The Vampyre Syren
Part 1

QSI-N 9854179e(1)

Interview: Kvôrrím (aka Wander) | Øsjäm “Venus” Sjöbäl

Part 1: DeCrypting

Three things the ancient traveller carried. Each a totem of memory, of grounding, of dispelled illusions, they reminded him where he was—an Ariadne’s thread of sorts. Together they formed within a labyrinth, void of walls upon which his left hand might find purchase, or, where walls there were, such threads would lead him nowhere but deeper into realms of the non-euclidean. For dreams and fantasies were the winding passages he made home, and therein paradoxes and abstruse geometries were abound. In the spaces between two forms of lucidity where he wandered, only these three items, inscribed in words of power older than memory, threaded the corridors of all mankind’s imaginings.

First was a paper crane, wilted, wrinkled, and browning with age. This totem, an anchor to a past he could no longer remember, carried on it still the scent of someone important. Her name long faded in the expanses of time between them there yet remained the sillage of her fragrance, lingering like a ghost. She was precious to him, he knew, but for what reason, he could no longer recall. Impressed in washi preserved only in the worlds he created—worlds of dreams and fantasies—this fragrance was an anchor, reminding him of where he was, the place to which he must one day return, and the presence or absence of it would make obvious which of the two he was in.

Second, a ring worn on his left index finger. Made not any precious metal, but of tungsten carbide, void of any markings, jewels, or other decorations, filigree, engravings, nor scratches, nor blemishes of any sort. Like the crane, he could no longer recall how he came to be of its possession, nor in whose memory he wore it still, only that it was a gift from a dear friend whose face, like so many a photograph, had faded into naught but another indiscernible and washed-out shadow. Though the crane had long ago disintegrated in the real, the ring remained, affixed to his left index finger between worlds. It was a tether to identity, something that had, at one point, come to define him, a boon from one greater than he in a time none now lived who could remember. It would be there just the same now as when he woke.

Third, he kept an old, analogue telephone. The colour red, bright and bold, like cherry taffy, it had on its face a fixed, black ring where a dial one might have turned would be, and its handset, connected by a corkscrewed wire to the base, remained as an icon of an era dead and forgotten for four orders of magnitude longer than it had twice once been. This was not so much carried upon him, like as the crane and the ring, but was hidden just on the limits of the landscape, tucked away in impossible geometries, a corner or a cupboard or a biometric safe built into the intangible substrate of his mind.

This hard line to reality was his oldest device. The ancient traveller knew this, though he did not know how. It was right that it should be the oldest, for he knew also there was one in the real, held in the stewardship of one entrusted with its keeping. When he was needed, they would call upon him, and, in the spaces between, his would ring. Its shrill and shrieking bell, striker oscillating between two metal domes tucked within its inscrutable components, made by intent to be an intolerable presence he could not ignore nor give reply with any delay.

Silence had fallen over this totem for what he knew was the longest duration yet. So long had it been that he had very nearly forgotten about it entirely, his memory only retracing the path, and with great strain, when its altitonant trill interrupted his guidance of another forlorn soul on a journey to some lesser measure of peace.

Though to his ears its cries thundered on high, the ancient man knew no others besides him could perceive its presence. He had made it that way. He knew this, but like its age, he could not articulate why, only that it was right to be so. He departed the young man whose wailing and torment he had heard from afar, and to whom he had come as sad replacement for the want of a Virgil. The young followed as the old approached the telephone, hidden behind a patch of cloud.

He, the ancient, turned to the young man before opening the cloud door and said, “Go on without me. I’ll not be long.”

The young man nodded, and then drifted away on his own. At first he went tepidly, like an infant taking their first steps, before, having found his footing, greater command of his flight was seized, and he went off, soaring like the great skorðhawk of Trønheimer. With pride, the old man’s heart swelled. He watched the young man go, the telephone still ringing. After offering his gratitude to the Elder One, he turned his attention again to the telephone.

The old man opened the door revealing behind the patch of cloud a cabinet of weathered wood. Its dry and greying timbers flecked with patches of peeling white paint, held in its centre a red telephone with a black ring. His eyes having no more than fallen upon it silenced its alarm.

The old man lifted the handset and, placing it to his ear, greeted whomever might be calling him, “Hello? Who calls?”

“This is Hal,” a woman’s voice replied, “I need you in Soulstar.”

“I am presently occupied,” he said.

“I’ve had to pull Ravenheart,” Hal mentioned.

“Who?” he asked, eliciting an exasperated sigh from Hal.

“It’s serious. I need you.”

“Send your envoys,” he answered, “but I will not abandon my task until it is complete.”

“Give me an ETA, Kvôrrím,” Hal responded.

“Kvôrrím?” he reacted.

“Not again…” Hal groaned.

“I apologise, I am not following.”

“What’s your ETA?”

