I bent over, panting. We had raced away from the stage as fast as we could. I was simply furious! Those…those children had taken our wonderful victory and thrown it down in ruins! And destroyed our Songs as well! The rage in my chest was being rapidly overtaken by another feeling, however.
Hollowness.
I hadn't ever felt this empty before, not even when we had wandered the world after our initial banishment and went without feeding for a while. This did not bode well. How would we survive now? And was the thrall we held over some people still stand? Thank goodness that I had looked ahead and stashed money in a bank decades ago. We had enough to get by on and even if the deal we had on our apartment went up, we’d still have a roof over our heads.
Contracts are the noose by which humans hang themselves.
I saw my sisters standing nearby, panic and worry clear in their eyes. Sonata had her hand pressed to her belly, wincing slightly.
“Dagi,” she whispered. “I’m scared.”
I didn’t know how to assure her. We were SIrens! We had wreaked havoc over both Equestria and the seas of this world and fear was something we drank like a fine wine, avarice was a light snack, and anger or strife filled us like nothing else.
I looked at her, and I wondered what I should do.
“What are we going to do. Adagio?” Aria asked with none of her usual sarcasm. “We need our Songs to feed.” In her eyes, I saw confusion and she looked at me for guidance.
“We don't need them to feed,” I said shakily. “It just makes it easier. We need to stay calm. We’ll go grab the shards after everyone leaves the arena. Maybe they can be fixed.”
“By who?” Aria shouted. “It's not like we know a lit of folk that specialize in magical gem repair!”
“It’s better than nothing!” I shouted back. Fear was chopping my temper even shorter.
“Stop it!” Sonata yelled, hands in fists and tears in her eyes.
I froze and looked at her. She had never raised her voice once in my memory. She looked on the verge of breaking down.
Truth be told, I wasn’t far behind.
And in the back of my mind, a little voice started taunting me, smug and biting.
This is all your fault. You did this to them with your leadership. You brought them down with your arrogance.
You’ve killed them.
As those words filtered through, I sagged back against the alley wall and slid down it as tears began to fill my eyes.
Pain. All I could focus on was the pain. My hunger had always hit me harder than my sisters, never really knew why. But beyond the haze of pain and shock I watched as Adagio slumped against the wall, tears flooding down her face.
I had never seen her cry before. No matter what we went through, she always had a plan and always seemed confident, but now…
I felt even more afraid seeing the hopelessness in her face. My stomach was roiling from my anxiousness and I turned to the side, retching. I dimly heard Sonata say something but all I could hear was the rush of my panicked heartbeat.
Adagio was the leader. I may have made moves to take over on the occasion, but deep down I knew that she had the motivation and natural talent for taking charge. But if even she was saying it was hopeless, then what chance did we have? Feeding had been hard enough with the gems, and they made it easier in this world with such low ambient magic.
I looked back at the lights of the stage, and immediately started back towards them, still hunched over somewhat from the twisting feeling in my gut.
“Ari?” I heard Sonata whimper. “Where are you going?”
“To collect what shards I can find,” I rasped. “Maybe there’s enough residual enchantment that we at least won’t starve.”
Adagio swiped her tears away roughly. “Don’t do it now,” she whispered. “They’re still playing down there, can’t you hear them?”
I stopped, trying to hear through the pulse in my ears. Dimly, I heard a guitar strike a few notes hard. I hung my head and cursed. Mentally, I berated myself for being so desperate. I pressed a hand against my chest as a hollowness began to spread now that my panic was subsiding. A throbbing, clawing numbness that threatened to subsume me.
I sank to my knees, trying to draw on the rage that had so often flowed through me to beat the numbness aside. I slammed my fist against the pavement, and the pain actually driving it away momentarily. I felt the sting of tears in my eyes but I forced them back. One of us had to stay strong, keep it together.
But as I looked at my sisters again, I knew it wasn’t going to be me. Not this time.
Adagio was crying, Aria was looking lost, and all I could feel was numbing fear. And under that, a sinking feeling that sat where I was used to my hunger being. I felt like I could collapse at any moment.
I wasn’t the smart one. I wasn’t the strong one. I was the cheery one. But I couldn’t even muster the energy to try and get my sisters to bond together so we could figure out our next step. I kept looking back and forth from Adagio, who had her head tilted back against the wall as tears dripped down her face, to Aria, who had started pounding a fist against the pavement, anger and pain in her face. I could tell she was fighting back tears, and those alone were enough to panic me.
Aria never cried. Adagio never cried. That wasn’t their reactions. Adagio would convince prey of something they feared so deeply that they would believe it was happening. Aria would just beat them or make them fear of the same. Breaking down was not either of their methods.
I ran my hand through my hair, feeling the roostertail pulling free of the tie I had it up in. In moments, everything was breaking down. I felt my knees give out, and I collapsed to the sidewalk. I felt dizzy, all of a sudden, and the world swam in my vision.
I heard Adagio say my name, and I looked up. She was slowly walking towards me, concern in her face as she drew near. “Are you alright?” she asked, her voice dull, as though my ears were stuffed with cotton.
I think that more than anything else frightened me. We were Sirens, and concern was not a huge part of our makeup. While we were a group, it was always understood that if any of us fell behind, we would get cut loose. It was how we were raised, after all.
But Adagio was coming towards me, worried for my well-being. I felt her hand take mine and I squeezed weakly. The place where my hunger once rested began to feel more and more like an abcess, a weeping wound that would fester before it got any better.
I let Adagio pull me to my feet, supporting me somewhat as we slowly made our way back the way we had come. We crept back to the stage, now empty and the seating devoid of anyone. Up onto the stage we went, and sitting there in the debris of blown trash were the rubicund fragments of our pendents, our Songs.
I picked up a large piece of my pendent, seeing a faint glimmer flicker through the gem before it died again. I didn’t find all that many pieces before Adagio looked around.
“We need to move,” she whispered. “Get back to shelter and prepare whatever we have in the event something else goes wrong.”
And that was when I truly knew how bad things were for us.
Adagio was planning to run away.
And this was a first in the centuries we had been alive.
