Caught in the swirling coastal wind, Forza’s long hair twisted and writhed around him. It clutched at the air, then fell, rose, and fell again. In the middle of it all, his eyes blazed like embers when he shot a glance back over his shoulder. “Hurry up! We have no time for your nonsense!”
“But I’m tired!” Adagio dragged her foot up yet another of the seemingly endless stone stairs that had been carved into the towering cliff. Twin fires smoldered in each of her legs, flaring up again with each step.
Forza’s mouth twisted into a hard sneer. “You’re tired. I’m sure that will be a big comfort to your brother.”
Reaching out a hand to steady herself on the cliff’s clammy wall, Adagio dropped her eyes to the ground. She hated it, but her mother was always telling her that she’d get farther with her father by not pushing things so much. “I just want to stop for a second. My feet—”
“Well, that’s too bad.” Forza snatched Adagio’s hand from the wall and pulled. “I let your mother coddle you for twelve years—two years too long—but it’s finally time for you to do your part!” His flinty eyes bored into her. “If you’re able.”
Adagio’s lower lip trembled.
Forza worked his tongue around his mouth, then spat at her feet. “Poor Adagio. Here she suffers the Joining while her brother risks death daily at our border.”
“Well, then you do it!” Adagio said, her face hardening. “I didn’t ask—”
Adagio let out a small scream when her father’s hand shot out and grabbed a fistful of her voluminous hair. Growling, he dragged her up several stairs. “Didn’t ask? As though you ever would have! You! Born with power, yet you squander it singing to birds while wasting time with your friends. We face extinction, but poor, precious Adagio—”
“Let go of me!”
“Poor, precious Adagio,” he continued, raising his voice, “can’t be bothered! Practices when she feels like it. Helps out at home only when there’s nothing better to do. Talks back. Well, no more! You’ll—”
Forcing her head up, Adagio inhaled, then sang out a quavering note. The air between them rippled like the surface of a wind-blown pond.
Forza’s eyes slid out of focus for only a second, but in that moment, his hand spasmed and released his daughter. His mouth fell open, then twisted into a furious snarl.
Adagio lifted her foot to step away, then stomped it back down to the ground. Her fingernails dug into her palms as she she balled her fists against her sides. “Oh, I’m so sorry I’m such a disappointment to you!” Her eyes flashed. “I’m sorry that eight hours of practicing every day isn’t enough! I’m sorry that I have to stop when my throat gives out. I’m sorry I’m not perfect like Marcato!”
“Your brother was never perfect, but he knew what was at stake!” Forza reached out again, but pulled his hand away just before touching Adagio, settling instead for shaking his fist in her face. “His teachers never had to come to me complaining that he just didn’t feel like singing that day. He never lazed in bed while the rest of the house sweated. No, when Marcato was able, he performed his Joining without complaint. He went to defend us because that’s his duty!”
“Well, I don’t want to!” Adagio trembled, but refused to look away from her father’s hard, hateful eyes. “All you want me to do is force people to do what you want them to do! I’m sick of it!”
“All I want you to do is fulfill your obligations!”
“They aren’t mine!” Lips pulled back into a snarl, Adagio leaned into the argument that had simmered between them for twelve years. Her mother had carefully tended to the escalating heat, diffusing the aggression where she could, but here, away from her soothing voice and gentle touch, Adagio found herself eager. She would not be silenced again. “No one asked me! I didn’t agree to anything! Maybe I don’t want to spend the rest of my life fighting things and waiting to get killed! You don’t care about me or Marcato! All you care about is that everyone knows you sent your son and daughter off to the war because you’re such a great citizen! It probably got you a bunch of new business when you packed Marcato off, didn’t it? You probably—”
“How dare you?” Forza’s face drained to bone white, then ugly blotches of red blossomed on his cheeks. His whole body shook. “You have no idea what I have sacrificed for—”
“I know exactly what you’ve sacrificed!” Tears welled in Adagio’s eyes, but she wiped them away hard with the back of her hand. “Us! It’s always us! Everyday, you use me and Marcato and mom to get what you want, and when we’re all used up, you’ll find someone else and do it again!”
