//------------------------------// // The Dream Of The Sirens // Story: In the Company of Night // by Mitch H //------------------------------// SBMS035 I dreamed that night… Dragging my little conch behind me, two little furrows left like zig-zag trails in the white coral sands. Upwards and upwards, around the roots of the coral towers, even their bases teeming with rampaging life, rioting in the drifting rain of indescribable detritus from the chaos above, so many different living things, all of them fighting for their share of the gift. Life among the coral towers was brief, brutish, savage – but not lonesome. Little swarms of creatures working in tandem, in concert, fighting their little wars for their share of the loot against other little swarms, or single solitary monsters looming large among the little swarmlings. All of them making use of the coral walls that surrounded us on every side, as sanctuaries, barriers, traps, the blind alleys and cul-de-sacs and secret rooms tangling within themselves like vast, intricate, tiny labyrinths. I retreated within my shell, my own savage claws the only part of me extending out of my personal portable fortress, as a couple of little transparent predators tried to pry my juicy bits out of myself. A few swipes, and the cowed motes flicked away for easier prey. An eye-stalk extending, I pulled myself back out of my shell, and continued my ascent. As the watery light from above strengthened, the coral began to come to life, or rather, the creatures and plants that made the coral continued to survive, began to thrive, in the new regions through which I dragged myself. Riots of color waving in the currents and the light, still swarms of predators and scavengers and prey, but more and more the prey themselves preying on actual living material, the mindless aquatic plants that worshiped the light and drew it in and were slowly devoured by their harvesters, devoured so slowly that they themselves often outlived their herbivorous parasites, torn apart and eaten in their turn by those that preyed upon them. It was all so beautiful, the riot of worship of the light, a cloud of little deaths that somehow added up to life. As the coral sea-mount I circled rose to the surface of the sea, I heard the singing, the sirens singing each to each, distorted and echoing above the tiny tumult of the constant battle of life of the middle and upper ranges of the world. I did not think they sang to me. The song became clearer and less plagued by echoes as I approached the surface, the waves muted by out-lying coral reefs surrounding the sea-mount itself. Multiple voices twining in a competitive, sharp-taloned sort of harmony, this voice or that seizing the lead for a few short lines or words, would-be divas squabbling in song over their time to sing aria above the others. As I crawled onto the beach, the sun setting glorious-trained in the westwards, dragging her clouds of purple and red and golden behind her, the sea-horses combed the white hair of the waves blown back, perched upon the coral out-reefs rising above the entrances to the lagoon, my little crab eyes somehow making out the many-colored sirens in their endless musical struggle with each other. The water of the lagoon was broken again and again as other hermit-crabs, dragging their various bits of coral and abandoned shells behind them, crawled up the beach, to join me in listening to the musical, somehow harmonious cacophony of singers in conflict. As the glorious colors of sunset faded into the cool tones of twilight, it was as if the scaly hides of the beautiful sirens drew down the hues of the heavens into themselves, their endless song leaving them glowing on their coral thrones. I curled, half-resting on my shelled porch, among my clawed fellows stretched out along the beach on either side, and we listened to their argumentative song as night followed day. The eastward palm-tree tops were touched by a cold, burning glow behind us, and the chill rays of the unseen moon stretched black shadows across the sands before the crowd of crabs under the harmonic conflict of the siren-chorus’s arguments. Hoof-prints broke the wave-smoothed sands before us two by two, four by four, silver hoof-bladed guards materializing from them rising upwards in spiraling vaporous accretion. Black-furred legs and then the goddess of the night herself, the night drawing down out of the skies above and swirling about her great head and demon-wings, mane and tail like galaxies in motion. Her great shout sundered the sirens’ song, and silence echoed across the star-touched lagoon reflecting her endless night. Their harmony resumed, subjugated into a subservient, fearful chorus, their quarreling set aside by the appearance of a true diva, and her aria filled the watery amphitheatre, her only audience her sirens and the lowly hermit-crabs in their serried shell-seats. Here at our surfacing The day hidden beneath Silent smoothed sea Surfaces hiding the Struggle of the Merciless sun in all Her endless and hopeless Hypocritical demands Our sister she gives Her gifts to give But leaving then all These terrible, squalid Consequences To her faithful work-horse Humble Night to Oh, somehow, fix To resolve, to drown These dilemma of the day Under the secret Cloak of the Night. If you would make Us Your pet monster, Tyrant Sister, merciless Sun! See how we wax Within our cold shadows Monstrous and terrible! And wane your sister Sad wan moon with her Weak and reflected light Who you lovingly Called to your proud standard To be the killer in your shadow! The Nightmare, her song sung, dematerialized, and the lagoon returned to its night-time rhythms, the spooked sirens diving for the safety of open ocean and waves not haunted by dread dreams of vengeance and monsters monstrous even by their squabbling standards. Once the ripples of the sirens’ retreat subsided in the lagoon, a shadow crept from behind my shell, and a tiny horse-shaped blot in the sand before me formed again. "Acolyte, how dream you this evening? Have you foals for my hunger?" "Mistress," I chittered in the language of anthropods, "I only bring you the dream of foals, and the death of harmless fools." The walls of the narrow city-square rose up out of the waters of the star-touched lagoon, and within those walls the faceless jeering crowd, and the stocks with weeping foals cringing their faces from flung mud and stones. Above the stocks stood the gallows, and the dangling caribou dead, their faces bloated in the moonlight, their hooves dangling in the slight waves of the enclosed lagoon waters. "Mistress, is this what you wished, what you want? The angry, desperate mobs, lashing out at innocent foals and hanging foolish, senile old bucks? Would you have us pull down our lances and charge the hungry mobs and their well-earned fury, and save the innocent and the foolish? Would you have us hang the foals as well, or offer them to you on your Company-altar? What would make you happy again, Lady?" The shadow on the sand blew forward, swirling across the surface of the waters, and from the darkness emerged a blue-furred mare, her mane and tail dragging the stars and darkness out of the lagoon’s mirror, her eyes equine and tearing. She skated across the spectral cobblestone square, her blue-feathered wings high and proud, war-like, coming to a stop between the foals in their stocks and the faceless mob. The ghost-projectiles passed through her, one phantasm passing another in the dream of the night, and she screamed, shattering the vision, "No!" She turned to my anthropod self in my conch-shell, her eyes turning draconic, thestral, the feathers falling from her wings and the calm blue of her fur boiling into blackness. As the dream broke up, we heard her say in a voice like thunder, "Find a WAY!" And equine voices drowned us.