hellkitty

“When you see me next, I’ll be wearing colors,” Windblade said, with confidence she didn’t really feel, her hand curling around the cortical chamber's doorframe. She'd already set the colors in front of her: one for each of the metrotitan languages.

She needed solitude, and time. And Nautica and Chromia gave it to her, Chromia giving her one last, worried look over her shoulder as they left the cortical chamber. Needlessly, so. She was safer here than anywhere else and this? This was what she was trained to do. It was her calling, her vocation, and she had fought for her training on Caminus, insisting time and again they give her a chance, that they let her try.  

Camiens believed in trying. They believed that if no one got hurt, one could try. And maybe they’d thought they were protecting her from herself, sparing her from the hurt of disappointment.  But she’d had faith, though she’d never admit how low it sometimes ebbed, and she’d persevered, and she’d earned her cityspeaker’s torques, the small shapes under her optics that identified her, like marks of rank.  

And she called forth that faith now, all the more intense because if she couldn’t speak to Metroplex, their whole quest would have been in vain. Windblade’s first chance to matter--really matter--and she was determined to make it work.

She settled down in front of the cortex, taking a slow vent of air to steady herself, murmuring a prayer, the rhythm of the words and the familiarity of the ritual enough to soothe her, to separate her from her anxiety, from the thread of fear of ‘what if she failed’?  What if faith and need were not enough?  

She tried the chromatic language itself, the one that had given Chromia her name, widening her optics, letting her optics shift through a progression of color, red to gold to green to blue to violet and white, the greeting of that language, moving through the vibrations of light waves.  

A flicker over the cortical surface, nothing more.

Don’t get disheartened, Windblade. There was a response--he was able to respond, if nothing else.  

Each metrotitan had their preferred language: Caminus preferred visual shapes projected in the air, shifting from one to another, the language and melody of geometry.  Windblade tried that next, the pentagon on her throat glowing, casting holographic shapes in the air.  

Another shimmer of response, as though the air gathered to a thickness before fading.

He’s responding, Windblade.  That’s what matters. He’s trying. He’s not turning away.  It just isn’t his language, either.  

Song, then, the pattern of sound. Her weakest, she knew, her voice thready and soft and, to her audio, unbeautiful and weak. But she would try. She had to try.

Windblade sang, her voice climbing slowly through scales: pentatonic, octatonic, all the way through the complex decatonic, her voice rising and falling like a swooping bird riding the wind up and down the steady stairs of the notes, pausing for a response, her voice hovering like a hummingbird.

It came, a sound so low that at first she merely felt it in the finest sensors of her audio receivers, a vibration that seemed to fill her like water, rising slowly through a series of notes as though testing her, finding what scales she heard---reaching out, a sonic compromise.  

More than just hearing, more than just acknowledging: Metroplex was answering, or preparing to, trying to calibrate the range of his mighty voice to her pitifully small audio range.  And it was beautiful, beyond words, the sounds vibrating through every part of her, as though summoning emotion: joy and loneliness both, solitude and loss.  He was singing his story to her, suddenly, and the notes in her own vocalizer became merely a counterpoint, highlights to his song. It was a duet, a true duet, one they’d told her she’d never be able to do--too strong in personality, too determined.  ‘To Sing together,’ her instructors had clucked at her, ‘you must release yourself, you must give in to the Song, lose yourself.’

She’d never been able to, but she was now, the song so big and magnificent and strange and beautiful that her own self was just a tiny note in a symphony, a star in the vastness of a galaxy--still there, still coherent, just small, and made part of the song. It wasn’t a surrender as much as a dance, sometimes careful and slow, sometimes fast and passionate.  It was beautiful and intimate and beggared everything, everyone who had touched her before, and when he ended his song, she was trembling, wrung out, her voice an echoing vibrato.

“Wind-voice,” Metroplex sang, the notes bright, almost teasing, as he gave her a name. The Song was a formal step, an introduction, an immersion in the thoroughness of each other, and he sang now, less abstractly, the notes still shimmering with the warmth and beauty of the Song.