Chapter XIV: The Musician

There was no sleeping for me that night, either. The nightmare that I’d had the night before the infighting incident was nothing compared to then. Every time I closed my eyes I was under attack. Abby died half a dozen times in front of me, as did Regan Leyrender, Lady Halflance, Unity, the Mechanodrones, until the very background of my mind was overrun with blood and gore. Even when I woke up, I would get out of bed only to be confronted by something namelessly horrible in the dark, something so awful that it would shock me awake and reveal the previous awakening to be just another layer of that terrible nightmare. And then it would happen again, to the point where I would sometimes wake up only to have my heart pounding in my chest from fear that this, too, would turn out to be a nightmare. 

And the entire thing was full of the haunting sound of violins, melodic and yet impossibly sinister. The violins would be the last sound to fade away whenever I woke up, to the point that I could have sworn that it was playing off in the distance even once I was fully awake. 

I don’t know what time it was when I woke up for good, but it was late. Anna and Unity weren’t having any better of a night than I was, because I could hear their blankets rustling as they tossed and turned. That wasn’t what had woken me up, though. There was another sound coming from outside the hut, the sound of metal clashing on metal, occasionally interrupted by screams of pain or panic. And below that, a quiet sound, the pure tones of the most beautiful violin playing I had ever seen. 

I rolled out of bed with a coordination usually only reserved for being woken up by an unexpected alarm on Monday mornings. My sword was sitting in its scabbard on the floor under my bed, and I had enough presence of mind to pick it up, though not enough to take a belt with me to hang the scabbard on. Just before I walked outside to see what the hell was going on, a thought came to me. This could still be a dream.

In an instant, I whirled around, putting all of my effort into a wide arcing punch aimed at the solid wood of the doorframe. My fist hit the wall hard enough to send up a puff of dust, and the pain shot up my hand like I’d just broken something. In an instant, the cobwebs in my head were burned away. This was real. Which meant something bad was happening outside. I broke into a sprint. 

At first the sound outside was just that, a sound, seemingly coming from every direction but with no actual source. So I picked a direction at random and started running, cutting across the middle of the treaty grounds. I didn’t make it far before finding out who was fighting whom. 

I dashed around a corner and stopped in my tracks, taking a moment just to realize that my eyes weren’t lying to me. There were a group of five people, two Durkahns and three Blueroses, and they were trying to murder each other. They were soldiers, though they had abandoned their rifles and were fighting with sword and fist, and right as I showed up, one of the Blueroses went down, a Durkahn slamming her horn into her face with a disturbing crack.

“What the hell are you doing!” I shouted over the violin music. 

They all looked at me, except for the woman who was still recovering from the mother of all headbutts. They looked… terrified. Their eyes were red and streaked with tears, faces blanched and breathing heavily. One girl locked eyes with me. “No, not you, please, I already said I’m sorry…”

I didn’t have the proper time to process what that was supposed to mean before three hundred pounds of prime Durkahni beef bowled me over. Something popped as I hit the ground, only to distinctly un-pop a moment later. “You aren’t going to take me!” she roared, cocking back her fist. 

I caught her arm with both of mine. “What the hell are you talking about? I don’t want to have to force the issue…”

She didn’t listen, broke through my grip, and punched me in the face. Once the white flash was gone from my vision, I gritted my teeth and realized that diplomacy had failed. I grabbed her by the horn, yanking her head down into my rising fist. Something popped. A kick to the knee forced her off-balance, giving me the time to wriggle out from under her and go for my sword.

“Don’t try it, lady. I really don’t want to have to hurt you any more.”

She glared at me, right up the blade. “Don’t lie,” she growled. “I can see the way you’re holding that spear. You’re hungry.”

I glanced down just long enough to ascertain that I was, in fact, holding a sword and not a spear. Something was deeply wrong. Suddenly, the violin shrieked louder, a piercing pure note like the climax of a frantic concerto. I tried to blink the sound out of my head, and the Durkahn was gone. The others were still fighting, but before I could go separate them, or beat them into submission as need be, I felt a presence. 

