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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 4227600" data-attributes="member: 63">The Contest of Harmony and InventionBy Ryan NockThe power lines shook like violin strings being bowed by a dying man. The streets were well past rain-slick, and now had currents of their own, pushing flotsam of both the trash and the citizen variety away from the great river. Sewage and sea brine splashed beneath Jordan’s feet as he stumbled through the storm, pistol and fiddle case in hand, calling out to his brother.He could barely see ten feet, and the crowds – all fools as bad or worse than Jordan to have waited this long to evacuate – threatened to trample him into the rising flood. Cursing God, Jordan turned and cut across the street to the dark shape of a two-story building. A motel, he realized, as he staggered out of the rain and under the carport awning.The door was locked. He kicked in the glass, cleared out the remains with the barrel of his pistol, and clambered inside. The flood had preceded him, and in the near black interior he sloshed through ankle-deep detritus. Roaring gusts blew rain in after him, and he tucked his pistol into his pocket so he could flip open his cell phone for light. At the far end of the lobby was a staircase, and he climbed a few steps up so he could sit out of the water. He lay back on the steps and caught his breath, glad to be out of the rain, at least for a while.Jordan and Nathan had thought they could outlast the storm, wait until the weather cleared and then be on the ground to fight off looters and squatters. Their mother had owned a historic house on the edge of the bayou. Jordan now wished they had sold it, because the storm would probably turn it into a playhouse for alligators, but if it didn’t, he and his brother were going to protect their property.Or so they had planned. But the disaster radio’s governmentally stentorian proclamations of doom had convinced them they needed to find sturdier shelter. They’d grabbed their most cherished possessions – mom’s fiddle and dad’s rifle – loaded the truck bed with supplies, and taken off for the stadium. They had been taking the road that cut alongside the north levee when the water poured over, the truck hydroplaned, and they crashed into a store that was in the process of being looted. Nathan tried to drive them off with a few blasts of his rifle, but the looters had guns of their own, and they had to flee. Jordan tried to follow the sounds of his brother’s gunshots, but the storm roared louder, and soon he was lost.Now Jordan had no idea where his brother was. He tried to call his brother’s cell phone, but reception was almost nothing, and the call just went to a static-riddled voicemail. It was just as well, Jordan thought. He would rest here tonight, wait for sunrise and clear weather, and then go to the stadium to find Nathan.Reverently, Jordan checked the fiddle case. The outside was drenched, but almost no water had seeped in. The antique instrument and bow were safe. Sirens wailed, an ambulance flashed by outside, and the flicker of its emergency lights gave Jordan a glimpse of the lobby. It was a motel, like any other, but a plastic tray of fruit had somehow miraculously been knocked off a counter without flipping, and it bobbed nearby the base of the stairs.He closed the case, then reached down and grabbed a fruit, barely able to see in the reborn gloom. It felt like a pear. He was about to take a bite when a lamp flickered on above him, and he saw a wretched worm-like thing with white strands of hair crawling out of the fruit. [imager]http://www.enworld.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=34127[/imager] Grimacing, he threw it into the water.“That’s just a sign of what’s to come,” a voice said.Jordan tensed and looked in the direction of the voice. Standing in the storm-blown waters just ten feet away was a young woman in a white dress. The lamp seemed to illuminate only her. No light glinted off the cheap motel decorations. The tiny waves were black. There was no wake in the water from the woman’s passage.“Who are you?” Jordan asked.“I need you to play a song for me, Jordan.”The building shook in the wind and Jordan grabbed his pistol.“Who are you?” Jordan asked again.“You need to get out of here,” she said, “quickly. Our city has been rotting for years, though we have survived through the blues. But something wretched has been feeding on our decay, and child, this storm and the death it brings will give it the strength it needs to be born.”“What are you talking about?” he shouted. “Listen, I have a gun, woman, so don’t you come any closer.”She had not moved since he had seen her, except to talk. She didn’t seem frightened.“Your brother, your friends, this whole city is in danger. If you want to save them, think not of your safety. Follow the currents. They flow to its gnashing mouth.”The lamp died, and the room fell to darkness. Jordan squinted, but he couldn’t see the woman anywhere. Wishing that asylums would know better than to let their patients out in the middle of the apocalypse, Jordan grabbed his mother’s fiddle case and led the way with his pistol as he went for the door. The woman didn’t accost him, and once he got out on the street he heard the deep, unsteady creak of shearing metal and cracking stone. The motel began to shift in the force of the wind, and Jordan ran clear as it crashed down behind him. Thunder boomed overhead, and Jordan came to a stop beside a tilting metal pole, a blackened street light lurching sideways. He caught his breath, then looked down as he noticed something floating past him in the current.The bowl of fruit, barely visible but seeming to writhe in the shadows, drifted away from the debris of the collapsed motel. Jordan glanced around, and on all sides he saw trash and refuse carried on the flood, flowing westward, toward the swamp. Along with it stumbled confused people, nearly blind from the rain and from their tears at what they knew they would lose. The stadium was south and east, but Jordan was more afraid to go there than to ignore the unearthly warning he had received. He began to run with the current, while all around him the city was pummeled by winds and rain from the sea.He felt like he had walked for hours, and the streets turned into rivers, and then vanished entirely as homes stretched out, letting the bayou dominate. Broken swing sets, upturned tupperware, wrappers of Popeye’s chicken sandwiches and plastic daiquiri cups congealed amid the knees of cypress trees. Dark shapes, not moving, floated face down, and hungry teeth and snouts pulled them under the murky water. Once teeth bit at his leg, and he had shot down into the swamp, and the creature had released him.The sky was threshed with tempest and thunderclouds, but above its roar Jordan heard a sound, like a hungry voice, or an ancient horn, coming from straight ahead. The current began to quicken, and Jordan knew he had to be close. So he wouldn’t be swept away, he leapt onto a half-toppled tree, then climbed to the next, through branches that tried to shake him loose. He scrambled from tree to tree, watching everything that was dying in his city be dragged toward something that spoke in the gloom. Finally, he knew he had to be right above it. Witchfire hovered above the swirling flood, and below he saw a vortex of refuse.