“Who is Kvôrrím?” he asked.

“You,” Hal answered.

“Is that so?” he mused. “Hmm...I...do not recall that name….”

“It wouldn’t be the first time you’ve forgotten your own name. What are you going by now?”

“Hmm…” the ancient traveller pondered, “Wander, I should think.”

“I should have suspected,” Hal sighed, “what’s your ETA?”

Wander looked around the endless, cloudswept sky for the young man he had been shepherding but could not find him. Squinting, he peered deeper into the dream, into the young man’s inmost heart. There he felt was right, and there he found him. In the place of his deepest anguishes, the young man rested on his knees before faceless creatures shrouded in shadow.

“This one has no further need of me,” Wander answered, hanging up the telephone.

A daisy lay in the young man’s palm, outstretched as offering to the figures who had tortured him so.

* * *

As was the usual course, Wander woke with all the struggle of a moth breaking free its cocoon. It was slow, exhausting, agonising even. His mind so weighed by the dreams he cast, to shake them off and rise was an effort no less than a half-measure of Heracles. Sounds in the real came to him as distorted echoes and grotesque shadows of what they ought be. His ears were filled with cotton, everything dulled and muffled. His respiration brought no tastes, no smells, his skin barely sensate, and what there was, could only be felt as confused and jumbled—an inchoate, primordial fog.

Decrypting was never an easy task. Wander pushed through, and with each laboured firing of a synapse, ever enlarging portions of the real world returned. When he could open his eyes, he felt sight like a kitten opening its eyes and seeing the world for the first time. Blindingly bright, unfocused and blurry, everything a washed-out deformation. His eyes strained for the memory of their muscles, to blink a task of great pains, to gaze into his periphery an exhausting effort.

As sound coalesced into coherence, his ears remembering how to hear in the real again, he heard a mellifluous voice softly singing a lullaby. He knew the melody, but could not place its origins, the words too lost to him. An attempt at speech, to ask of the unfamiliar and blurry silhouette at his side, fell short of his desires. The forming of sound and words an action his present state would not abide.

“Who is that?” Wander asked, when his vagus nerve had finally awoken and, with it, his tongue and larynx and the symphony of lesser but essential components whose work only in concert could make of basal groans and intonation speech. His voice, though, was, as all things in the waking world—a hoarse and unrecognisable shadow of its true form.

“Hal,” the voice replied, as Wander’s vision came back into focus. “You’ve been travelling a long time, haven’t you?”

“Yes…” Wander said. “I should think so.”

“I can fix your body,” Hal said, placing a hand on his forehead, “but you’ll have to remember how to use it on your own.”

Between blinks, Wander found himself sitting up, half-immersed in a viscous fluid he only vaguely recognised but could not find the words for. Without thinking, the instinct drilled into him, he reached to his chest, to where moments before, in his breast pocket, he would have found a paper crane imbued with the smell of heartbreak and toska dulled by the millennia into no more than razbliuto lingering on like the last fragments of her fragrance. His left hand found only bare skin, the ring on his index finger striking his rib if only to remind him of what was all too painfully clear.

Beside him, hands dripping in the same viscous and semi-translucent fluid, a young woman sat, resting on her knees. She possessed a queen’s mane of jet black hair, straight, and which poured over her shoulders, pooling in her lap. The dress she wore was made of the fur of some majestic creature whose name, like so many, Wander could no longer recall. It was long extinct, though. A beautiful, wondrous denizen of a dark land, it had been obliterated like the past when rewound around the knotted recursion of time unravelled and knotted together again in a kite string tangle of the infinite.

A knife of obsidian with a hilt of antler hung from at the young woman’s hip, and, besides this, she adorned herself with a collection of necklaces draped with pieces of carved bone and wood, some painted, some not, and a crescent of ivory, intricately carved with words of power in an unknown language, hung from her septum.

As he looked up and into her face, he could only vaguely recognise its features. Her nose bore a scar over the bridge—a thin line tapering to a point over the inner portions of her eyelids—a mark only made by specific intent and hands more skilled than the greatest of whom decorated flesh with scars. Her brilliant green eyes were of a shape seen only among tribes of Dark Sister whose names had fled his memory. From her forehead to her cheeks, two lines of paint the colour of sky had been drawn, contrasting against a dark, olive complexion. Every detail of her face was familiar, but though Wander reached into the deepest recesses of his mind, he could not identify who she was.

“Hal,” the woman said, placing her palm over her chest, “I’m Hal.”

There was a rightness to what she said. Though the knowledge came to him, that she was Hal, her face, the dress, the knife, the necklaces, the scar and septum ring, the eyes piercing and green, the blue paint streaked over them from brow to cheek, it was her, unmistakably. These were the emblems of her image, the icons of The Second Silence, Mother Sedna, Progenitor of Witches, Sister of Whisper.