It was tall, dark, full of hate, and it was just over my shoulder. Against every instinct in my body, I looked around. It was him. The man who had haunted my nightmares, who had taken my sister from me, the bastard who let me know where my loyalties truly were.

“Ethan… you’re supposed to be in jail,” I said, holding back tears.

His face split open in that goddamned smile of his, and the stars in the sky wept sparks at his presence. “Not even close, Marcus. Your sister was just the beginning. And oh my, what a gorgeous young woman you’ve turned into.”

He reached out his hand at me, a normal human hand, perfectly manicured and clean. I ran like I had never run before. The violins were playing madly, beautifully, a frantic and jittery piece that one might dance to under different circumstances. The sounds of battle were all around, swords clashing on swords, guns firing, grunts and screams of exertion, rage, and pain. It was like the entire treaty grounds had turned into a hell on Selene. 

I didn’t pay much attention to any of that, and indeed it fell into the background of the whole event. He was still chasing me, no matter how fast I ran, even when my feet turned into a blur, even when I climbed up and over the roofs of buildings to try to escape. There was no way I was going to look behind me for long enough to see him, but I knew he was there from the feeling of being watched, and I could see his hands extending out from every place where the light of the moon or of lanterns couldn’t reach.

I probably would have kept running, consumed by mortal terror, all night and well into the morning. Though my heart pounded in my chest, I barely felt any exhaustion, and what little I did feel was quickly overpowered by my surging adrenaline. There was no time to think, no hope to fight back, no place to hide that wouldn’t end with me being wrapped up in the darkness and deposited at his feet to be done with as he pleased. 

I ran into a dead end, a large L-shaped building. There were people already there, blurry and indistinct and not at all my concern. With him still behind me, there was only one way out. I jumped up onto the wall of the building, clawing at the eaves with my fingernails and scrabbling against the wood with my feet, but those weren’t enough. I fell back to the ground. He was right behind me, and though I probably couldn’t die, there were fates worse than death.

Just as I turned around to look that bastard in the eye one last time, a stabbing pain shot through my torso. A literally stabbing pain, because I had been stabbed. I looked down to see a straight-bladed infantry saber sticking out of my chest. I reached around to my back, and found a couple inches of tip there, though not enough to have put a second hole in my shirt. When I looked up from my impalement, he was gone, the only person around being a Bluerose soldier who was becoming increasingly shocked that I hadn’t collapsed yet. A second later she had been tackled to the ground by someone who should have been on the same side as her.

Being impaled, as you can probably imagine, hurts like hell. But the pain brought clarity more than it did terror, and this time it seemed to fade before I had even removed the blade. Over several seconds it shrank from agony like I’d never felt, to something more closely resembling the dull ache of a bad stomach bug. With eerie focus brought on by extreme circumstances, I realized what was going on. Something was causing mass hallucinations, including both my visions, and whatever was causing the soldiers to break out into frenzied violence. The sound of the violin song, never-ending and far too loud to be entirely natural, suddenly turned sinister and bloody in my ears. If I focused, I could tell exactly which direction it was coming from, out by the far edge of the treaty grounds. 

Before I could deal with that, I had to get the sword out of my chest so that it would stop impinging upon my ability to breathe. It took a solid minute of pulling on the hilt and yanking on the flat of the blade with the heels of my hands, jerking it out one inch at a time so that the bleeding wouldn’t get too bad. It hurt almost as much as getting stabbed in the first place. When the blade finally clattered to the ground, my body wasted no time, the blood trickling back into the wound in the several seconds before it sealed up again, good as new. I was going to need to ask Anna to sew shut the hole in my shirt, though.