Forza’s hand clenched into a fist, and he half-raised his arm before taking several steadying deep breaths. Still trembling, he fixed his daughter with his narrowed, iron-grey eyes. “Use. What a curious way of putting it. I’d love to find some use for you. We live in a society, Adagio, and each of us has a function. Each of us but you, who spends her days doing as she pleases because no one knows better than she. You’d speak to me of using? Your mother and father provide for you, and what do we get in return? Your teachers and trainers spend countless hours, and what do they have to show for it? You stand on the backs of multitudes, yet give nothing!” He leaned in, thrusting his finger into her face. “Now tell me, who is using whom?”
Adagio slapped the finger away. “Fine! You want me to help out so bad? You want me to be a ‘contributing member of society?’ Let’s go do your precious ritual. You think I’m bad now? Just wait until—”
“What? What are you going to do, Adagio? Bring us all to heel with your new-found might?” Forza snapped, turning his back on her and ascending the stairs again, “You’d have to succeed first, and quite frankly, I have my doubts about that.”
Seething, Adagio growled and slammed her fist into the damp, cold stone wall beside her. “I hate you!” she whispered.
~~~
Buffeted by ferocious gusts, Forza’s hand wavered wildly while he struggled to point to a worn stone dais. “Stand in the circle.”
“I’m going!” Adagio wondered if her father could even hear her. The howling winds at the top of cliff tore the words from her mouth and sent them tumbling back toward the mainland. She screamed louder. “What do I do now?”
Forza motioned to faint indentations in the circle’s center. “Put your feet there.”
Adagio continued to glare at him while she stomped into place.
“Don’t look at me, idiot girl! Look over—” A smirk wormed its way across his face. “Ah. Do you feel it? There’s no turning away from your responsibility this time.”
“What are you—”
A rumbling growl shook the earth beneath their feet. Adagio whipped her head around and stared off into the foggy ocean air. Despite everything she’d said to herself in the past few weeks, she found herself trembling. A white hot bolt of panic shot through her.
Something was coming for her. Something big.
“No…” Adagio took a step off of the dais.
“Do not move!”
Adagio found herself back in position. Turning to catch her father out of the corner of her eye, she swallowed hard. Several feet away, he’d dropped to one knee, clutching his throat. Fear mixed with a kind of smug satisfaction warred within her. Like most of their people, her father had only been born with a faint touch of the gift. Adagio could feel his jealousy and greed each time he came to hear her sing. His own voice, so common and flat, held very little of the power to command and control that she’d been born with. To influence her as he had, he must have had to strain to his very limits. He was probably in a great deal of pain, and that made Adagio want to smile.
But it also meant that whatever this was held incredible danger. The ground trembled again, and the beginnings of Adagio’s grin fell away. She wanted to run, but her feet refused. “What is it? What’s going on?”
“Tame it, Adagio.” His voice rasped out, barely audible above the whipping of the winds.
She twisted around to face him, her teeth bared. “You didn’t say anything about fighting!”
“It’s forbidden!” he croaked. “The ceremony’s secrets must be kept.”
Adagio hummed low and felt the glamour of his song break. She stepped off the dais again, but nearly fell when the thing roared out in a strange, keening voice. Somewhere below them, a section of cliff cracked and dropped into the sea. “Well, I’m not—”
She froze when she met her father’s eyes. They were wide and desperate. For once, any trace of scorn had left them. “It’s an Ancient that you’ve called!” His finger stabbed back toward the dais. “Get back into position! The ritual has begun. You cannot end it! The creature will devour your mind!”
Her knees buckled when vicious laughter exploded inside her head. Reeling, Adagio tried to find her bearings, but the seaside whirled around her. Something was filling her consciousness: A presence equally malicious and contemptuous.
You have finally come. Even whispering, the voice slammed into her mind with sledgehammer force. So strong. So weak. So many glimmering facets. Which parts to consume first?
In the fog, a hulking shadow rose before them. Where the haze allowed, Adagio caught glimpses. The flash of a golden scale. Saliva glinting from a yellowed tooth. The narrowing of an eye.
“Master it!” her father said, rising to stand beside her. “If not for me—if not for our people—tame it for yourself. You must win this or become its slave, and to become its slave is to become the enemy!”
