Chapter 25
ILSEVEL
The song all around me is broken.
I’d never realized how much I depended on the ever-presence of harmonies in my life, in my very existence.
Yes, there were always discords and dissonance to cause discomfort, even pain.
But at the foundation of everything was the goodness, the rightness of pure song, which might, if understood correctly, draw all other threads together in beautiful congruence, making meaning out of madness, order out of chaos.
That harmony is gone. Severed.
I fall and fall into a space of hellish brokenness, where the clamor of loss reverberates to the depths of my being.
This is worse by far than when I had burned.
That was a torment of the body, and at the end of it there would be death.
There is no hope for death here. I believe this broken song will follow me, pursue me from world to world, from realm to realm, rendering heaven itself a new and terrible hell.
I curl my soul tighter, desperately clinging to a last little thread of connection. Diira, I cry, attempting to sing my licorneir’s name. Over and over again I try, but it seems to fray and melt away. Diira! Diira, please . . . please . . .
There is no guilt. There is no anger. There is no bargaining or brutal rage. There is only loss, loss, loss without end. Stretching from here to eternity.
Somewhere far away—so far as to feel like a different world—I hear another broken song calling out to mine.
A song I’ve heard before, great and powerful and all-consuming.
Drawing other broken songs to it in a united chorus of madness.
I’ve heard it before and trembled, but never with understanding.
My tightly-wound spirit uncoils. I lift up my awareness, casting the eyes of my spirit out beyond this physical realm, out over the wilds of Cruor. Out to where that other soul stands in the fiery torments of its own ever-present loss.
Mahra, I sing in broken, repulsive chords. Mahra . . . I hear you.
A voice of volcanic sorrow sings back: And I hear you, broken one. At last we hear one another clearly.
I don’t know what to make of that song. Part of me wonders if I should rise up even now, take some control over my weak, mortal body, and go out after it.
I try to open my eyes. A vague impression of a dakath interior surrounds me, and a body hovering close over mine, whispering prayers in a rough, anguished voice.
But I have no patience for that anguish, which seems to me far too small, too lacking in real depth.
I close my eyes, slip deeper into the dissonance of my mind.
Diira, I sing. Mahra.
But there is no answer.
I am alone. Utterly alone.