Sweet Child O’ Mine
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Chapter XXXVIII: Sweet Child O’ Mine

 

I couldn’t sleep that night. There was too much energy in me, too much energy in the air, this feeling that I had something more important to be doing than just sleeping. So instead I remained awake, wandering around the edge of Yazthaan, waiting for something. 

The moon was bright that night, shedding enough light to see the whole of the town by. It looked like the world had been dipped in thick indigo dye, except for a few scattered orange lights where flames showed through the dark. The only movement came from small animals scurrying in the bush, and from two groups of soldiers patrolling along with me. 

The air changed all at once. Reality sharpened, turned, twisted in place like someone had started twisting the string that hung the entire universe in suspension. If someone had asked me, there was no way I could have explained what was happening or why I was feeling what I was feeling, but I knew. I was drawn to move, slowly and silently, toward the edge of Yazthaan, away from the rising moon. My obligation was waiting for me there.

The two groups of soldiers had stopped patrolling. I didn’t pay it much mind at the time, passively observing that they had fallen down where they stood, but feeling no anxiety or fear. It was a dream, the detachment of a dream, knowing things without really knowing, seeing things without feeling. Even the animal noises grew quiet and died as the animals became frightened and hid. The place I needed to be was a flat, grassy plain. It wasn’t different from any other particular section of flat, grassy plain around Yazthaan, aside from the fact that I needed to be there to meet my future head-on.

I sat down in the grass and waited. It was cold as hell, without sun or fire to warm me and with me being fully exposed to the rushing wind of the plateau. Not that the cold could hurt me. My saber, thankfully, was at my side, as I’d remembered to grab it during the confusing moments just after I dragged myself out of bed. No gun, though. Having a weapon felt reassuring, felt necessary, even though I still didn’t fully understand what it was that I was waiting for.

That changed when I heard the first soft strains of violin music drifting across the wind. In a moment, the weird trance was shattered to pieces, and I was fully aware of what I was about to face. The Musician was back. I leapt to my feet, drawing my sword and taking it up in both hands as the music grew louder and more complete. I looked back on the events of the last hour and found them completely confusing. Had she been controlling me? Or had I, in my half-awake state, somehow known that she was coming? 

There was no time for pondering abstract hows and whys, because already the cloying psychic fog of her music was nipping at the edges of my consciousness. I gritted my teeth and fought it off as best as I could. The Musician and I had fought twice now, and I knew her tricks. Holding my sword in both hands and gazing determinedly into the dark, I walked forward in a sharp zig-zag pattern, trying to hear which direction the music was coming from.

But the music already felt like it was coming from every direction at once, and far louder than any note a violin could possibly produce. It didn’t have the sound of a proper composition, at least not to my ear. The notes sounded and felt like pure emotion, without plan or melody, aggressive shrieking notes played at the whims of a violinist utterly lost in passionate fury and hate. 

Images flickered at the edges of my vision. Swarms of crawling bugs, shadowy figures, the bloodless faces of people I knew or had once known, appearing and disappearing in a constant foam of hallucinatory madness. When at last I found the Musician, I initially mistook her for another vision. That was probably her intention. But when I locked my attention on her white cloak and strange metal violin, her image remained utterly stable and real. I’d found her.

I wasn’t going to give her any chance to prepare for my arrival. Raising my sword in preparation for a killing blow, I broke into a sprint, silently dashing through the dark and cold. Victory was so close, but my ambush failed. Perhaps she heard me stomping through the grass, or perhaps it was another one of her weird mental powers, but either way she moved when I was barely five feet from her. The violin screeched out a long note, almost deafening me, as she leapt backward while simultaneously throwing out a spinning kick. I ducked back, and she landed safely several feet away, violin still in hand.

“You again? And here I was, thinking that I’d taught you your lesson back in Zrimash, Blueroser dog. Or that you’d just given up and died, preferably.”