Adagio shot him a glare filled with loathing before stepping back onto the dais. “You didn’t tell me.”
“It is forbid—”
“You didn’t tell me!” Adagio felt the presence in her mind retreat from her anger. Half-snarling, she allowed her rage to fill her. “You! All of you! Everyone is always just… just trying to get everyone else to do whatever it is that they want. It’s all lies and plots and whatever you can do to force people into your plan! Well, I’m not going to be a part of it! I’m done!”
Are you now? the voice purred. Perhaps you would walk a new path? Others have stood within the circle and found that they desired more. Your brothers and sisters, weary of their chains, have joined with us. Will you? I can free you from your people…
Adagio focused on her anger, imagining it as a white-hot ball. The voice hissed and shrank away. “Get… out… of my… mind!”
Adagio shuddered when the thing chuckled. It was a thick, viscous sound, as though it laughed through a throatful of blood. Idiot girl. They really have kept it all from you. It laughed again, and Adagio felt its power build. The truth is, I will never be out of your mind. We are Joined. What did you think you were here for? All that is left is for you to open yourself to me. Submit, and we will tear down everything you hate so ferociously.
“I will never give in to you or anyone else!”
Hopeless, but amusing. Come then, crawling creature of land. Fight, and know that you will be mine in the end.
~~~
Jagged pain sliced through Adagio’s head again, and she staggered. Trembling, she dropped to one knee. The skin there burst apart and bled when it slammed into the stone dais, but she hardly noticed. The world around her dimmed as the monstrous presence in her mind continued to thrash and buck. Hate flowed over her like a tsunami, and she vomited again.
“Get up!” Forza hooked her under arm and dragged her back to her feet. “You must do this!”
Her eyes squeezed shut, Adagio slowly shook her head. “C-can’t,” she said. The muscles around her jaw jumped when she clenched her teeth. “I—”
“Do it!”
She sagged again. “It’s too—”
Tightening his grip on her arm, Forza struck her across the face with the open palm of his other hand. “Do it!”
Adagio’s eyes flew open, and she cried out. In the distance, a discordant roar echoed her pain. As she brought a hand up to cup her stinging cheek, the keening howl grew. Adagio and Forza both stumbled when sub-harmonic bass waves shook the earth beneath them.
Forza squeezed her arm more tightly still, dragging Adagio just inches from his face. “Master it, or you are of no use to our people.” He pushed her to the dais’s edge. Below, past the cliff’s drop, the churning ocean pounded against the stones. “Don’t think that I won’t give you to the sea if you become its thrall!” Adagio windmilled her free arm when he tipped her over the edge. “Death will be your only refuge then, and don’t think that I’ll hesitate!”
Teeth bared, Adagio snatched as much of Forza’s long, greying hair out of the swirling winds as she could and wrapped it around her hand several times. “If I go, you go!”
“That’s it! Fight!” Forza pulled Adagio back from the cliff’s edge. “Again! Sing!”
Adagio lingered on her father’s face for a moment, and her mind flashed to the statues that lined the boulevard leading to the grand concert hall. Cold. Unyielding. Flawless, but in a way that separated rather than inspired. Her father admired those statues. He and they were the same: Rigidly obsessed with glory and the past.
The creature howled again, and both Forza and Adagio slapped their hands over their ears. Their clothes snapped and popped, rippling as the pounding sound hammered at them. For a moment, eyes flared out in the fog, then squeezed into dagger-like slits.
“Sing!”
Adagio leaned into the pulsing sound waves that beat against her, fighting to keep them from pushing her out of the dais. Squeezing her hands into tight fists, she opened her mouth and sang out a single sustained note.
The glowing eyes widened, and the atonal keening lost some of its bone-shaking power for just a moment before slamming back into the pair with renewed fury.
“Sing!” Ropes of strangely viscous blood flowed freely from Forza’s nose, and the capillaries around his now crimson eyes had burst. Dark bruises spread out along his cheeks. “Sing or be destroyed!”
The twisting, thrashing presence in Adagio’s mind rose again, but she refused to back away. Breathing in through her nose, she forced the air down into her burning lungs and transformed it there into power. Adagio let the world fall away, until she was alone with the creature before her.