With my own blade in hand, I followed the sound of the violins, running as quickly as I could while still keeping my footsteps light and stealthy. Now that I knew that my mind was being affected, I had a somewhat better ability to fend off the hallucinations, but it wasn’t easy. More than once I would trip and fall because the ground wasn’t where I thought it was, or have to slow down and truly focus to figure out if I was seeing an enraged Durkahn or just another trick of the moonlight. 

Whoever was playing the violin had orchestra-level stamina, and showed no signs of slowing down. The music was quick and ethereal, almost jaunty at times, while at other times becoming unearthly and sinister, sounding almost like the distorted wail of a human voice. And it was impossibly loud for a world that definitely hadn’t invented the audio amplifier. Stranger still, I would sometimes catch snippets of other instruments accompanying it, heavy distorted beats like a drum or an electric bass guitar, only for those notes to vanish as soon as I tried to focus on the sound.

I almost could have missed her, passed right by that one specific hill and never caught the source of the music, even though it was painfully loud. It was the same hill where Halflance and I had had our conversation the previous night, likely chosen because of how well it overlooked the entire treaty grounds. The entire area seemed blurry, indistinct, offensive to my eyes. But when I glanced up at the top of that hill, remembering the amazing view, I saw her.

She was dressed all in white, a long hooded cloak that flared and rippled as she danced madly across the hilltop. Under it she was wearing leather dyed midnight blue, with high boots for travel and plenty of pockets, but still immaculately clean. And, indeed, she was playing the violin like it was a part of her own body, dancing along with her own tune. I could almost imagine that she would have had her eyes closed to concentrate, but I couldn’t tell if that was the case or not because she was wearing an all-too-familiar mask. The mask was steel, and completely featureless and blank aside from a pair of glass lenses perfectly fitted over the eyes. I had seen it twice before, once on Esther Nettle aka Nemesis, and once on the mysterious tall woman I’d seen for only a moment before she sent her werewolf minion after me. 

I tried to remain as stealthy as possible, walking in a crouch up the side of the hill. The musician didn’t take note of me, being too focused on her music. When I reached the top of the hill, she was facing away from me, doing a couple of waltz steps while looking out across the river to Zrimash. The accompaniment was more consistent now, a complementary tune playing under her strings to form a full musical performance. One good hit with the grip of my sword would knock her off balance, definitely stopping her from playing her music and giving me a chance to keep her down. 

I almost wanted to break into a sprint the moment I reached the top of the hill, charge in and slam the grip of my sword into her head to stop her from playing. But I couldn’t trust myself to be able to fight well against someone who was fighting back, so stealth was still much more important. Almost quivering with nervousness, I crept across the hilltop, the music pounding in my ears. Strangely, I wasn’t noticing any of the weird visual distortions or hallucinations, here in the eye of the storm.

I got to within a couple feet of the musician, my arm raised for the key strike, when she stopped dancing. “That’s very rude, you know, to interrupt a woman in the middle of a performance,” her voice was soft, thin, speaking with an accent that suggested the eastern part of Europe. “Why don’t you dance with me instead?”

I wasn’t in the mood for exchanging witty repartee, not with a growing headache and the knowledge that people had already died. I lunged forward with every ounce of strength I could, swinging for her head with a raw scream of exertion. All at once, the musician shattered, spiraling off into dozens of identical copies that danced around me in a dizzying vortex of whirling white cloth and shining wood. 

“What, you thought it would be that easy?” she said, her music becoming slower but at the same time more purposeful, with long and heavy notes instead of quick and rapid-fire ones. The dubstep beats and bass guitar followed suit. “My music controls you, and you will dance with me whether you like it or not. All thought is resonant frequencies, and I choose the wavelength!”

The ground suddenly tilted under my feet, my balance completely thrown off as gravity seemed to turn. Blood poured out from narrow rents in the soil, my hands felt heavy, my blade sought of its own will to take the final plunge through my heart. I stumbled forward, barely remaining upright, crashing into and through the encircling crowd of musicians, who laughed a sparrow’s tittering laugh and melted into each other like wax.