So she hadn’t been controlling me. Interesting. I decided to interrogate the implications of that at a later time.

“Yeah. It’s me.” I lunged in once again, aiming a deadly thrust for her upper chest. She dodged out of the way with ease, the acrobatic leap scarcely seeming to interrupt her musical performance.

“What do you think you’re doing? You have no armor to defend against my music. The Blackbird is not here to leap to your defense this time, dog. You stand no chance against the fullness of my psychic power!”

“What do you get out of all the monologuing, huh?” I said, going in for another series of slashing attacks. “Just shut up and fight me!”

She ducked back again, except this time she caught me overextending and leapt back in, sending me to the ground with a spinning heel kick to the jaw. Hurt like hell, that did. “I am trying to educate you, whelp. To show you that there is no point in continuing to resist the might of Cassandra!”

“You’re wrong,” I groaned. “Just like everyone else who has ever said that there is no point in resisting. There always is.”

I rose back up onto my knees, aiming my sword point at her. The Musician lowered her chin, and I could almost feel her glaring at me through the steel of the reikverratr mask. The violin music slowed, then came to a denouement. 

“Do you know why they sent me on this mission, when my comrade and her ghoul army have already won the day?”

I stood up, but didn’t say anything.

“Because I can do things that soldiers can’t do, no matter how big their guns, or how often they practice their little formations, like chess pieces on a board. I attack the mind. I sow fear. I drive soldiers to attack their sisters in arms, officers to betray their leaders, the common woman to cry out in terror and run into the night.”

“None of that matters if you’re dead!” I shouted, and charged. I swept my sword across the Musician, from shoulder to hip, throwing my full force into it… and felt only air. The Musician had vanished.

“I attack that which cannot be attacked,” she continued from behind me. “I break that which cannot be seen, or felt, but which is more essential for battle than any soldier or weapon. Many within the agency don’t understand that.”

I wheeled around and continued the attack, aiming for her stomach with a series of lightning-fast thrusts. But suddenly, although her violin was utterly silent, there was suddenly an explosion of Musicians, six or eight or ten of them, surrounding me. 

“You, Alraune, are the ultimate lifeform, a creature that cannot be beaten by strength of arms, no matter how great. I knew this; even when my comrade claimed to have cut off your head, I knew that you would be back. So I’m here to finish the job, Alraune. I will sunder your mind, rend cerebellum from the cortex, burn your neurons with a storm of impulses until every thought has been extinguished from your pathetic skull!”

I thought that one of the Musician images seemed more real than the others, and was about to go in for another attack when the violin went up. The steel bow flexed against brassy strings. A single piercing note, utterly pure and overpoweringly loud, stabbed directly into the center of my forehead, and in an instant every patch of skin was alight with agonizing pain. The breath was forced from my body and I collapsed.

“You cannot die, Alraune, but you will die a thousand times over when I am done with you. My mind over your crude matter, and we will see who is truly the ultimate lifeform!”

A cloud of darkness was pulled over my eyes, and tightened around my throat until I could barely breathe. Then consciousness slipped away.

 

I blinked profusely, forcing the dryness out of my eyes. With a groan, I stretched my arms out and twisted my back. I’d fallen asleep at an odd angle, making my spine feel all weird.

“Hey kid,” Abby said. “School must have been rough today; you fell asleep almost as soon as you sat down.”

School, right. I was sitting in the backseat of the minivan, with my backpack next to me on the faux-leather. Abby was driving.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m tired a lot.”

“It’s okay, Emma,” she said. “Lots of people are tired. Seventh grade is just preparing you for the kinds of challenges you’ll have to face later on.”

“Emma? But my name is—”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” she said. She wasn’t angry at my mistake. But she was firm; she wasn’t going to turn it into an argument. 

“Why’d you even come and pick me up?” I said, my preteen voice turning into a predictable whine. “I thought you had to go spend time with Ethan.”

