Chapter 51: Songs

“…Beast?” Violet asked, then exchanged a small, anxious look with the cat.

“Where’s it gone now? I thought we were over the whole disappearing act thing.” Her companion said with a muted huff.

Before them, one of the rabbits bolted for the cover of the trees and the foxes leapt after it with a chorus of delighted yelps. In an instant the lot of them, predator and prey alike, were swirled away into a luminous fog. Violet knew that if she were to look behind herself then her line of sight would be similarly limited. For a moment there came anxious thoughts of becoming turned around and lost, but the road still ran straight and because of that Violet knew she was on track.

And surely it wasn’t as though the beast had simply floated off for no reason. It had to have seen something entrancing, though how it could have looked straight through the Glow Violet could not imagine.

“I wonder what it saw.” She said at last.

“Maybe another metal box full of human food. Or more glowing tadpoles,” the cat said, then was silent for a contemplative moment. “…I did like the tadpoles.”

Violet stroked a finger behind one of the cat’s ears and her companion squirmed a little bit, embarrassed by the affection. Still, it made no attempt to escape.

In the slender, blossom garlanded branches of a crooked willow tree, a group of starlings began to sing, their voices rising into a gathering harmony. It didn’t sound like any birdsong that Violet was familiar with, and an urge rose within her to add her voice to the chorus, though she did not know what path, if any, the music was taking.

Then, from somewhere off to her right, there came the high, keening wail of a wolf’s howl, followed by the yelping bark of a fox. Noises fell to pattern, animals gathering to unity via song, and in her arms Violet saw the cat’s mask of familiarity slip. For a moment she was holding something else entirely.

Violet felt her own mouth fall slightly open, but the breath froze in the back of her throat even as the cat straightened in her arms and began to howl out into the Glow soaked night, tail lashing fiercely against her hip. She could feel something tugging from deep within her, a feral desire to fling off her rucksack and crash away into the woods.

It was a wonderfully vivid impulse, but even at its heights Violet could still see herself all around it, the her that she currently was. And though there was something frightening about it, she did not let herself become scared. Even when her thoughts went to the cat and she wondered if it was feeling that same grand temptation, her companion, gloriously feral and entirely unlike the polished, primly posed cat she was so often faced with, never for a moment tensed to leave her arms.

Then, slowly, bit by bit, the song drifted off into the far woods, where those animals entranced by its promises had run, and the cat relaxed into her embrace, softly sighing.

“You didn’t sing.” It noted.

“I wanted to, but….” Violet trailed off into a tiny shrug. There were no answers coming.

“You are who you are.” Said the cat.

“…Does that happen a lot? The singing?” Violet asked.

“I’ve never heard it before,” the cat said. “But it felt…natural, right?”

“Natural?”

“All of the wild creatures acknowledging themselves and the world. It felt like a celebration, almost, a great burst of happiness at having each other, so that we might hunt and run and….”

“And be animals.” Violet finished. She wasn’t sure why, but saying that made her feel faintly lonely.

“I suppose. You felt it too, didn’t you?” The cat asked.

“Sort of. I only felt the edges, the wildness.”

“You can relate to animals, but I guess you’re not quite ready to be an animal yet.” The cat said lightly.

Violet smiled.

“I don’t want to be an animal,” she said. “I like having thumbs.”

The cat slumped theatrically, giving her a scandalized look.

“You poor thing.” It said, and Violet scratched her friend behind the ears again.

This time the cat purred. It still seemed to be ever so slightly self conscious, concerned with what the other wild animals might think. Violet felt a temptation to tease her companion some more, but before she could set to it, she realized that a difference had come to the Glow.

It was not that the light itself had changed, but rather that the direction from which it was coming had, for the first time, become entirely apparent. For a very long time, her whole life really, Violet had known the Glow’s origin only as north. But now that she was close enough to be enveloped by its azure totality, that distinction had become nuanced.

Before her, a denseness of form flowed like water, a place where the light came up from. Though she had known that the Glow must have a centralized location, a point of origin as sure as the center of a star or the point in a shadow from which direct light was eliminated, the sight still took her breath away.

It was not a clearing, as Violet had sometimes imagined when hypothesizing about the type of place the Glow might choose to live, though the trees did thin around her, the forest seeming to take a reverent step back. Instead, the space was framed by curls of chainlink and barbed wire, concrete bollards and fortified booths much like those she had seen on the bridge…was this really still the same day? The memories felt as though they were filtering in from another world entirely.