His brain, though, it could not make that connection, could not bridge the gap too wide. Not… yet… Yes, that too was right.

“I…can not…” he stuttered, the form of words just before the boundaries of the foreign.

“Come,” Hal said, offering her hand.

Wander attempted to reach for it, but, to his surprise, found great difficulty in the act. His arm felt flaccid, shaky, as if made of jelly. The motions were clumsy, his nerves dull and delayed, signals swimming through honey. Finding the way to her hand strained his every neuron. He struggled to remember the path, to ambulation, to grasping, but when his hand reached hers, she closed hers firmly around his, gripping with strength for both of them.

“Let’s get you up,” she said, placing her other hand under his armpit.

There was no need of this, Wander knew this too. This mundane manner of things. Neither one was any more bound to the rules that governed reality. Having been touched by, or born entirely of the substrate of reality bent by will impressed upon it, the laws of nature were theirs to command, not to be commanded by.

Yet they did. And there, too, was a rightness to this. To achieve the same ends by the means of the banal gave unto their deeds a greater reward. A young relicborn would, in his impatience, or his desire to prove himself, use his power to manifest objects of desire his elders would craft by hand. Age and time and, with it, the weight of experience had tempered all of Soulstar’s best and brightest. Centuries bleeding into millennia into epochs would make any wise to find that it was always in the journey that made its destination desirable.

To use her own strength, the muscles of her arm and back and belly and legs, to lift and hold him as he found his own, it was, to one such as her, an unnecessary exertion. Hal’s wellspring had no limits, its volume boundless, its aperture infinite. Yet she did, and she allowed his nerves, long dormant and confused, to wake again in their own way. In the disorientation and infirmity, he would find his footing and balance and the memory to walk again, and would be better for it. To make of gelatin flesh, bone, sinew, and to make the constituent elements of discombobulated incoherence ambulate again was a task Wander had, across the countless times he had done so before, always done the old way.

Wander leaned on Hal’s shoulder, eyes closed, head spinning as his inner ear retraced the path to balance. She continued to hum the lullaby.

Standing, with some help from Hal, he looked around, his surroundings for the first time perceptible, the fog of awakening having cleared substantially. The room was empty, but for the tank he felt he must have been exhumed from. Lit brightly from panels in the ceiling, it was white and devoid of any details but for gaps between tiles and sterile aluminium panelling.

Though all unsanitary and unsatisfactory conditions had been dispelled by arcane means in the instant of Hal’s arrival, their imprint upon the space could not so easily be banished. Echoes of his extended entombment remained. He could feel in the palpable absence of dust and cobwebs and burnt out lights that the room had not been entered in epochs, ages even.

“There you go,” Hal encouraged, helping him step out of the stasis tank.

“Hal,” Wander repeated.

The verbalisation assuaged his cognitive dissonance.

“Yes,” Hal affirmed, “that’s me.”

“Hal,” Wander repeated again, the name associating itself to her visage more strongly.

“Yes,” Hal encouraged, leading him out of the room and into a corridor.

“Where?” he asked, the act of forming words still difficult.

“Soulstar Central Medical Centre,” she answered, leading him down the long corridor.

“How…long?” he asked.

“Three hundred and forty-three thousand Tanno,” Hal answered, as they approached the door at the end of the corridor.

“Three hundred thousand?” he repeated, as she opened the door.

The number…

It was…

It was impossible to comprehend.

How could it have been so long?

How…

“Yes,” Hal confirmed, pushing the door open. “You’ve been in The Crypt a very long time, Wander. Too long.”

“Yes,” Wander agreed, as Hal led him into another room, where three young women were assembled, dressed plainly in outfits the name of which lay just out of reach. A soft blue, the garments suited them well, as though the three had been made for them instead of the inverse.

“Kvôrrím?” one of them asked, astonished.

“Wander,” Hal corrected, leading him to a seat.

“Oh,” the young woman replied, a pang of sorrow in her voice.

“Wander,” Hal said, drawing his attention back as she knelt down beside him, “these are Afa, Usi, and Ona. They’re going to get you cleaned up and assist you in DeCrypting.”

“Don’t go,” Wander said, the words falling out of him without thought.

“I’ll be right here,” Hal assured, patting his hand.

“Afa, Usi, Ona,” Wander repeated, glancing between the three women.

He noticed each of them, wherever bare skin was showing, displayed legions of scars. Some were precise, as if cut by a surgeon, others gruesome and mottled, the visage of flesh melted in flames, yet more the appearance of wounds minor and grievous. Eschewing long sleeves, Wander sensed there was pride behind these scars. Each less a memory to forget and more a badge of honour specific to those whose mastery was in making flesh ravaged by disease or injury, whole. They were, by this display, as terrifying to behold as majestic.

“Yes,” Hal confirmed, “they’re Mercies from the Caldera Academy of Physician-Mages.”

