Tock and the Second Sounding: Excerpt from Chapter 1

There weren't always dragons in the Valley.

Spawned seemingly from nothing, with arched tectonic wings and throats warbling creation, they brought with them the Sounding and with it the Valleyfolk rose anew from the magick that seeped into the very earth beneath their feet.

This was what all conduits were taught from a young age, and it was a reverent imagining of this very moment over half a millennium ago that decorated the ceiling of the Hall that Alyx anxiously was crossing the threshold of. Her hurried footsteps echoing loudly as she broached the hall, half-mindedly swatting at the mosquito that was making a meal out of her damp neck. The sharpness of its bite almost made the leftover embarrassment and shame from class she could feel in her neck less noticeable, almost.

Applied Days were unequivocally her worst days. Even though she had placed at the top of her cohort in their entrance exams, automatically building the tower of expectations the faculty had of her higher than she could ever reach, it was inevitable that it would all come crashing down the moment they began practicals. And crash down it did when it became obvious that while she could debate theory with the best of them, she couldn’t even accomplish the simplest of ætherphysics. She never had been.

Broken, wasted potential were words that she was familiar with. And yet, despite them, she continued to show up, to come back, pretending to be unaffected by the stares and the whispers, by the disappointment that graced her professors’ faces every time they looked at her. And today had been no different, the water bowl she attempted to carve ætherrunes into shattering, splashing charged water all over herself and her irate labmate.

Breathing slowly to steady herself as she kept her quick pace, she tried to remind herself that it didn’t matter. It had been three years since she had come to North Haven College of Ætherphysics. She was used to the stares that were once new but soon followed those of her childhood. It didn’t matter. But it did.

It didn’t. After all, she didn’t need to excel at ethercasting to become a theoretical ætherphysicist. And her grades in everything but applied work always pulled her through her classes.

Trying to push it out of her mind, she began rushing even more quickly through the horribly red marble floor antechamber, cursing under her breath. Try as she might, there was never a day in her life when she wasn’t late, mind always lost in whatever she was doing, and today was no different. Except, it was worse because this time it wasn’t just her lǎomā waiting at home for her care, still parked in her rocking chair and facing the window with distant eyes, this time her best friend was waiting to go with her.

With long ringlets of red hair that always looked like it was kissed by firelight and eyes the color of new leaves, Narey had always had a way of catching everyone’s eye no matter how oblivious she was to it. Ever early, she was waiting in the alcove before the archway to the courtyard, leaning against where the sandstone pillar met the wall and cast in the soft orange haze of approaching evening.

No matter how long they had known each other, Alyx always felt out of place with her. Almost as if there were two world existing side by side and each time she was close enough to catch Narey’s notice, she was unceremoniously pushed across the threshold.

“Narey!” Alyx hesitantly called out to her, causing the woman’s head to whip towards her.

At her voice, Narey’s entire demeanor changed. Her eyes lit up and when she smiled softly back at Alyx, the freckles sprinkled across her pale cheeks raised with the motion. A few stray strands fell in her eyes which she quickly huffed out of her face. Despite the warmth that was always suffocating the Hall of Fife, the ever cold Narey was wearing a dark turtleneck with a sleeveless light beige dress over top.

“You’re late, Ms. Sūn,” she teased, a light lilt tilting her words ever so slightly. She rocked back on her heels, swinging her hands behind her back where she clasped them. She tilted her head, a curtain of her hair falling like a river, “But why am I not surprised?”

“And you’re going to catch fire, Ms. O'Callaghan,” Alyx couldn’t help but to tease back, a smile tugging at her lips. The uneasiness she always felt washed away at the sound of her best friend’s calming voice, her anxiety tucking itself back into a far corner of the back of her mind, soothed. “As always. Whenever will you get your obvious anemia checked, I wonder?”

Instead of laughing and shoving her aside to start a faux irritated brisk walk past her that her smiling eyes would inevitably betray, Narey this time said nothing at all. In fact, her smile washed away almost completely, like someone slowly dimming a bright light, darkness swallowing the space left behind. A bright sheen growing in her eyes like unexpected rain washing over moss, a tightness taking over her features as she tried and failed to keep some sort of carefree expression.

And, for some reason, that’s when Alyx noticed that the redhead’s violin case was open though her symphony lay untouched. The out of place silence seemed to hang around them like a shroud, louder in the air than her Song ever was and, at first, Alyx wasn’t sure if she had just been waiting so long for her that she got bored of playing but then she noticed the distinct lack of leftover æther lingering in the air around them and knew that Narey hadn’t played at all. Which was not normal. Song was something that was always surrounding Narey even when they were children, loving curling in the air around her, playfully jostling her hair as it went about softening hearts and minds. Her manipulation of ether was a gentle one, barely noticeable in how it laced the notes that she drew from her symphony, the violin’s heady vibrato humming in the air with the hint of something other like a siren’s song drawing the tide near and people too.

“What’s–”

“Not here,” she said lowly before pressing her pale rose, trembling lips back together in a flat line.

Something in her chest squeezed painfully, a sense of wrongness settling uneasily in the still air between them.