The old fences were half disintegrated, falling into puddles of their own rust, and the sections that endured were thickly overrun with fractalized swirls of forget-me-nots and roses, each flower exploding into a different variant, petals and stamens flourishing in a wild riot of color and diverse life. As Violet approached she caught the ghostly silhouette of a building beyond, set upon a slight rise thickly lined with flowery bushes.

Once there had been roads, and other buildings too, dips and depressions in the east that might have been pools or bunkers, but it had all long since collapsed and been worn to atoms by the ravenous attentions of time. The building itself still stood firm, but that was because it was made from concrete and steel, built like a fortress.

Even so, the northern end, that which faced away from Violet, had been blown outwards by some ancient calamity and stood crooked. Through the hole blasted in the roof and walls, across the fields of tumbled over concrete and twisted steel, there rose great velvety shimmers of Glow, an aurora drawing patterns over and over across the sky, across itself, rewriting the face of the world in raw beauty.

Violet shut her eyes to try and center herself, but was startled to find crimson sparks shooting across the insides of her eyelids like little comets. Somehow, she knew they were real, physical manifestations of some nameless force rather than the usual tricks her eyes played when faced with sudden shifts in light and dark.

She stepped past the fence and heard the cat make a small, indefinable noise. Her companion stared ahead through slitted eyes, its whiskers dyed blue with Glow light. They twitched and trembled.

Violet took a deep breath and realized that she was trembling too. It was as though a note had been struck from a chord at the font of her soul, and the vibrations were rippling out through her. The cat stroked a gentle paw across the back of her hand, where goosebumps had risen in a prickly wave.

There were avenues through the brush that surrounded the building, and channels of illuminated water ran along the bottom like irrigation ditches, though from the crooked paths they took Violet knew that there was nothing intentional about how they had come to be. The plants here held no common form and where Violet saw insects they were equally bizarre. A praying mantis unfolded a pair of velvety prongs where wings should have been, and though them came shimmers of a kaleidoscopic light that put swirls of dizziness into the front of Violet’s vision, until she shook her head and stepped away.

The plants themselves were moving, she realized, not in pattern with any wind or the brush of the animals that stalked amongst them, hunting one another for food and companionship and fun. Her thoughts spun back to the refinery for a worried moment, but the unity here held no coercion and from the plants there arose no underlying consciousness. They did not feel alive in the same way an animal or an insect did, but held energy nonetheless. It reminded Violet of being near to an electric wire and knowing that it contained a great force.

From the nearby hedge there came a sleek little dog-like creature, dustily furred and beholden to a form that Violet could not put together before it had slipped out of her path and disappeared again.

“That thing had too many legs.” Said the cat, but only sounded bemused.

The brush was not so high that she couldn’t see above it, and Violet looked around herself. Now that she was in the middle of it, surrounded by curious new plant life on all sides, she suddenly wasn’t sure if it was actually moving or not. Perhaps she had imagined that part, or simply become accustomed already.

Then she caught sight of a familiar formless shuffle and jumped in place, relieved and excited all at once. The beast was before her, turning a narrow circuit around a small, rectangular promontory that stood perhaps twenty meters from the front of the building. It was a slab of some sort, and the beast was worrying at the plants overgrowing it, trying to shake them aside as best it could without doing any harm.

“Beast!” Violet called, and it glanced quickly back at her, as though startled. Its jaws clacked but Violet was too far away for her companion’s words to reach and so she hurried forward, flushing a flight of golden sparrows from the nearby brush.

The beast stood quietly as she approached, fidgeting in place.

“Why’d you run ahead?” Violet asked, though couldn’t summon the will to sound annoyed. She was still too overawed by everything that surrounded her. Even the air itself seemed to have acquired a texture, like viewing the world from underwater.

The beast said nothing, simply turned back to the stone slab and this time did not bother with delicacy. Gripping a huge bundle of rose vines between its teeth, mindless of the thorns, it yanked and tore them loose, exposing a stretch of worn black basalt. Upon it, etched and enameled in gold, were letters. Part of a word.

Violet blinked. The cat stirred. Knowing that it had gotten their attention, the beast turned back to its work and tore more plants away. There rose a shivery exclamation from the dying roses, like a severed cable finding that it suddenly had nowhere to go.

The basalt had once been polished and grand, emblazoned with letters that stood several inches high, but many had been sanded away and rose vines wormed into each crack that had appeared. Most of the first few words were gone, but towards the bottom of the slab quite a lot of gold lettering still dully gleamed, newly exposed to the Glow’s light.

Fully exposed, only the last two words were clear, preceded by a jumble of meaningless letters.

LLE

O KE

ATOMIC REACTOR

And beneath it, a familiar symbol, done in faded red, like an exclamation point.

ɣ