Opening her mouth wide, Adagio belted out the note again, holding it this time.
In the distance, the creature screamed. The outcropping shook as the beast’s thrashing sent towering waves crashing into it. Snarling, the enormous golden beast surged toward them and continued its assault. As it neared, the hippocampus reared back and kicked its hooves, and rocks crumbled to dust on each side of the dais.
Standing firm before it, tiny Adagio held the note.
The air between the combatants buckled and bent away at desperate angles. Bits of color and strange shapes were born, then died within it. For the briefest moments, windows into other places flickered into view. Strange lands filled with the curious, the hungry, or the malevolent, only to disappear just as suddenly when the warping power between the siren and the hippocampus would shift. Great cracks split the rock below them in concentric rings. Their muscles locked to rigidity, the hippocampus and Adagio channeled their remaining might into their songs.
At the edge of Adagio’s field of vision, Forza threw a hand up to shield his face only to have the skin flayed from his palm. Once richly appointed, his ceremonial robe now flowed away from him in tatters. His face was so swollen that Adagio wondered how he could even see, but he still managed to fight his way behind a sheltering rock. He yelled something out to her just before disappearing behind cover.
Adagio couldn’t hear him, though. She was holding the note.
The creature’s will slammed into her mind. It bit and kicked and tore at her. She fought back, demanding obedience. Slowly, painfully, she created chains. She shut doors. Walls sprang up and penned the snarling, rampaging beast inside of them. Sweat poured down her face, then streamed out behind her as it fell into the hippocampus’s sonic attack.
Eyes blazing, Adagio held the note while reaching for the beast with clutching fingers.
Waves of sound, so potent now that they had become visible, battered everything around the combatants. Below, fish floated belly up, and birds too slow or too foolish to leave the battlefield dropped from the sky like stones. The stony outcropping that had been the site of the Joining for time untold was crumbling away.
Still, Adagio held the note.
Her lungs were on fire, and jagged knives stabbed into her throat, but she sang on. Before her, the hippocampus drew itself to its full height and poured everything it had into its countersong. Though her eyes were squeezed shut, she could still see the shimmering thing. Her eyelids did little to block the dazzling light that played off of its scales. Adagio could feel the seaside’s ambient magical energy sweep by her as the beast drank it in, and with each passing moment, those scales glowed more brightly.
That’s it! Adagio tossed her head back and spread her arms wide beside her. That’s the answer! Adagio mentally reached out for the arcane power flowing into her opponent. Imagining herself as a being with many arms, she grasped the pulsing ley lines and yanked.
The hippocampus slid forward, pulled off balance by the unexpected attack. Eyes wide, it roared, but collapsed into coughing gasps when Adagio pulled again. Nearby, stone cliffs that had stood for millennia crumbled into dust. Ocean boiled away into nothingness, its vital essence ripped away by the siren.
Adagio’s mouth curled up into a smirk. Her lungs didn’t ache quite so badly anymore. The cutting lines in her throat eased. She could go on forever, it seemed. In her mind, two golden, grasping hands clenched around the hippocampus’s raging will. A twisted smile flashed, and the hands bore down on the beast. Chains looped around its limbs while cage doors slammed. She barely noticed when the strange tingling sensation flared on her back. As naturally as walking, she rose into the air on gossamer wings to meet the beast in its element.
There, she held the note, then built it into a crescendo.
Her power washed over the hippocampus. Scales buckled and fell, slicing through the air briefly before dropping into the sea. The creature kicked and bit at the sound, desperate for some way to fight back, but the siren’s force of will was too great. Slowly, the hippocampus’s song changed. Instead of a discordant countersong, it harmonized.
Together, they held the notes.
Siren and hippocampus rose high above the ocean. Arcs of pure magic jumped between them, and with each crackling leap, Adagio felt her power swell. Her whole body seemed to vibrate like a plucked string. She smirked at the hippocampus. “Now—”
Adagio gasped. The incredible power that had been building around her suddenly shot through her limbs and up into the sensitive skin around her throat. Her hand flew up to the choker that had materialized there. Beneath her fingers, a jewel pulsed like a heartbeat.
The voice whispered in her mind again, but gently this time. I submit.