Sabriel, First Intermission - "The visions are fragmented..."
An endless, star-void night encompassed her. The coarse, warm tomb of sand she had been buried in was vanished. All existence seemed as lost to her as her memory.
Yet still she thought.
Suspended there in that rayless realm, Sabriel knew that what she beheld was not death's domain. This was something else. Something far more sinister.
"Sabriel. You must go on, Sabriel. Without me."
The man's face that came to her was as familiar as the sun, but she could not give it a name. The sincerity of his aching fell upon her like rain on a muddied field, so heavy was its sadness. She wished she could stay there with him, wished she was not about to go back to wherever it was that she was lost in.
Yet the echo of his words faded quickly, and the visage of his face was lost with it. She was alone, more so than before. And now she needed to go on living again.
Sabriel, Round II - "...and a dark cloud spreads like spilt ink across the pages of possible futures."
Sand. Why'd it have to be sand?
Shoulders squared and jaw firmly set, she surveyed her surroundings and the happenings of them without the turn of her head. Her eyes quickly drank in the situation. Many questions now rang in her head, but she did not have time for them. There was another here.
Two, in point of fact. Three, if you counted whoever the disembodied voice belonged to. She did not have time to think who that might be, choosing instead to observe the two before her.
The first was a large... frog? It was a strange thing to behold, and there was a dullness behind its look. Slimy and with little red red fins or spikes upon its green back, it looked on in abject idiocy. Its partner did not look much better.
Shrouded in a ragged cloak almost as decrepit as itself, the combatant looked as a wicker chair given life and clothing. Its appendages were as straw in a scarecrow, its eyes dying coals in the twilight of its absent head. With skin the consistency of aged parchment, it was a wonder the creature was able to conjure enough spittle to hock such a glob at her feet.
She didn't move her eyes to see if it hit her. Her face betrayed no emotion. She simply stared the thing dead in its seemingly lifeless face.
"Such a nuisance… but don’t worry, my sweet. You will have your freedom just as soon as Pharod will have theirs."
As it began to pull something from its pouch, she reached for her belt, feeling for her little friend Ranna. But as she reached, she stopped, for something else metallic laid there. She glanced down, and drew in a tiny gasp of surprise.
She knew their names as well as hers, though they had been forgotten til that moment: Mosrael and Kibeth! The Waker and the Walker, returned to her! For the first time in the limited recollection of her life, she felt joy. That hope - the one she had so clung to in what seemed her final moment - was alive in full spring, filling her with a brightening joy that gave her strength.
When her gaze returned to the creatures across from her, she saw it held a sort of rope dart in its clutch. The frog-beast still looked onward, idle and dumb, as the humming of that strange stick-like being now loomed menacingly across from her.
This was an issue.
The creature had the hooked rope, and she had her sword. And while there was no doubt of her own dexterity, she was never again going to underestimate that of another. The Sandman had proven what a folly that was.
Nervousness did not overtake her, anxiousness did not blot her thoughts. That thing had a companion; she needed one too. Again she glanced around, looking. What sort of dead could be found in the belly of an hourglass? What corpse could be risen in such a place? She looked inside, but all there was was her, the two dolts across from her, and the ever falling sand.
Think.
The floor was wood. The walls were glass. Above her rained the sand.
Think outside.
She looked outside the glass at the room surrounding their timely cage. It seemed to be a study of sorts, and their hourglass was placed upon a desk. No help there. They seemed to be shrunken in comparison. Was there anything this small that could be brought back? Anything that lingered in the falling sand that might be raised?
Think outside the box.
Then she saw it. It was already unearthed, there was no need for Mosrael's song! Why had she not thought of this before? She'd seen it in her first observance of the area, plain as day.
A smirk broadened across her face as she quickly drew Kibeth. It was larger than Ranna and Mosrael both, and she held it in a curious two-handed grip. Kibeth quivered, seeming almost to want to twitch free of her grasp, but her grip was firm. She swung it quickly, back and forth, round and round, side to side. The sounds, all from this one simple silver bell, were each different from one another, but they made a little marching tune, a dancing song, a parade.
The tune rang out, bouncing off the glass and sand, reverberating along the structure of the hourglass itself. Jauntily, the march of the tolling could be heard throughout the arena and without. The whole structure seemed to suddenly come alive, primarily because parts of it actually had.
Some of the bones that held the hourglass shook, jerking with the same freeing motion that Kibeth had in Sabriel's hands. A single skull up near the neck of the glass seemed to chatter as well. Not all of them sprang to life, however. That suited her just fine. A mania had overtaken her, a recklessness now indulged, and she kept the bell briskly ringing, kept the march ever stepping.
Creaking and rocking the very hourglass itself, a few of the bones that held the arena awakened to her call. The wooden floor rolled as if it were in an earthquake, and the falling sand sprayed around like an ocean wave against a boulder. Her smirk was a wide-faced grin, now and she spoke with mocking derision.
"Funny thing about the dead!" she called over the din, her laughter a punctuation. "They are still dead no matter their size! They answer the call just the same." Those final words dripped with her manic malice, her wild peels of laughter joining the jarring chorus. As parts of the columns of bones now wrenched themselves away and fell to her command, Sabriel stared directly at the stick-man, her laughter clear and shrieking.
Bookmarks