She sighed. “I know I spend a lot of time with him. He’s just… he’s very sensitive, and he gets upset if I’m away for too long. But he’s away for this week, so I thought I might spend some time with you.”

“Wait, seriously? You spent time away from your precious Ethan just so you could pick me up from school?”

Abby nodded. “I sure did. I mean, we’ve barely been able to talk to each other for a while. Figured we could at least catch up a little, you know?”

“Okay,” I said. While I was asleep, Abby must have turned the car radio to a classical music channel or something, because there was violin music playing kinda loudly. “Could you turn down the radio?”

A shadow passed over Abby’s face for just an instant. “I can’t, Emma. I’m sorry.”

I sighed, slouching down into the seatbelt. “It feels like you don’t care about anyone but Ethan. It’s like all you can ever talk about is Ethan, Ethan, Ethan. Do you not like me anymore?”

“Of course I do, Emma. It’s just… I love Ethan so very much, but he gets into those moods of his, and he’s always calling to make sure I’m alright, and… it’s a whole thing. You’ll understand when you’re older, okay?”

“But I don’t wanna have to be older! I wanna understand now! Why do you barely ever talk to me anymore, Abby? What am I doing wrong that you care more about being with your stupid boyfriend all the time than with being with your family?”

Abby hadn’t turned the music up, but it felt like she had. Maybe it was because the violins were too loud, or maybe it was just the way the music sounded so sharp, but I was starting to get a headache. I was crying, too.

“Do you think that I’m spending less time with you because of something you’ve done?” Abby said softly.

“Well, yeah, if I was being a good brother you’d want to spend time with me, right?”

“That’s not true at all, okay?” Abby said. “You get that, right? None of what’s going to happen is your fault.”

“But it’s gotta be!” I said, snot dripping down my nose, the music-induced headache getting worse.

“I’ve already told you this. A lot of the time when I’m not around, it’s because Ethan surprised me with a big expensive trip to some incredible place, and I can’t bring myself to refuse that. Didn’t I tell you?”

“You did…” I said. My head was starting to hurt more. It was that stupid music.

“And didn’t you hear me complaining how, every time I try to prioritize you over him, he gives me a big speech about how the family is abusing me by forcing me to do all of these things for you, no matter how much I say that I want to do this, because I love you?”

“I… I did hear that.”

“See? None of this is your fault. And none of it is going to be your fault, either. No matter what happens, alright. Ethan’s the one with the power here.”

“But I should’ve figured it out first, or something, before you d—”

“Come on, Emma. You’re twelve. And… Mom and Dad already know it too. But I’m an adult, and he’s never hit me, so there’s not enough proof to bring in the police. There’s nothing you can do.”

I opened my mouth to complain more, or to apologize, when the music suddenly became much louder. I slammed my hands over my ears and screammed as my eardrums were suddenly filled with a loud electrical whine, and my head hurt so much it felt like it was going to explode.

“Turn the music off! Turn it off!”

“I’m sorry!” Abby said in a panic. “That’s something only you can do!” She quickly turned the steering wheel of the car, pulling up against the sidewalk and bringing us to a stop. Then she unbuckled her seatbelt and crawled backwards between the front two seats.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!” I cried, as Abby pulled me close to her chest. 

“It’s okay, Emma, it’s okay. It wasn’t your fault. Please believe that it wasn’t your fault,” she said, rocking me back and forth.

The pain had me gasping for breath. “I miss you,” I said. “I miss you so much, Abby! I’m sorry.”

“Ethan did this to me, not you,” she said softly, her voice somehow perfectly audible through the overpowering violin music.

“What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “The Musician must be attacking the basal processes, the part of the brain responsible for breathing and heart function.”

That made the pain fade, at least a little bit, though the physical pain was replaced by a yawning sense of dread and horror. “Am I going to die, Abby?”

“I don’t know. Considering she’s already taken out any kind of connection to material reality and totally dissociated your logical processing from emotional, she might stand a chance.”