“Sisters?” Wander asked.

“Identical triplets,” Hal confirmed, “just relax. They’ll take care of you.”

“Yes,” Wander agreed after a long pause, the word he was looking for unable to find.

Hal stood up and backed away as the three women, covered in scars, the ritualistic markings of a sisterhood he had by some miracle not forgotten, approached him. One took a shower head off the wall, another a sponge, and a third a bottle of viscous liquid soap.

An inexplicable aura of peace and serenity came off them like vapours of nepenthe. Wander felt warm water touch his skin as his mind began to dissipate into a cloud of diffuse semi-consciousness, all sensation descending into a Schrödingerian paradox, a distant reverberation and an acute presence. In this impossible contradiction of dissembled reassembly, his mind spread across everywhere and each individual and singular fibre of his being, each sense meridian, all at once, overwhelming and chaotic, orderly and composed. Time stretched in both directions as the Mercies wove reality to their whims, suspended nature’s laws by their will, and made of his misfiring neurons and misaligned components a cohesive whole once more.

Everything blurred together until he found himself, in the lifting of the spell, stood in a dark room, dressed in a selection of the day’s fineries—a short-sleeved shirt and plain jacket, loose-fit trousers, but without shoes or socks or any such things about his feet. Footwear in this era must have not been in vogue. Either that, or he had never entertained the wearing of them, and so was not made to. Wander, again, could not place why, but he felt this latter answer correct. A feeling of rightness in his feet could not be so easily ignored.

The room he was in was also familiar. Though three and a half ages had passed, and this structure had, in all due likelihood, been rebuilt many times, there had been no need of much innovation in its structure, layout, and design. An interrogation room and its attendant observation room had proven time and again unbroken, and so no manner of fixing was required.

This one, though, it did have a peculiar feel of the vintage to it, as though Hal had made this place with intentional nods to their generation. None could appreciate those subtler elements but Hal’s and his generation, those whose essences had coalesced and arisen in the frozen wastes of the Apoch-Freeze, the aftermath of the universe torn asunder by forces man had no right to toy with. Describing them he felt as pointless as sacrilegious. Red to a blind man would bear more weight of meaning.

From ancient holms and hjälla of Stronghold, Wander knew this architecture, knew its purpose and function. Technicians seated at desks worked terminals all too contemporary—an anachronism in a space defined by its timelessness—he had seen this scene in every role and every perspective a hundred thousand times since last he walked the Real. Its half-silvered mirror displayed the quotidian beyond. A room of concrete walls, bare, with nothing to serve as distraction. Only the thoughts of the subject seated at a steel table would keep her company, pressing her deeper into the aluminium chair upon which she sat, its left front leg slightly shorter than the others. Cold, uncomfortable, a room void of peace, it made the mind into an echo chamber, the acts which brought whomever sat inside let to reverberate without pause nor relief. Indeed this was one ancient idea that had not once lost the least of its utility.

Seated in the chair in which no comfort could be found was a woman. She was naked, covered in blood and a viscous fluid he could not immediately identify. It seemed familiar, though the mindscape whence that memory hailed was beyond his immediate access. Her wrists were bound to the centre of the table by chains of anomalous materials only the greatest of mages would know how to break. Red and ragged from chafing against the chains, fresh blood dripped down her wrists as her arms and hands quivered from the pain. Hunched over, her face was obscured by long, wet strands of hair, tangled and dripping with the same fluids as the rest of her. Draped on the table, her messy and tangled hair left pools and streaks of thick, ruddy slime. Behind her, a trio of figures dressed in a manner that spoke of their station stood.

On the left stood a tall, dark, and wispy woman, with white hair unbound and untrimmed. She wore a sleeveless dress which, like her hair, blew gently about her as though she called to her a soft, spring zephyr. Her grey eyes spoke of a sorrow deeper than any mortal could bear, and her shoulders sagged beneath the weight of burdens she barely had strength to carry.

In the middle a pale and short man rippling with muscles, stood with his arms folded over his chest. His head he kept shaven clean, but his jaw boasted a thick and impressive auburn beard that would have been the pride of many a starship’s captain. Wearing military-style fatigues, he exuded strength, authority, and the temperament of a man who had spent his life mastering himself, and from that, gained power beyond measure.

The woman on the right, however, was most intriguing. She seemed a mix of all humanity, bearing the tan and physique of one who had spent her life employed in manual labour beneath the beating sun. She wore only a short skirt and kept her hair—dark but iridescent in the manner of ravens, pleochroic in the hues of a peacock—short and in a neatly arranged topknot.

“The woman on the left,” Hal said, “you may, for now at least, refer to her either as The Weathermaster, Halcyon’s Weathermaster, or HalWeath.”

“She has no other name?” Wander enquired.

“Her name is sacred to her,” Hal replied, “given only to the worthy.”