“Nice supervillain dialogue,” I said, holding my sword out in front of me while I tried to hold onto my aching head with the other hand. “I don’t know what else I expected from someone who makes people kill each other with a magic hallucinatory violin.”

“You distract yourself with speech,” said the musician. Her voice wasn’t coming from any of the dozen or so images dancing around me. “My music is more beautiful than anything that could come from the lips of an inbred Bluerose dog.”

My eyes filled with exotic colors, blinding lights and double images. “Is it just me, or does making people hallucinate a bunch of backup instruments count as cheating?”

The musician laughed again, which I was already getting tired of hearing. “I am not making that happen, darling. Your mind resonates in tune with every note I play. Your own imagination follows me as the orchestra follows the lead violin.”

“Cool, you’re still a piece of shit.” I sprang forward, my sword aimed directly at the spot of air that the musician’s voice had been emanating from. Sure enough, a moment later, the music stopped mid-note as reality suddenly snapped back into shape, the dozens of musicians collapsing into one, a single woman nearly leaping out of the way as my sword cut a slash in her cloak.

For a moment, she looked at me through that mask, and I looked back at her. She was breathing heavily. Her violin and bow were both held loose. Neither one looked like any violin and bow I’d seen before, constructed out of blended materials, plates of brassy metal and strips of off-white bone composited together into something that was roughly shaped like a violin. Her bow was strung with steel wire.

Then the moment ended as I took my saber in both hands and advanced, swinging for her chest. She retreated with frantic speed, a lack of practice showing in the way she almost threw herself away from me.

In the moment of safety that she was able to buy for herself, the musician suddenly regained her composure, tucking the violin back into the crook of her neck and running the bow along it to produce a single shrieking note. Pain like nothing I had ever felt exploded out of my head, making the bullet from earlier that day feel like nothing. I collapsed to my knees, screaming. 

“That is quite enough of that,” said the musician. “You’ve earned my sole attention, dog. Now let’s see what you fear.”

The new song she started to play was different from before, quick and violent, played with purpose and rhythmic strokes. Angry, is what it was, and the backup instruments supported that, distorted guitars and the distant screaming of human voices. All at once, reality collapsed in around me, and I was totally blind. 

The next thing I saw felt like it came into being hours later, or maybe months. She was curled into the fetal position, crying her eyes out. I stood up to approach her, even though that loud violin music was giving me a headache. She didn’t move until I rested my hand on her shoulder, when she looked up at me.

It was Abby, but she was already dead. Her skin was as pale as rotten milk, dried vomit and blood crusted around the edges of her mouth, her eyes rolled back and her face disfigured with bleeding wounds.

“Why didn’t you listen?” Abby said, in between sobs. “Men never listen… except for him. He listened.”

I tried to open my mouth to speak, but when I did the voice that came out was inhumanly deep, rumbling like a landslide. “I’m sorry,” I said before shutting up and never wanting to speak again. 

“No, you aren’t. You kept on going without me. You grew into the worst type of man and you forgot about me!” The corpse of my sister staggered to her feet, and I stumbled backwards, falling onto my ass and scrambling backwards across the grass. I suddenly remembered that there was something I had to do, through the pain and the terror, something absolutely important that was just on the tip of my tongue.

“You asshole!” screamed Abby’s corpse, blood dripping down her jaw. “You knew what was happening with me and Ethan and all of us, you saw it with your own eyes, and you left me to die! Emma, you brainless, lazy, self-centered, piece of shit, why didn’t you do anything!”

“Emma? Why are you calling me Emma?” I said between sobs. Nothing made sense, and yet it all did. Abby wasn’t saying anything I didn’t already know, nothing I hadn’t thought to myself a thousand times while I was trying to sleep, or walking down the street, or staring at an open bottle of aspirin. It was just that now she had decided to come back from the grave to say it all to my face. She was right, she was totally right.

