[The Sunken Conundrum] An Intriguing Mystery (Dra Nivera)

[Saige]

Though the Pycon did not lack sympathy for Dra's story, she was slightly disappointed to learn that she could not obtain as much information as she had hoped. Her outside appearance did not change; she did not slump her shoulders or make a face. Those feelings, she kept to herself. "I understand," she replied with a smile of comprehension.

The aura wavered again, exactly as it had done before. There was a subject of concern to the ghost that seemed to keep her mind occupied. Saige hoped it was not something that would trigger a violent reaction. Of the little she knew of ghosts, she knew that they were unpredictable creatures. Not a difficult concept to imagine, as their very existence hung between the world of the living and the afterlife.

Dra's loss of materialization sent worry through Saige at first, who thought that she might return to scaring the life out of the little statuette. Instead, the ghost only reassured her. "I can still see you," the Pycon replied slyly, "There is little light and your physical form is transparent, but I am an Aurist. I can see you the way you see yourself." She wasn't lying, either. Colors continued to swirl around Dra Nivera, not nearly as defined as earlier, but Saige was sure that if she were a more accomplished Aurist, she wouldn't even have noticed the loss of materialization.

In fact, the aura was fascinating to observe. As most all creatures Saige had previously encountered were solid, Saige could only make visual observations as to what happened around them. Now, she could see the aura swirling inside the transparent ghost's very essence, showing Saige a blurred version of Dra's form that she has spent a great deal of energy to materialize for her, while it lasted.

"Old, how old?" Saige piped up, forgetting to be considerate at the mention of the song. "It doesn't matter that you don't know the whole thing. Perhaps one day I will find the ending, if I study more, and if I am lucky." She smiled. "On that day, I will be sure to find you. I know how irritating it is to feel like something is missing."

[Dra Nivera]

“I cannot put a proper age on this song,” Dra said, turning her gaze to the floor, how foolish she must look to this master of history. “I do know that when I learned it from my father, he had said it was an old song even then.”

“As for the irritation of the lost I can relate all too well,” the ghost said, switching topics, “I seem to have lost much of my life before and after death, no pun intended.”

She giggled at her own joke, hoping it was not of a too dry humour for the PYcon’s liking. Nivera did not try to think back this time, did not try to think about her song. She had done so many times in the past and the only memories it brought forth were ones of pain and anguish. So rather than thinking about that she did her best prepare herself and her mind for singing. It was an almost pointless exercise as a ghost considering she didn’t need to breathe, her vocal chords never needed stretching and the song she planned to sing was already known to her by heart.

So instead of preparing herself physically, she prepared herself mentally. Trying to clear her mind as Seline had often done, she found it a hard task indeed to calm herself completely. The Soulmist that made her still remaining swirling and chaotic, despite her focus on it to remain still. She knew the song would bring back memories when she sang it, some good, some bad. Being ready for such things would have been a blessing indeed, but she had sung her song many times without the preparation.

This time was different though, the ghost thought to herself, now you’ve got an audience who pays extravagantly close attention to detail.

“I’m sorry I’m not much help on my own,” Dra started, “but if you heard the song, maybe then you could decipher something from it that has escaped me.”

[Saige]

Saige found herself wishing that she had something within her power to help the ghost recover her memories. To her surprise, it was not her own selfish desire to hoard knowledge that made her so wistful, but rather the sorrow in Dra's voice that did it. It was not fair to her, to have lost so much. As if it wasn't enough that she had lost her life, but her memories as well? Saige shuddered. It was her worst fear to lose the reliability of her own mind. She was anything but forgetful.

The ghost concentrated for a good amount of time while Saige practiced her Auristic skills as she had done earlier. She squinted, trying to pinpoint the colors that flowed within Dra's soulmist, but found her vision lessening more than anything as a mulled pain crept into her head, and body. With a hand to her head, Saige calmed her focus, knowing that she had to be careful about the use of her djed. She was not one to stretch her limits in the realm of magic, and despite feeling compelled to continue, she stopped. She had to at least save her energy for the night to come; she did not intend to cut her conversation short on account of overgiving.

"'Don't apologize, there is no reason to," Saige said, saying it not to make Dra more at ease, but rather because she believed it to be the truth. She did not enjoy small talk nor niceties. Both were based on lies, invented by society to hide that which was truly important. She did realize the necessity of it for some people, however, and understood that she might have been a bit stern, so she continued, "Maybe I could decipher something, but I am still young and have much to learn. So, I will try but I cannot guarantee anything."

[Dra Nivera]

“I am old and have learned very little,” Dra said, “so maybe someone younger would be of far better help.”

Calm came over the ghost as she started her song. Her mind became lost in the words and rhythms as her dead voice rang, high and echoing off the walls of the library. Memory after memory came back to her and she met each one content and willing. A farm. A fire. A bloody hand. A knit quilt. A young girl’s grave. She watched herself in her own memories, as if she were somehow disconnected from the events that were hers alone to have witnessed. She saw her spirit pull free from its body, watched her father bury her in the ground, then burn their house down around him.