“How did she become your weathermaster?”

“Mine?” Hal scoffed, “Never. It is a name others gave her.”

“Obviously. How it came about that others referred to her as such was rather more to the point.”

“Until recently, she was Soulstar’s Prime Gatherer.”

Wander scowled. Ignominy was all that title ever carried with it. Those whose names were ever once associated carried that shame and disgrace even beyond the grave, passing diminished portions of it to their descendants. Looking into her eyes again, Wander understood the weight she carried. Once, long ago, he too had borne that burden. The world was different, then, back when Earth was all humanity had and those two words meant so much more than a convenient metaphor.

“What happened?” Wander asked, rubbing his chin.

“It’s…not worth getting into,” Hal said, with some hesitation.

“I need to know,” Wander insisted.

“There was a...situation on New Rio,” Hal answered, “I retained the services of a certain mercenary to handle it.”

Bearfist, it would have been. The Great Unbroken, Hero of Monikyn, and the last man of any principle in New Rio. Wander had heard tales of this living legend; a warrior without equal, a lone gun prowling dark, long forgotten corners of New Rio at the behest of the Galaxy’s wealthiest and most powerful. Somehow, though, as if to defy all that New Rio was, he had transcended even his trade. No petty mercenary was he, and what tasks he took were but the ferryman’s fare—not to cross the Styx, but to plumb its depths and hack it its heart, writhing in its foetid abyss.

It was this, perhaps, that gave him success where others found only failure. Many had tried their hands hunting bounties on New Rio, and those who survived vowed never to make the same mistake twice. Bearfist, though...he had done what was considered impossible, and knew well its value.

“And Bearfist’s Price was The Weathermaster?”

“Had I known the consequences—” Hal began.

“You would have handled it yourself?” Wander cut off, incredulously.

“The arrogance,” Hal chuckled, assuming Wander’s response.

“Hubris,” Wander corrected, “it was wise of you to let he who has dedicated his entire life to the mastery of his craft ply it in your stead.”

“Losing The Weathermaster was a high price to pay,” Hal pointed out.

“Indeed,” Wander agreed, “but perhaps it is fortuitous.”

“How so?”

“It is a hard task,” Wander said, “what you had her do. It takes its toll. Think what manner of chaos and subsequent grief has been spared you by her resignation.”

Hal sighed longingly. She did not need to remember what had happened all those ages ago. The stories he had told her throughout the epochs remained, and they were enough.

“I knew she wasn’t well,” Hal admitted, “had I known the price, it would have made it easier.”

“But you know there was no ending to that chapter where she ever forgave you.”

“Even First Marines are not without their struggles against the repugnant necessities of the world we live in,” Hal sighed, sadly. “Would that I had the insight of my sister….”

“Hers was a blessing,” Wander said, “never forget that.”

“Every epoch, Wander. Tabula rasa but for a mote.”

“That is the burden of the pact you made,” Wander replied.

“Pax Deorum,” Hal murmured.

“When Sedna and Silla went to war,” Wander recalled.

Unbound, neither could coexist forever. In divine irony, it was Whisper who was the sister of serenity. Pax deorum, the peace of god—or goddess perhaps—was not something Halcyon was born with. Rather it was cold, hunger, pain, and anguish, carried at her sister’s breast for many years, that had made of the young Sedna a wild and vengeful tempest.

Whisper broke the world open and set them adrift, but those whom young Sedna despised could not be so easily kept away. When inevitability came to the shore of their vast lands, they fought, and the world ended a hundred trillion times, put together again just as it was, again and again, as the two fought for supremacy of wills. Sedna’s rage, as it was always doomed to, fell short of her elder sister’s tranquillity and Whisper cursed her sister. Every ten thousand years, Sedna would forget everything, but for what fragments would make one year of memory. Then Whisper cast her out of the Dark Lands, condemning her sister to live among those she so hated, as one of them, her power bound to the same curse of remembering.

As Whisper must have expected, the curse quieted Sedna’s raging seas. Each erasure of the slate tempered her, made unbending iron a more molten material, until skin replaced stone, and sinew, steel. When humanity awakened the slumbering maw in the heart of the Dark Lands, tore the universe open, and spilt naked infinities across the screaming surface of reality, it was not Sedna who waited to great those touched by the glitch. It was Halcyon.

“I miss her…” Hal said, longingly, “I can’t tell you how long I’ve spent in her mausoleum, wishing I could just wake her, to see her again.”

A long and mournful sigh carried a pain even Wander could neither relate to, nor even scarcely comprehend. Whisper’s sleep was something so much worse than death. Binding her desires in oblivion hymns, she emptied herself of all but the want of a world without her—the one wish she could not fulfil.

“Weathermaster,” Hal repeated.

“Yes,” Wander affirmed.

“I feel like there’s a final question waiting for its voice,” Hal said.