“Maybe I deserve it,” I groaned. “Maybe I deserve it for killing you.”

“Emma.” Abby took my cheek in her hand and lifted until I was looking up at her face. “Please stop blaming this on yourself.”

“But… but…I…”

“You blame yourself because it’s easier than acknowledging that there was nothing you could have done,” she said. “I know. It’s okay, baby.”

“It hurts,” I said, my breathing growing ragged. “Everything hurts.”

“I know,” she said. “I wish there was something I could do.”

The violins around me were growing ever louder and more frenetic, the music building up towards a terrible, all-consuming crescendo. I couldn’t remember what it meant or why, but I knew that something bad would happen when that crescendo came. “Abby?”

“Yeah, kid?”

“If I’m going to go, I’m glad that you’re here. I love you so much, Abby. I miss you so much.”

She started crying, her throat twitching with feeling and unspoken words. “I love you too, Emma.”

And then, suddenly, a distant memory emerged in my mind. It was vague, faded, but I knew enough to understand what it meant. It was a memory of another time, long ago, another time when I’d broken down, though that time had been after bawling about my classmates being so mean to me and how I had no friends. But I remembered what Abby had done back then that had made it all better.

“Abby? Could you sing that song with me?”

Her nose scrunched up in confusion. “What song?”

“You know. My favorite song. The one you always sing when I get too upset. The one you always sing with me whenever it comes on the car radio.”

She remembered not long after I did, and even in the circumstances, it made her crack up a little bit. “That one? Okay.”

We both sang together.

“She’s got a smile, that it seems to me/reminds me of childhood memories…”

My dad was a bit of a freak for classic rock, and he’d passed that on to my sister. That song was one of the ones that didn’t involve too much reference to sex or violence, so it became a frequent play on the car radio, or just when Abby and I listened to music together at home. And if there wasn’t anyone else around to get annoyed, we would always, always sing along, together.

As we pushed through the pain to sing that first verse, a dam broke in the back of my head, and the memories returned in a deluge. Memories of singing transformed into memories of the times before and after singing, memories of hanging out with my cool older sister, of sharing jokes and talking about how things had been going at school. I remembered her coming to parent-teacher conferences when our actual parents couldn’t show, and comforting me when the bullying got too much and I broke down. The tears flowed freely as I remembered just how much she’d loved me. 

And something started to change in the dreamscape as we sang. The violins started to distort and shudder, the notes shifting into something else and quieting down as they did. By the time we got to the first chorus my headache was getting better as well. Abby looked around in a mix of confusion and awe. 

“How… how are we doing this? How are we fighting her music with… music! We’re fighting music with music!”

I lost track of the song, looking up at her in my own confusion. The moment I stopped singing, the violins were back and louder than ever, each piercing note stabbing into my ear drums with blasts of pain enough to make me scream.

“Keep singing!” Abby said. “We have to keep singing if we’re going to make it through this.”

My grasp on what “this” was faded in and out every few seconds. Sometimes I could remember that I was locked in a struggle with a psychic Musician, other times I was just in the car with my big sister and sobbing my eyes out. But I kept singing no matter what. By the midpoint of the second verse, the violins were a distant noise, mostly replaced by melodic guitars in the same tune as our own song. I’d heard somewhere that that song started out as some sort of guitar warm-up, and only later got expanded into an actual song with lyrics and stuff, and I can believe it. 

Suddenly, reality throbbed and compacted, and the windows of the car cracked under a sudden pressure. We’d gotten to the part where the song turns into a long guitar solo, which played on without any input from us. 

“We did it,” Abby said, pulling me into a tight hug. “As long as our song is louder than hers, she won’t be able to hurt us.”

“What’s going on, everything is changing!”

“It’s okay, Emma.” Abby pulled away from me, holding my shoulders. “You’ve managed to reestablish a connection to reality, so you’re going back up to the conscious mind.”

