hand. The blue green stone looked like just that, a strangely-colored stone.

"Don't be fooled by its mundane appearance," the metallic voice resumed its brassy, slow talk, "We're not entirely sure what it is or what it does, but we know that it's a part of those remnants. None of us, powerful as we may be, can touch it. When it is not in the possession of a temporal creature, we can't even see it."

Thea looked up at the void. In it, the elegant and complex flourishes of the metallic voice were fading back into nothingness.

"Then- Then what do you want?" She said.

Silence again.

"We don't know the extent of the damage those things could cause," spoke a hissing, rough voice, like a thousand bricks sliding against concrete, "that stone could be capable of destroying us or the temporal realms. We've agreed that regardless of what they may actually do, we must treat those stones as if they do the worst possible things."

"That's right," said the metallic voice, its flourishes replacing the tessellated geometric forms that the hissing voice drew, "we have to secure them precisely because we don't know what they do. Their ability to conceal themselves from us has caused us much trouble in this. We can't just have objects with unknown, potentially terrible power floating through the cosmos, but there's often very little we can do. Now, though, with the envoy we'll send you, you will help us."

The young, floating woman bit her lip.

"She won't help!" yelled another voice. Before Thea could process anything else, all the shouting voices came back in full force, arguing with each other fiercely.

The cacophony of thundering voices became too much. Thea's eyes rolled back into her head and her memory of the realm where the gods yell at each other ends right there, with her falling into a deep sleep.