“Your feeling is correct,” Wander agreed, “Will her moral conflicts cause any psychic interference?”

“No,” Hal assured, “The Weathermaster is…a rare bird. She’s remarkably resilient.”

“Continue,” Wander said, his gaze shifting to the man in the middle.

“That is I3,” Hal introduced, “you’ve worked together before.”

Wander felt Hal was correct in this, though the memory of any previous interactions he’d had with I3 were sorely missing.

“In what capacity?” Wander asked.

“I would have to ask Cloud9,” Hal responded, seemingly as amnesic. Moving on, she said, “He’s currently the only extant King Magos.”

“What of the White King of Vostok?”

“If Freyja Björn didn’t obliterate him, his scattered shards have still yet to reassemble themselves,” Hal said.

“Yes….I do recall that now you mention it.”

“How could you forget the Battle of the Pale Lake?”

“It was a long, long time ago,” Wander answered, “I’m afraid I recall very little of that era. Except for it was cold, miserable, and indomitable despots were the fashion of the day. It is rare men can handle such power as the White King’s.”

“That, sadly, is true of everyone,” Hal added.

“And yet the Tapestry of Time favours the feminine for its greatest of gifts,” Wander countered, “does that not strike you a curious affair?”

“No,” Hal put, bluntly.

“That is fair,” Wander said. “I ought enquire, what manner of petty indiscretions need I be aware of as regards I3?”

“Temporal atrophy,” Hal answered.

Wander’s heart sank. Temporal atrophy had been the bane of Soulstar’s greater masters of the Glitch. Their wellsprings flowed not just with the power to upend the natural order, to weave it to their whims, but also as a fountain of youth. Even the lowest neophyte would long outlive the last of their generation. Those who had children were often condemned to watch their progeny grow up, then old, and then bury them, themselves still no more ravaged by time as the day they bore their sons and daughters into being.

As the epochs dragged on, these great mages’ hearts would atrophy until they could stand the presence of others no more. Each new face was a reminder of a thousand they had lost before. Some would end their own lives to escape the horror of perpetuity, others would retreat entirely, sequestering themselves off until they had withered away completely, passing on at long last as they cursed the crack of daylight dawning.

“How severe?” Wander dared ask.

“He’s built a literal fortress of solitude.”

“Replete with whores, wine, and fine dining, I hope?”

After all, what castle manor fit for a king would be without? Even the most high minded could go only so long without entertaining one minor vice or another.

“If only,” Hal chortled, “at least then some measurable degree of lingering sentimentality for even carnal delights would remain. Seems the only divas dancing on his bed are angels of anhedonia.”

“Pity,” Wander responded.

I3 had truly reached the end, then. He had seen too much, experienced too much. Knowledge no longer interested him, and he no longer had it within him to pursue even refined things such as the tending of gardens, or the preparing of their finest fruits with hands of peerless skill, or the delighting over what subtleties sneak into the perfect imperfections of things done the old way. His heart had atrophied to nothing. He wanted only isolation.

“And the last?” Wander said, his gaze shifting to the right.

“She’s new as well, in a manner of speaking. Her name is Ember Ravenheart and, as best we can tell, she’s been around since the DNL Hawking Incident. About an epoch ago the Monikyn Exodus Fleet just happened to pick up her signal between interstices—don’t ask. She’s spent most of her time since then exploring and expanding her techniques whilst assisting in the colonisation efforts of Bearclaw.”

“Monikyn Exodus Fleet?” Wander reacted.

“Six colony ships packed to the gills with Monikyn’s Martial Matriarchs,” Hal explained.

Wander paused. Martial Matriarchs were one of the Rimworlds’ more desperate measures, though its extremity could be debated. To use GreyTech exowombs was nothing short of intolerable to Rimworlders. If they were to continue, as a people, it would be by the will of its people. Those who answered the recruiter’s call would not be trained for war, but motherhood, sent not to trenches and bunkers, but fertility clinics and a new world, far from home.

“I had heard of the war,” Wander said, “Its conclusion, though, I’ve only fragments of the story.”

“Texsar destroyed it,” Hal answered, “and even after it had been reduced to a lifeless, barren rock, The CORR kept fighting. It went on for forty Tanno before Bearfist led the march to Mothership. Thankfully, Texsar’s CEO capitulated at the Midway Peace Summit. Another Kaidan would have been a total disaster.”

“And what was his Price?”

“White peace, reparations, and a vast swath of territory to the galactic northeast along Laughlin’s Wall,” Hal answered, “the latter of which is almost worse than what The Major did to Kaidan.”

As he gazed through the glass, he felt something he hadn’t in thirteen ages. This new Witch Queen, there was wildness in her heart. Fire burned there that would not so easily be extinguished.

