Song of the Piper

::26:: Of What Once Was (Part 1)

Music is Red October by Audiomachine. Play it!

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Colours slowly returned to me. Hues of grey and brown and green filled my vision, gradually taking shape until I could make out where I was.

Rocks. I looked around. It seemed like I was stuck in the bottom of a cavern. People were talking somewhere nearby, but I still couldn't think straight. My mind was blurry from shock.

Then I realised that I was still in Erstürnach's Fountain.

A shriek pierced the air.

I blinked my eyes, instantly snapping to focus. I wheeling around. There was a group of people right behind me. Four of them, I counted. They didn't pay me any heed when I tentatively said, "Hello?"

Instead, their attentions were concentrated upon the man in the middle of the circle they were forming. He was kneeling on the ground, raving and crying. Though his clear blue eyes were open, they were blank. He looked like he was in a trance. I suppressed a shudder at the sight.

"Leon!" cried a tall, tangled-hair woman. She fell to her knees and grabbed the man by the shoulders, shaking him hard. Another man wrenched them apart.

Anton. As I took in his curly brown hair and deep blue eyes, a jolt shot up my spine. He was truly a perfect mirror image of me, if I were a man; I was a perfect image of my father.

Anton is—or was my father. The thought still didn't ring right in my head.

"Control yourself, Helene! Stay alert—his cries may have given our presence away," he warned.

It was only then I realised that I was peering into Anton's past again. I was still in Erstürnach, and I was standing in its dead Fountain, but my companions were not in sight. These four were. The four Anya had mentioned who had been tasked with tracking down the Pied Piper.

Maria was there too, her face eerily similar to Elise's. She nodded grimly at her husband and kept a vigilant watch on her surroundings, Medium in hand.

A violin.

My eyes went wide.

It couldn't be...but it could. This was too much of a coincidence. Yet—

Elise was my mother?

I gritted my teeth and forced myself to observe the scene. It would do me no good to get distracted here.

Helene had backed away at Anton's orders, leaving a considerable space for Leon—the memory sifter—to do whatever he needed to do.

His fingers were buried in the dirt, and his jaw was clenched hard. A sheen of sweat coated his body, making his clothes cling onto skin. He was muttering incoherently under his breath, and his brows were drawn together tightly.

An alien scream rang out from a distance.

Anton spat out a filthy curse. "Gryphon!" he snarled. "We need to get out of here!"

"What about Leon? If we break the connection now—"

Anton cut Helene off with another curse. He turned to Maria—Elise. Whoever she was. "Maria, can you strengthen our wards?"

"I most certainly can," she replied readily. "I don't know how long I'll last against the gryphon though. My magic has been severely affected by the area."

"So has mine. But do it."

With a nod, Maria propped the violin on her shoulder and drew the bow across the strings. A vigorous, powerful melody rang out. However, even as I felt the magic from where I stood, I knew that something was wrong. Maria's magic felt like a river flowing seawards, but a barricade was built in the middle to slow down the flow.