Emyr Travels

By Jason

The five sets of melodies, harmonies and rhythms rode in on the tide. They curled up and off the incoming waters, peeling away from the white crests to be caught by the breeze and reverberate around the rocky walls. In the cold Welsh air, the five songs found each other and finally embraced.  The cliffs and the land welcomed them, embraced them and made them felt safe so that, slowly, they could become one song. At first Carol and the other sirens in the cove simply stood and listened. Marvelling at the new song with its intricate form, watching it grow in confidence, letting it fill with vibrancy, colour and light. As the new song started to shimmer in the night air the sirens stood along the darkened shore and braced themselves.

One by one, feeling the strength of their sisters’ shared music, they started to pick up the notes and phrases and repeat them. Singing them back to the cliffs and the water and the sand, adding to the melody with their own, weaving a strong song for Emyr. The music grew and when it was ready the sirens held onto the song like it was a lifeline. The sirens spun the song round the cove, looping it through the air high above their heads. It thickened the air around it, and when the sirens had given it enough momentum, they cast their song through the portal in the cliff face, up into the inky night sky and out into the universe, towards the Circle.

Emyr, thoughtCarol, who had tied all her hopes into the song. When you step out of the Circle, don’t worry, we’ve got you sweetheart!

The song of the Earthly Sirens sought out the Circle. When it arrived, it wound its way through and around the ever-shifting architecture searching for the portal and there it caught Anwen’s son as he stepped across over the threshold.

Emyr felt the portal push him forwards, out toward the void. At the same time a strangely familiar force reached out and curled around his waist, holding him steady and pulling him away from the rising chaos in the Circle. This aggressive push and pull felt like gliding and turning and falling and panic. Like floating in warm, calm waters but with speed and motion and a dizzying stillness. Stretching ahead of him was a confusion of light and noise. The spheres turned, the sirens’ song danced and their combined motion catapulted Emyr onwards. Suns offered their white-orange melodies in fiery arcs as he sped past them. He tumbled past the fracturing songs of countless planets and moons. Swarms of orbiting satellites chirped and clicked in percussive time at his feet. He watched a long-forgotten probe plodding through the lonely night sky, sending new telemetry back to its long-forgotten home.

He was a stone skipping across a millpond, skimming event horizons, weaving through cosmic storms and hopping over supernovae. Lonely comets pirouetted to faded tunes under flickering starlight. Nebulae bubbled and popped as he pierced their delicate forms. In the depths of space he witnessed vast civilisations, impossible cities teeming with unimaginable life, stretching out across the darkness, bound together by ribbons of rainbow crystal and delicate threads of pulsating light. Emyr saw asteroids collide, break apart and fall to dust. He watched starships of baffling size and design roll and dive through lakes of crimson fire, canons blazing across the open stars. Beyond all this he saw enormous slow-moving shadows, charting a stately course through the universe. As snatches of plaintive songs rose like air bubbles from the depths of the ocean, Emyr recognised these creatures as the whale-like beings from his mum’s bedtime stories.

The universe opened up and around Emyr and afforded him a safe conduit. As the spheres continued to turn and carry him forward, he heard the purity of their tone, just fragments here and there amongst the cacophony of his journey. There was a simplicity and an overwhelming truthfulness to that music that resonated deep inside every particle of his body. Emyr was far from the Circle, the skies around him changed: the stars thinned out and the space between them lost colour and texture, becoming dull and hard. Emyr had the sense that something was forming below him. There was a chill in the air and the smell of rain. Mountains. Rocks. Landscape. Instinct set his feet to work, running as if to meet this new geography. He felt a surge of adrenaline as the solid ground rushed up to meet him, closer and closer and closer till one foot then the other made contact and Emyr was running up an all too familiar road. He slowed his pace, with his chest heaving and heart pounding he looked around.

Peck stepped over the threshold and realised she could not see Emyr, he was already gone. She had a moment of panic before the nexus caught her with sound and energy and a barely contained fury. The universe opened up a new conduit, just for her and dragged her across the stars. Shifting chromatic patterns catapulted her down a long narrow pathway, very different from Emyr’s. When the stars thinned out for Peck, reality resolved itself and she set foot on a layer of something smooth and hard like volcanic glass, but dangerously thin. Peck couldn’t see what was below the glass floor. Unease crept into her limbs; a sense that she was being watched. The space around her was cavernous, she couldn’t see the walls or tell if there was a ceiling. The dark glass seemed to whisper tales of sadness and offer memories of forgotten music and other things long lost. As Peck’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, she realised that a collection of dark figures were standing amongst the shadows, waiting to greet her, waiting to ask her one final question.

Starlight.

Water.

Tarmac.

Slowly Emyr took his bearings. The rain-soaked road curved up and away. Over the grey hills and upward leaving the landscape altogether and climbing into the impossible night sky. Bare branches of bone white hedges pushed up into the cold air, like chalk lines skittering across cold slate. The ossuary shrubs, clicked and clacked, bending in the hard and lonely winds. The hills beyond the pale hedgerows were coal dust black and the sky beyond them the colour of fresh cut peat. The only other sound was the steady slap, slap, slap of Emyr’s trainers as he walked up the steep incline.

With each step Emyr studied the landscape. The road felt real enough underfoot, solid and whole. Yet, everything else was like a scene from some old horror movie, like the one that he and his teenage cousin had snuck downstairs to watch one Halloween after their parents had gone to bed. But he knew this place, he’d seen these hedgerows and walked these hills countless times.  He recognised this cracked tarmac and the way that the road curved past that clump of spine like trees and swept up the hill toward the cottage.

The cottage was the only man-made object in the vicinity, but that felt wrong as if parts of his childhood had been forgotten or lost. Dai’s place was gone, so was old Mrs. Jenkin’s ramshackle excuse of a house and the Sharma’s home with its immaculate window boxes and the washing perpetually on the line. The stone wall on the corner with the post box set in it was gone, or was never really there. Emyr knew this place and missed these landmarks, the sign posts pointing to the familiar, memory seemed at odds with this odd geography. He had never realised how much he would miss the sight of Mr Sharma’s geraniums.

The wind continued its monotonous tone broken only by the clack of the bone bushes and the sound of Emyr’s footsteps. Each step toward the cottage became increasingly difficult, as if Emyr was dragging an invisible boulder up the hill; but each step took him closer to this version of his home. Closer to the only familiar thing on the bleak hillside. Determined, he continued, forcing himself further and further up the hill until, finally, he could see a shape in one of the downstairs windows. A women silhouetted against the warm interior glow. Emyr smiled as the figure left the window: it must have been time to put the kettle on.