“I sense a coinciding of a great many threads,” Wander responded, feeling hairs on the back of his neck stand up. “Ravenheart...she is no simple Witch Queen.”

“Truth be told, only Whisper could really tell what she is,” Hal admitted.

“What did Overseer say?”

“That she is the equivalent of a magnetic monopole,” Hal answered. “He declined to elaborate further.”

“I see,” Wander ruminated, “you brought her here for what purpose, exactly?”

“Ravenheart can do things I’ve only ever seen one person do before,” Hal said.

“Then we are indeed in a Great Confluence,” Wander assessed.

In the way he knew so many things, Wander felt a rightness to this also. It was as if there was nothing else the presence of all the individuals there could be. Two or three could be dismissed, but six? Never.

“Tell me about the subject.”

“That is Øsjäm Sjöbäl,” Hal said, “Temple Mistress and High Völva of the Midwinter Temple, Imperial Kaidan, 47th District.”

“Class?”

“That…has become complicated,” Hal answered.

“By this revelation I am entirely unsurprised,” Wander said, “it seems but for the Scattered, we are gathered in the company of all our greatest.”

“I think you’re missing a few names,” Hal commented.

“Yet before this tale is told, its gravity will draw them in also,” Wander grinned. “What manner of witch is Headmistress Sjöbäl.”

“She blurs the lines between a Death’s End and a Beacon,” Hal detailed, “98th percentile of 2nd Order Grandmasters according to her file. Quite an impressive C.V. as well. Her most recent exploit, however, leads me to believe her full potential is, at the very least, Type 3 ADMXN.”

That was far from the reality. Wander knew this in his bones.

“Give me your most liberal assessment.”

“What she just pulled off?” Hal responded. “S3 level work.”

Even this was less than the measure he felt. Though, if the former headmistress’ true potential was known, he supposed he would not have been brought in to interrogate her.

“I assume her present state is explained by said work,” Wander said, pointing at the woman.

“Yes,” Hal agreed, “I had the 47th Kaidan Temple’s Beacon give me a few day’s notice prior to the completion of Sjöbäl’s ritual so I could have you prepared for this.”

“Describe the ritual.”

“What do you know of Sonorian Sirenics?” Hal asked.

“Only what its founder saw fit to enlighten me to,” Wander answered. “It is wild magic, extremely potent, and hard to control. Last I was around, in even the most aetherial of capacities, the field was in its infancy. I recall it was a Ciþwa Sonorian heading the research, being possessed of the memory of an ancient practise known as the Kama Sutra, though she seemed rather preoccupied with only its most salacious passages. A shame, really. A complete synthesis would have been of much greater utility.”

“The field has much matured since then,” Hal added, “that Ciþwa Sonorian may have given birth to the field, and in more ways than one, but Sjöbäl’s body of work has progressed and expanded it more than her collective predecessors combined.”

“I would imagine so,” Wander commented, gesturing toward the filthy woman, soaked in all manner of unpleasant bodily fluids.

It truly did seem as though she had been dragged directly out of a New Rio ArtiUterus. The thought of what manner of activities she had engaged in to find herself in such a state causing even he a great deal of discomfort.

“Yes…” Hal cringed, all but confirming his suspicions. “Moving swiftly onward. When Sjöbäl was coming up, the best and brightest Sonorians were pushing the boundaries with interdisciplinary orgies in what they called ‘orchestral works’. She not only wrote the library on Siren Symphonics, but rewrote and refined practically every other Sirenic ritual in the Archives of the Arcaeanum.”

“Ensemble works,” Wander reacted, rubbing his chin, “with other disciplines? That sounds exceedingly dangerous.”

“It is,” Hal agreed, “which is why the field is only open to the most adept mages in the Arcaeanum. Centuries of practise are required to qualify as part of an ensemble. Conductors just are. I’m sure you can appreciate.”

Conductor and concertmaster, he knew the practise well from developing similar techniques in his own field. In fact, the nomenclature came from Wanderthought Ensembles, though the praxis, he imagined, was quite dissimilar. Sonorians had, after all, gotten their name through the direct antithesis of the fundamental tenets of Wanderthoughts. They were witches whose power came from the depths of feeling. Where Wanderthoughts used equanimity, focus, and tranquillity to ply their crafts, Sonorians gained their power from the frenetic, the exciting, the adrenaline rush of danger, the infernos of passion. They sang and danced, made love and cut their wrists to bleed the beauty of human experience into wonderful works of magic.

They were reckless, Sonorians, but measured. Something seemed uniquely foolhardy about this, though. A symphony of sirens making a daisy chain of delight to suspend nature’s laws in altogether riskier and more unpredictable ways came to him as uncharacteristically audacious, even for of witches and warlocks notorious for their audacity.

“Why pursue this magic?” Wander eventually asked.

