There is a baby lying in a crib. He has been named Emyr. His mother, Anwen, folds laundry in the kitchen. It is almost Emyr’s first birthday though he does not yet understand the concept of time or age or birthdays. He will learn that in due course. On this day Emyr is a happy child. He lies, eyes closed. Long dark lashes curling upward, away from his cheeks. He smiles as he sleeps. Afternoon sun dapples warm and carefree across his soft face. Light and shadow dance over his eyelids. The child is aware of layers of crimson and veridian and indigo. Their crystal shapes fold and swirl and merge into each other.
There is music in the dappled motion. From somewhere in the house, the baby hears his mother singing. An old song born from her mother’s song with deep, rich autumnal notes that rise up through the home and gently fold themselves around the child. The boy wriggles his feet to enjoy the soft embrace of the duck yellow hand me down baby grow as it stretches across his body. New notes emerge. His notes. The first notes of a new song, finding their way. Still small but strong and certain. Emyr feels safe. He feels love and comfort. Harmony and melody and rhythm are slowly coming together.
The sunlight shapes continue their slow dance across his eyelids, his crib and the bedroom wall. The colours are fading, losing their jewel tones. Shadow settles over the room and inside the child. In his mind Emyr see a single shape. A new form. Dark. Rounded. A hard-edged carapace floating free in a deep red ether. Alien. Cold. There is the faintest chitter chatter coming from the shell. Asking a question that the child cannot yet answer.
In his sleep Emyr wrinkles his nose. His tiny hands, clamped in tight fists, rub about his head trying to push the chitter chatter away. He cries out. A single sharp sound. Half plea, half anger. The shell shape evaporates. The ether is clear again. Emyr falls into a dreamless slumber. The sunlight has left his room.
—
Damp commuters packed in a train carriage with no heating. Ribbons of rainwater on the dirty glass folded the early morning suburban landscape into distended, bulbous forms. Curving the grey light round on itself until there, hanging low in the saturated sky Emyr saw a dark shape begin to form. It seemed to bleed out of the clouds. Strands and ripples and threads curling out and up, weaving together into something hard and rigid. A giant Shell. Alien and cold. Hard lines moved across the gleaming surface in wave rhythm. Metallic light caught on the wave crests and juddered back blinking and blinding. Radiation spiralled across the gloom.
Chitter chatter sounds grew louder. Half formed words and guttural expulsions. Bugs in the eiderdown. The clitter clatter of chitinous voices in the wind. Dizzying, complex, layered. Insidiously pushing its way inward, seeking out the soft tissue. Metallic. Surgical edged, dark and dazzling. The noise came from everywhere. It was inside Emyr’s head and outside the train carriage and nowhere and everywhere.
The Shell’s curves swept up and around and fold over, feeding into itself. Save the rhythm just beneath the shell it did not move. Just hung there like a dead sun casting blackened rays across sodden hills and rotting fields. Beasts and decaying vegetation littered the water-logged landscape. Festering carcasses, hard to distinguish living from dead because there was no distinction. Not anymore. Not when you lived in the shadow of the Shell.
Emyr wanted to look away. To see anything else but there it was again. The childhood vision. If he closed his eyes, he knew it would be in his head. The cold shape that had pressed itself into his memory so effectively that even when it wasn’t there, he could still feel the dent it left behind. Emyr knew that wherever he looked that is where the shell would be.
“Eh, butt! Tickets. Please!” the conductor looked down at Emyr with a mix of tiredness and exasperation.
“What?” Emyr blinked finding himself in the too hot train carriage surrounded by staring faces. “Sorry. Sorry, sorry. Miles away.” With an eagerly apologetic smile Emyr flicked on his phone and showed the conductor his pass. Emyr’s cheeks felt white hot. As the conductor continued along the carriage and his fellow travellers lost their curiosity Emyr took a deep breath and rested his forehead on the scratched plastic panel of the chair in front of him. Outside the landscape slid past, Emyr dared not look out of the window, not just yet.