Other shapes formed out of the darkness around me, shifted under the ground beneath my feet, other faces and other bodies locked forever in their dying moments. A woman with cornrows, prayer beads still clutched in her dead hands, blood staining her mouth. I kept crawling backwards on my hands and feet, eyes locked on Abby, only to feel a hand wrapped around my throat. Her name was Harper, and I’d only ever met her twice. 

As I wordlessly struggled, my hand landed on something hard and metal, something that didn’t match the rest of the ground around it. I glanced away from Abby’s corpse, dragging my head through the miasma of blaring violin strings and pounding agony and the ice-cold grip around my neck, to look at my right hand. Through all the distortion and the noise and the darkness, I could recognize it as a 19th century cavalry saber. 

Even with that, I couldn’t remember what was happening or where I was, not fully. But I knew what I had to do with that sword. I picked it up, leaving my fingers together so I could hold it in both hands even though my body was shaking and my nerves were on fire. With a panicked scream, I jerked forward, the grip on my neck dissolving like so much mist as I fought to regain my footing on the shifting ground. My heart was pounding in my chest, far faster than was healthy, faster than it had ever been, fast enough to burst.

I squeezed my eyes shut and took a step forward. She sounded exactly like my sister, all the sweetness and kindness that I could remember in her voice still there in this undead mockery. “You aren’t real,” I said. “None of this is real!” I opened my eyes and swung with all of my strength.

My blade split Abby’s corpse in two, and she screamed as her torso fell off of her legs in a shower of gore. The pain in my head surged, and I clutched my head with one hand, trying to remember where I was, who I was, why I was seeing this awful vision. Suddenly, the violin music started to trail off, and a horrible tittering laugh echoed through my skull. Abby’s corpse melted, dissolving away like paint in water. A moment later, the other bodies around me did the same, running away until I was standing alone, on a moonlight night, on the peak of a hill outside of the Zrimash treaty grounds.

I felt drained, even as my heart slowed in my chest back to a reasonable pace. The musician could not have made it far, and if I caught her now I would know all of her tricks, and be able to knock her down and bring her back to the camp to answer for all she had done. It would have been easy, if only I had been able to catch her. I didn’t think that was going to be a problem, at least not until I tried to walk down the hill, lost control, fell all the way to the bottom, and had to experience the wonders of an ankle un-breaking itself.

I limped back into the treaty grounds, maintaining grip on my sword against all odds. By the time I got back, most of the grounds were awake, people starting to realize what had happened. The injured and dead were being treated or carted off, and those still alive were being seriously questioned. I searched through the treaty grounds for much too long, eventually stumbling directly into Sir Margaret. I handed her my sword, to her confusion, and tried to explain what had happened. My explanation was, to put it lightly, completely fucking incomprehensible even by my usual standards, but the frown on Sir Margaret’s face told my tired, traumatized brain that at least I was getting something across. 

Once I was done with that, I knew that I had work to do. The first thing was to go off and stare at a bush for an hour, thinking about Archopolid programming and trying not to fall asleep while my brain slowly settled into a stable arrangement. With that done, I realized that I had given my sword to Sir Margaret and left the scabbard with Anna and Unity, and quickly got that sorted out. Then it was time to get down to business, and figure out who this musician really was.

SaffronDragon

Emma really hasn't been having a good time of things, has she? At least now we know what's up with those nightmares... Of course, the Musician isn't exactly gone, is she? Will she come back? What happened in Emma's past that's coming back to haunt her? Will Emma ever get that shirt repaired? If you're curious about the answers to these questions, why not follow the link below and join my patreon? For only $3 a month, you can read the next four chapters, as well as being able to join my exclusive Discord server. If you want to pay more, you will also unlock a series of exclusive short stories, including two Selene prequel stories, as well as other benefits including exclusive voting rights in patron polls. Otherwise, I'll see you around in two weeks for Chapter XV: Picking Up Hints.