“Bu-but that means I won’t get to see you again!”

Abby sighed. “I know, kid. But that’s okay. I’ve been dead for twelve years anyway.”

I tried to hold on, tried to pull myself into her chest even as the windows of the car shattered and the ceiling caved in under the pressure. “Please don’t go! I don’t want you to go!”

Abby kept me away, looking right into my eyes. “I won’t be gone,” she said. “I’m just a projection, a memory. I’ll always be here, okay? And I’ll always love you.”

I hugged her just as the walls came crashing in, and the sensation of my head resting against her chest was blown away by the feeling that I was suddenly drowning in an infinitely deep ocean. But though I didn’t know where I was or how I’d gotten there, I knew that I was rising, shooting up, up, up—

 

 

I awoke with my face pressed into the ground, drowning in the sharp sounds of violin music. It was a few seconds before I remembered where I was, what was going on… and where I’d just been. My fingers found the hilt of my saber where I’d dropped it and wrapped around the grip.

Where do we go, where do we go now…

The Musician almost broke her melody, but saved the note partway through. “Incredible. Still able to speak, even at this late stage.”

I rose, first onto one knee, then to a crouch, though my entire body was shaking and my muscles were shaking. At some point I’d stopped breathing, my lungs were sore. “Where do we go, where do we go now…

And the music began to change. The Musician’s bow still played across her strings, but that sound became weak and hollow, slowly drowned out by the hallucinatory sound of electric guitar and drums. Abby—I—had been right: as long as I kept singing, I was in control of the music. 

I took my cutlass in both hands, fixed my eyes on the Musician, and stumbled forward. “Where do we go, sweet child, where do we go now…” There was about a minute left before the song ended, and I was going to make use of it. The tip of my sword pointed squarely at the robed center of her chest, and somewhere in the back of my head I realized with shock that I felt no hesitation whatsoever. 

“What the hell are you doing? How? How? Your mind vibrates in tune with my strings, you do not get to turn this around!”

Where do we go?! Ohhh where do we go now!” I lunged, thrusting the blade for her stomach. The Musician, no longer in total control of the situation, stumbled just barely out of range, struggling to continue playing in her state of growing panic. That didn’t slow me down for a second, and I attacked again, a downward cut, and again, a reverse slash. With each blow I regained my strength and speed until I was a blur of lethal blades. 

“No no no no! My will is superior!” the Musician shrieked, playing frantically on the violin. I could scarcely hear her over my own singing and the invisible band that had appeared to accompany it. She had given up on any kind of defense, relying entirely on the effect of her music.

Where do we go now?”

I charged. My feet barely touched the ground as I blew right past her guard, knocking the violin from her hands with one swipe of my sword. The music died instantly, replaced with the utter silence of night on the steppe. Before she could react with more than a throaty gasp, I pulled my blade back and plunged it into her chest.

The Musician didn’t speak a word as she crumpled to the ground. Some sense of justice made me catch her. I pulled her close to me, feeling her heart beat frantically, then slow and stop, looking into her eyes as they lost focus and rolled back into her skull, letting her blood soak into my hands and warm them in the night. There were no flashbacks, no images forcing themselves into my thoughts. I knew she was dying, and I hated to have to do it, but she’d tried to kill me, and many more others besides, so it was the only option. 

And by the silver light of Selene’s moon, reflected in the shining steel of the reikverratr mask, I saw it. My face. And although my flame-shorn hair made for a substantial difference, I could still see quite a bit of Abby in that face.

I pulled back from the Musician’s corpse, withdrawing my blade from her stomach. I wiped the blood away on my coat. Then, with one last look around to make sure there was nobody watching, I limped my way back into the warmth of Yazthaan.

I feel bad for anyone who doesn't know about the song "Sweet Child O' Mine" and thus presumably spent the back half of this chapter being confused as hell. Go listen to that song, it's good. But join my Patreon first, it's even better. Next chapter in two more days.

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