—
The last chord reverberated and faded away. Emyr looked around at the hard-edged space. This felt like a Haven in that it was removed from the universe. Except this space, unlike the Haven that the Sirens had conjured above Mag’s shop, was vast and cold and empty. The walls were vast and thick Emyr thought that this must be what it was like inside a glacier. Starlight filtered through the silver blue walls, creating pools of light on the cold hard floor. Emyr knew he was cut off from all he had known in the Harmonic Universe.
Hanging from the centre of the ceiling surrounded by silence and starlight Gloam waited and observed.
“We have met before,” Gloam’s voice bounced off the walls, coming to Emyr from different angles all at once. It felt subtle and spikey. The sound was layered and moving to its own staccato rhythms, unlike anything in the Universalis. It echoed through Emyr like the chitter chatter voices of his visions.
“Yes,” Emyr held his breath as he watched the strange shell shaped being detach itself from the ceiling. As Gloam let go of its vantage point he slowly extended too many spindly limbs. One by one they met the hard floor with a sound like knives tapping a window pane.
“They think you are… special. The Herald and the others.”
“They flatter me.”
“Not true,” Gloam took a few uncertain steps as if it were unused to the idea of legs. “They have a point. You have always been of interest. I have played with many like you. Across countless worlds.”
Emyr’s mid raced, …played with many like me. He focused on Gloam’s harsh form and worked to keep his breathing steady.
“I came back to you for a reason,” Gloam moved further away testing his spindly legs.
“Which was?”
“Your music! So different to the others. Even those of your own species. It was… tastier.”
Emyr tried to reach out, as Carol and The Herald had taught him above the music shop, searching for any sounds in the vast room that he could use. But he could not find any recognisable music. Emyr began to wonder if Gloam lived in pure silence. No music at all. Was that the reason he wanted to destroy the universe? No, for some reason Emyr knew it was more complicated than that. The way Gloam spoke with his strange rhythms, he learned that from somewhere.
“What are you looking for?”
“I am not used to this… silence.”
“You don’t hear it?”
“What?”
“The noise!” Gloam turned to face Emyr. “The incessant trilling of your universe. It leaks into every aspect of my realm.”
“I can’t hear it.”
Gloam altered his stance: three of his thin limbs moved up and around the back of his shell-like body. They came together to form an arm of sorts with which Gloam pointed to a bright spot just beyond the sphere wall. From that spot Emyr heard the faintest of melodies.
Okay, so that is as annoying as listening to the music from someone else’s headphones, thought Emyr nodding at Gloam. The music was not a style he recognised, but it worked to similar rhythmic and melodic patterns as his own.
“That is good to hear but, I was thinking more of your music Gloam. Where are you songs?”
“You want to hear my music?”
“Yes.”
“I do not think that wise.”
“I am interested,” Emyr stepped closer to Gloam and smiled. His heart beat faster, pushing against his ribs.
“It could end you. It has ended others.”
“Did it end her? The Emissary?”
“Don’t speak her name,” Gloam’s form rippled with tiny spikes. “You are not worthy enough to speak her name.”
“I’m sorry,” Emyr raised his arms, hands spread wide. “I was just curious. She was of the same universe as myself, no?”
“After a fashion, perhaps.”
“So, I’m right in thinking that The Emissary was a Mother of the Stars? It’s just that Anwen, my mother, sang me stories of how the Five Mothers of the Stars crossed the boundary of the celestial sea and sang our universe into being. That would mean that the Emissary’s music, the music of her sisters, is the origin of the Harmonic Universe. The origin of my music. So, where is her song?”
Gloam was still. His body, still atop his spindly legs, did not move. A dryness crept into Emyr’s throat, he found it hard to swallow. The gentle melody Gloam had shown him earlier was drowned out by the sound of his pulse thrumming in Emyr’s head. Then one of Gloam’s legs shifted. Then another. The creature took a step. Then another. As Gloam walked towards Emyr his legs decreased in height and his form started to reshape itself. The surface rippled and warped and took on odd planes and impossible angles. By the time he reached Emyr Gloam had taken on a more humanoid like appearance.