[imagel]http://www.enworld.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=34128[/imagel] “My God,” Jordan said. “What is that?”The deep murmur stopped, the vortex slowed. A voice called out, rumbling from every direction.Under a hard Season, fired by the SunLanguishes man, languishes the flock.We hear the cuckoo's voice; then sweet songs of the turtledove and finch.Soft breezes stir the air.The shepherd trembles.The fear of lightning and fierce thunderRobs his tired limbs of restAs gnats and flies buzz furiously aroundAnd the nests of songbirds are silenced.Alas, his fears were justifiedThe Heavens thunder and roar and majesticallyI am born.Jordan felt revulsion at its every word. He had heard many stories of demons and ghosts and sin in his youth, had heard his mother play the fiddle in church like her music alone was all that was keeping evil from claiming her children, but never had he believed in raw evil as he now witnessed.Balanced dangerously in the branches, Jordan drew his pistol at fired at the center of the vortex, but the bullet vanished into the gnashing froth of garbage, and the swamp laughed at him. The tree beneath him shook, its roots snapping at the flood threatened to pull it from the ground. He fired more shots in a swift, desperate cadence, but it was futile. Then, over the din, a tinny song called out, digitized, muffled. In Jordan’s pocket, his cell phone played “When the Saints Go Marching In,” the ring tone for his brother Nathan, and at the sound of the song, the thing beneath the vortex coughed in pain. The flood paused and the ground shuddered.The ring tone repeated once, then ended, and the evil thing murmured again, insistently. Hurricane winds pulled at Jordan, and his tree’s trunk was sundered. He threw his pistol away and leapt for the next farther tree. Still holding his mother’s fiddle case, he caught a branch, swung badly to the surface of the water, and then grabbed onto this new tree’s trunk, holding tight as the current pulled him toward the vortex.He braced himself against the roots of the tree and steadied himself, then turned and faced the devouring entity. All it existed for was to consume, not to create, but his city was one of splendor and song. He opened the fiddle case, and in the thrashing rain he held fiddle and bow high. A memory of childhood and church guided his hands as he pulled the bow across the rain-streaked strings.The current stopped and the ground trembled. The sound of cello strings rose up behind him, and then to his right and left guitars called out from the darkness. Violins hummed from the distance, and Jordan saw other men and women, silhouettes accompanying his fiddle in a symphony, their every note causing the thing pain.They played for minutes, and that which sought to devour their city fought against them. The ground bucked at their feet, but they all held steady. Beasts of the swamp snarled, but the music kept them at bay. The hungering thing roared and cursed at them, but Jordan raised the song to its crescendo and their enemy screamed and fled. Echoes of strings faded out under the still rumbling storm, but the vortex vanished, and the ground was still.Lashed with rain, Jordan tucked his mother’s fiddle back into its case, then set out into the night. He met the eyes of some of the other musicians – men, women, children of the city’s many races; poets and doctors and thieves and vagrants, fools all – but none of them spoke. It wasn’t necessary.It did not take long for him to find his mother’s old home, though he could not see his way. Stairs elevated it above the flood, and it had survived a century of storms. It would survive this one. The door was already open, but not by wind or looters. He walked inside, made his way through by memory as the great storm continued to shake the city to the east.In the kitchen, the young woman sat at the table. Jordan sat down across from her.“It’s a good fiddle,” he said, “though I don’t think I play it as well as you.”“You drove it away,” she said. “Now the storm can pass. Darkness hovers over the waters, but let there be light again.”[imager]http://www.enworld.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=34129[/imager]The young woman lifted her hands beside a candle on the table between them, and a flame blossomed at its tip, filling the room.“Don’t forget to play from time to time,” she said.Jordan nodded, stood, and picked up the fiddle case. There was a bowl of fresh fruit on the table, just like his mother had always kept, and Jordan took one as he left. As he stepped out onto the porch, the sky was just turning a light shade of gray.He stretched, then pulled out his cell phone. He had one new voicemail, from his brother.“Hey Jordan, where the hell are you? I’m praying you get here safely, but hey, you’re my brother. You’re probably off helping old ladies cross the street or something. Not like I can complain. I helped a bunch of people who were lost tonight. Would you believe, they were headed to the swamp? I’ll tell you all about it when you get here, but dad’s rifle sure came in handy.“Well, we’re all safe now. Safe and dry, at the stadium. Where the hell are you?“Be safe, okay bro? And, assuming you don’t die, do me a favor. We need to celebrate when you get here, so if you could loot some beer for us, that’d be great.” The message ended, and the first light of day broke the eastern horizon, pushing away the storm’s gloom. Jordan smiled, and began to walk.Eventually, he reached the great stadium, fiddle and beer in hand. The waters were receding, and there, amid crowds of flooded tents, he found his brother, surrounded by a flock of drunken, foolish people, already celebrating that their city had survived. <img src="http://www.enworld.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=34126" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /></blockquote>

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