All this passed through her as she sang.

“On the cold winters gloom
a fire doth rage
the city consumed
won't the gods come to aid?
As their people are lost
to the fires of that day
when the world was shattered
and the blood price was paid
the people are lost and forgotten in death
for the war of the Heavens sundered every breath
life itself is born a new
the world reshaped and torn in two
Heaven remains watchful as before
but I'll never forget the Valterrians lords.”

As the song ended, Nivera felt her calm slipping away, falling from her mind like rain from a cloud. She let it slip, her content leaving her as well and she found herself in a morbid state. The mixing of her exhaustion and memories was not a good combination; she would have to remember that. Still, she thought she had given a good performance. Above all else she had learned something knew and possibly useful. Being a ghost she no longer had to breathe, and so she never needed to inhale while singing. Possibilities began to multiply in her head, she could hold the longest notes, speak the fastest verses. She would have to keep that in mind for later though.

“So tell me,” Dra Nivera cooed, her morbid state washing away at her new realization, “what can my scholar figure out about my song?”

[Saige]

The ghost's voice rang out throughout the Sunken Conundrum, reverberating off every wall and book with eery grace. Though this was the first time the song had reached Saige's ears, she did not feel as though Dra had made any mistakes. Though she seemed calm, Saige allowed herself a quick look at her aura to smell the scent of something decaying, and felt a fire on her skin. The song certainly evoked one of Dra's stronger memories.

Excitement crept up through the Pycon's little body as she carefully analyzed the lyrics and figured it must speak of the Valterrian. So it must be an ancient song! But I'll never forget the Valterrian lords, the last line said, as though the creator actually lived before the cataclysm struck, and survived to write a song about it. "I must write this down," Saige said after a moment, after Dra asked her what she might have discerned. Her attention occupied, she did not even noticed the state of exhaustion she had put the poor soul in, and hopped off of the ledge she sat on. "I left my journal over there," she said quickly with a point of her finger, no longer able to hide the enthusiasm in her voice. Her clay body started molding and reshaping itself as Saige forced herself into the shape of a fish and swam at full speed towards her affairs. She gathered her quill, ink, and journal, shoved them into her bag hurriedly, and made her way back to Nivera as though she could not spare a single second.

[Dra Nivera]

The ghost smiled through her weariness at the excitement of the clay figure. “I see I’ve struck some chord with you,” she mused, watching Saige hurriedly rush about.

A thirst for knowledge was an interesting proposition to the ghost, never before had she seen someone so interested in the past. It saddened Nivera that she was not so reliant or fervent in such a thing, but what she did care for, her singing, made her as happy as could be. She still wished she could’ve offered more help to this alchemical creation, but care in after death was not one of her strong points. Let this woman take her past, Dra thought to herself, I am content with taking songs.

Excitement, that was something Dra hadn’t felt in a long time it seemed. In truth there wasn’t much for a ghost to get excited for, but at least this scholar had something worth living for, what did Dra have? Seline was one of the ghost’s reasons of existence, vengeance was another, yet still she felt she needed something more to keep her bound to the world.

“Does my voice ring bells in your memory?” The ghost asked as Saige swam about, “Or is this something rare indeed?”

[Saige]

The little Pycon returned to where she had left Dra, grateful that the ghost was not offended by her sudden departure. She sat on the shelf again and pulled out her journal and quill, barely paying any attention as she dipped the sharpened feather into a vial of ink.

Her memory did not fail her. It never did, and it proved its worth yet again as Saige wrote down the song in its entirety, without missing a single verse. She liked to believe that this was one of her strengths, that rarely a day went by that she forgot that which she had paid attention to. She heard Dra's questions, but did not speak up nor cease writing until the last line was recorded into her trusty book. Then, she finally looked up.

"Sorry about that," she said with a rueful smile, "I had to write it down while it was fresh in my mind. If the song speaks any truth, it was written by someone who lived during the Valterrian. So yes, I would call it rare." She held out her book for Dra to take. Even though the leather-bound journal was fit for Saige's size, it could still be read easily enough by a larger being. The Pycon made sure of that by writing slightly larger than she naturally would.

"Did I make any mistakes?" She asked. Yes, memory was her strong point, but it was by no means eidetic. She could not let pride get in the way of finding any errors in her work. "So much Valterrian history is lost to us," Saige continued, "Every possibility of traces it left us is of ultimate value to me. You wouldn't happen to remember who taught it to you, by any chance?" Perhaps it was an old song passed down through her family. It would be hard to investigate after all of the ghost's connections were long dead, but maybe, just maybe, Saige could find a clue. Somehow, somewhere.