“Its potency,” Hal answered, “that and telling Sonorians not to twine their sexuality with their particular set of talents is like telling an infant not to put things in their mouth. Better to set boundaries, standards, and practises. Had we not, they would have simply run sturmfrei and literally fucked up the galaxy.”

“I see.”

“Don’t even get me started,” Hal grumbled, pinching her brow between her thumb and forefinger. “The Farzen Incident has been a persistent thorn in my ass. Even Overseer wouldn’t take custody of that damned vibrator!”

“That...sounds inconvenient,” Wander responded, though not entirely sure what was being referenced.

“You have no idea,” Hal retorted.

By her tone, Wander realised exactly what she meant.

“Sjöbäl’s story is one I need disentangled,” Hal elaborated, “and for more reasons than one. The Weathermaster won’t speak about it. Not to me at least. She has, evidently, confided some portion of it to Ravenheart, and Ravenheart forbade anyone but you to extricate this particular knot.”

“This Ravenheart…how is it she commands the likes of you?”

“She doesn’t,” Hal said, “I simply followed my gut.”

“And what did your gut tell you?”

“That Øsjam Sjöbäl—”

“Venus,” Wander corrected, the name coming to him out of nowhere.

“What?” Hal reacted.

“Venus Sjoebal,” Wander repeated.

“That name just come to you?” Hal asked.

“Yes,” Wander answered.

“Venus it is,” Hal accepted, “anyway, my gut told me that Venus Sjoebal is more important than any of us realise.”

“Then Aisling’s arrival is imminent,” Wander determined, “a Weathermaster, a King Magos, an Untested Transcendant, a Wanderthought, and a shackled goddess walk into an interrogation room…”

“What?” Hal reacted.

“A wild tempest is a dangerous thing to bring into matters of this nature,” Wander mused. “But...necessity’s compulsion sets in motion decisions that are nothing if not the cascading of the thinnest thread.”

Halcyon sighed exasperatedly, muttering something indistinctly under her breath. She knew what was coming.

Scratching his chin, Wander assessed the three stood about the interrogation room. Then the words came to him, from nowhere, and they demanded voice.

“A tired and disillusioned misanthrope brought into a mess with no outcome possible but the deepening of his loathing for the company of others,” he said, compulsively, “what manner of serendipity has she foreseen? And the dutiful one, broken down and exhausted, crushed by weight of guilt and shame, where is your happy ending in the unravelling of this knot? And you, there, turmoil incarnate, consumed with rage and pain but with none now remaining to whom a dispensation of wrath is long overdue, where is your catharsis? Hmmm...Echoes of Ecstasy, I recall you well. That blasted tome I can never forget.”

“Should I have the Arcaeanum bring you a copy?” Hal asked.

“No, no,” Wander refused.

“Aisling’s visions never were clear to anyone but her anyhow,” Hal commented.

“Indeed,” Wander agreed, “and reviewing her writings would provide no insight, regardless of if the present echo could be identified or not. Speaking of identifying, I am wise to the fact that you could have assessed this particular threat, Hal. That power is within you thus making this confluence a curious construction of arbitrary un-necessities.”

“You know why I bind that power,” Hal defended.

“I do,” Wander agreed. “Why intercede?”

“What?” Hal reacted.

“Ravenheart saw the truth lain bare,” Wander explained, “and you saw her temper flare. Why step between them?”

“Perceptive as ever,” Hal affirmed. “Morbid curiosity. That and my gut told me Venus has at least some redeeming value.”

“Interesting,” Wander mused.

That Venus had some redeeming value was self-evident. Had she not, there would have been no need of him here. Gathering enough evidence to convince the courts and thus condemn her for what could only have been purge-worthy violations of the laws that bound them all, transcendent and acolyte alike, was trivial. Just the state of her before him told Wander enough of what had happened to convince him of that. What Halcyon was looking for was the reason for mercy. In searching for it, a wealth of serendipitous revelations would flow.

Wander did not attempt to suppress his growing elation. He grinned, ear to ear. Another joyful mystery, around whom had been brought so many individuals hurting from the inside out. He would take their pain and make lilies and lullabies of it. That was his purpose, after all.

“Would you like to begin?” Hal asked.

“No,” Wander assessed, sensing there was more to be observed in silence.

“Alright,” Hal said, “take as much time as you need.”

“Thank you,” Wander responded. “I will.”

Silence fell over the room, save for the activities of the technicians at their terminals. In this, Wander watched the four figures across the window. Their every motion and unspoken word a tell, each tell telling stories far more valuable than any words spilling from their mouths could offer.

Speech, after all, was imprecise. Within the arbitrary bounds of language, mankind’s greatest invention lay everywhere. In the silence between moments, Wander unravelled their stories each, with ease unmatched. And when he entered the room, there would be no place for any of the four to hide the truth from him. For he was Kvôrrìm—Wander—First of His Caste, Master of Minds, the Wandering Thought.