—
Emyr held the overlapping layers of Noah’s song so that Gloam could look at them. The strange figure moved his head from side to side like a large bird. He peered at them closely, then moved his head back and narrowed his eyes as he focussed on a particular detail. Without thinking he moved his bony fingers to caress the delicate edge. Emyr exhaled sharply and Gloam stopped just short of the song. He held his fingers apart and moved them away from the song.
“Forgive me,” Gloam attempted a smile. His eyes fell back on the song, the shifting patterns seemed to calm him. “I am fascinated. The complexity. The changes in cadence. The movement, it is all so… There is something else here. Growth through the pain. Light emerging and… This song was changed, part way through. The melody, the rhythm began as something else and then… it settled into something new. Both are true and real. It…
“Transitioned,” Emyr nodded.
“Yes,” recognition danced across Gloam’s eyes. “That’s it. Why?”
“The song is that journey and so both are complicated. I can’t really do it justice, I don’t have the words, and it is Noah’s song… but Noah wasn’t born as Noah, as a child they were expected to be a… certain type of person. But inside they knew that they were not what people saw on the outside. At first everyone around them saw them as that one thing, the external thing and they thought nothing of it. Noah was in there and to be that other way felt wrong and they did not believe they would be able to be Noah, not at first. It took time but it became possible, belief grew and became strength and possibility so they could act and change and eventually Noah was here.”
“This song is strong and beautiful but grew partly out of the old. Two things that are very different working together. There are parts of your song in here, Emyr. Parts of many other songs. Light and dark. A strange combination of harmonies.”
“Yes,” Emyr held the song aloft and let it fly.
“Pointing the way to truth,” Gloam’s eyes followed the song as it sped away. For a moment he looked sad to see it go.
“Their truth,” Emyr watched Gloam’s face. “Noah’s truth.”
“Why did he not abandon the older song? If it isn’t really him?”
“He couldn’t, not really, it is a part of who he is, a part of his journey. To let go of that would be to deny something vital. It is important to know who you are and who you were and try to accept it. Even if, at the times it is painful and even dangerous,” Emyr watched the song disappear into the sky. “You should hear the song for yourself, not just my memory of it. I think you’d enjoy meeting him.”
“You all hold so much inside you. I don’t know how or why.”
“Where else would it go?”
“Out. Away.”
“Then we would forget.”
“Exactly,” Gloam clapped his hands together, the sound echoed into the surrounding shadows.
“It can hurt but it is important to remember how far we have come and where we need to go.”
—
“These songs are important Gloam. I don’t know how else to say it. Do you want to lose her song? After all this time do you really want to let that go?”
“But it hurts to hold this in. I see it in you even now. Watching Noah’s song leave you, hearing Anwen’s song play in your heart, these things hurt you.”
Emyr stepped closer to Gloam, rested his hand on the being’s shoulder and looked into his eyes, “Yes it hurts, Of course it does but Gloam, not having them with me would hurt more. Noah is somewhere far away but I hope I will see him soon. Mum is dead. I know that I will never see her or speak to her again, never hold her hand or chat over a cup of tea with her again. But I can remember all the cups of tea, all the biscuits, all the laughter, the arguments that we ever had. If I can remember every little detail about her, the good, the bad and the indifferent she lives on. And I have Noah’s memories, Aunty Carol’s and the rest of the girls, even The Herald has his memories and those are things we can share. Mum’s song lives on and gains depth and meaning. I find new things in her music each time I listen to it. There is a universe inside each of those songs. That is why we cherish them. Each song is a set of memories, the verses are like constellations in the sky that can guide you home even by when you feel lost or abandoned. That is why we share them.”
Gloam frowned and smiled and looked away. When he looked back at Emyr he seemed puzzled, “So, I could meet others, like Noah, like Anwen or Carl or…?
Emyr laughed, “Gloam, you are a being of infinite possibility, you tell me what you could do!”
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