[Dra Nivera]

“Yes all the lyrics are correct,” Dra said, leaning towards the book so that she could read through the page.

It was a Pycon sized book, that being said it was easy enough to read, but Nivera still wondered how much writing one could fit into such a small book. Perhaps when this one was done Saige would purchase another and then start all over again, or maybe she already had a few, it never hurt to be prepared. Entertaining a wry thought, the ghost pondered how the scholar would react if suddenly she ran out of pages right in the middle of recording something.

The writing also made Nivera think of records, but in a different sense, in the sense that she had never kept any. It was a giddy feeling thinking that she’d be able to remember and recall things that had happened to her in the past, and if she lived long enough, she could remember back hundreds of years. What a memoir that would make, the recollections of hundreds of years of history, it made her feel a little less distraught about her current state of undeath.

“As for who taught it to me,” Dra said, noticing that she had been silently thinking to herself for a while, “it was my father, who said he had learned it from my mother. Though I never met her, she died giving birth to me.”

[Saige]

She smiled as she took her journal back, placing it back into her bag. She could write notes on her observations later. For now, she was more interested in conversing.

"So, this might be something that has been passed through generations. That leaves a lot of room for alteration, not to mention that your Mother may have simply borrowed the song from an external source." When Dra spoke of her mother, Saige mused with the possibility of this woman giving her more information of the song as a ghost. Dying in childbirth was probably traumatic for the poor soul, and the child would be reason enough to continue her existence against the will of nature. Saige dismissed the thought. She had traveled to the irrational assumption that since Dra was a ghost, her mother must be. Ghosts did not reproduce. At least, Saige had reason to believe they didn't.

Then her mind traveled to the girl's family. If she didn't have any siblings, that meant she was the last of her line. Probably not a ridiculously prominent family, if they were farmers, but it still brought a certain sadness to Saige. To see a piece of history extinguished, though miniscule compared to the disaster of the Valterrian, made her inexplicably bitter. The past had an immeasurable beauty, having formed everything that Saige saw today, or any day for the rest of her lifetime. But it was not a perfect thing; there were a lot of dead ends. Saige wondered, did the ghost keep on living because deep down, she refused to become a dead end?

"Dra Nivera," Saige spoke up, speaking rather formally as though she were about to ask her something important. Which she was. "How did you die?" Her stony eyes looked straight at the ghost as she once again increased her Auristic focus on her. Colors swirled about, making up the blurred form of a shy, thin girl, who hopefully wouldn't go into a rage upon being asked to answer the Pycon's rather rude question.

[Dra Nivera]

The ghost was a little startled by the question, which truly means she was nearly unravelled by it. Dra felt her emotions flare, but not towards anger, they dug down and pulled forward a deep longing that sobered the ghost. If she had been in a material form her smile would have faded, her eyes would have darted away from anything they landed on, her gaze and complexion itself would darken to the emotion. But as she was, all that changed was the gentle wind that moved her mist. It slowed, her form seeming to settle when it in fact, did the opposite, It tensed and folded in on itself.

It was a hard thing to explain, one’s death. It’s almost like trying to explain a birth except you remember most of it. Though Dra supposed it was probably a casual question most ghosts were asked almost on a daily basis, she wasn’t most ghosts. There were few times when she would grace the living with a conversation unless something truly caught her attention.

Nivera began to unknowingly drift away from Saige. She stopped just short of the opposite wall and gathered all her will to answer the scholar’s question. Pushing through her exhaustion, Dra Nivera refocused her Soulmist and shaped it into form, making her look exactly the way she had when she’d died. A hole opened in her chest, lacerations covered her from head to foot, her lips became sewn together with blood stained string and her eyes became black with bruising.

“This is how I died,” she said quietly, floating into the light where Saige could see her. “I sang the same song I have just sung for you now, except there was more to it, something is missing from my version, the ending. I sang it once, and am now dead because of it.” She spread her dress front slightly to reveal the entire circumference of her gaping wound, “This is what killed me,” she slide and ethereal hand around the inside of the hold, “I was tortured, stabbed, beaten, bloodied. Never once did I see my killer. All I heard was my on screams and her singing the lines of song that you have heard.” Her voice was flat, monotonous with the effort of keeping calm, “Then I awoke in my dead state as I am now, to witness my father burn our house down around himself as the last person he loved in this world was brutalized.”

She felt her emotional shield falter and she let her image fade; shrinking into herself as she once again became nothing more than mist. “After that the memories simply aren’t there until only a few years ago. I know it’s been over a hundred years,” Dra said, her voice catching slightly in a silent sob, “my killer is probably dead now, but it is the only hope I have of finishing this song, hearing it one last time before I fade.”

Nivera’s voice dropped off at the last word, letting it dissolve into the silence as the memories were forced out of her mind. Her calm returned, her clever returned, but now they were muted by old scars left to fester and sour.