Voices
Moving about with my roommate, sleeping and basking in the yet-named higher power have become my routine for… quite a long time. The routine is beginning to bore me, actually, so I start testing various things, such as if I could swim faster than my roommate through the churns and the stills of the fluid that permeates this place, how fast I can swim, if any smallest niche in the almost-perfect sphere can be a point of egress, and if I can touch myself or my roommate – at long last – and truly feel the action.
I do not keep with the more physical experiments for long, however, because My roommate, annoyingly, keeps trying to imitate me. I wonder if this is what Thor felt when we still lived and played in the nursery….
Well, regardless, there is something better to explore, lately, namely the sounds I start hearing, especially when the higher power is turning its full attention and might on us. Different from its soothing, wordless murmurs and songs of comfort, which I began to hear almost right after the said power firstly turned their full attention on me and my roommate. Different as well from the dug-dug and rush-rush noise that constantly permeates this place after that first time, irrespective of if the fluid is currently moving, or if the power’s attention is currently on us. It is more like… people?
I still myself, well removed from my roommate to avoid distractions, and listen, and… yes, I think I can detect words in the new sounds.
Words and timbres.
There are people outside of this place, although I do not recognise the language that they speak.
The sounds – no, voices – get clearer and more distinctly separate as time goes by. Unfortunately, other noises – far from peaceful noices – now become the background, and I find myself and my roommate violently tossed and swirled here and there, oftentimes. It is quite nauseating and alarming!
Are we trapped in the midst of a battle?!
Well, no, a war, come to think of it again, and I am pretty sure of it now. The power that encompasses and saturates us – protecting us, I am beginning to think – is increasingly… diminished, both in might and mental acuity; wearied, eroded, sanded raw.
I begin to hunt for a point of egress more dilligently. It is no longer a curiosity and a passtime, now, but a life-and-death necessity.
My roommate joins in the search and experimentation, and, strangely, I am no longer bothered by its intrusion. I feel… accompanied, in fact. It is just unfortunate that we seem to be tied closely together as well as with the slowly diminishing power that shelters us, and the worry from one transfers to the other among us, amplifying itself in each transference, while we regularly get drenched with the fretting of our shelter.
We are often distracted from our hunts by the various other powers which now seek to touch us. Some have ill intent, which make us shrink away automatically, and our own protector fends them off quite viciously indeed. But sometimes, the extended tendrals of power are deliberately guided to us, and, to our displeasure and somewhat of a discomfort, they get to touch us, however briefly. Our shelter calls them “family,” somehow, but still!
And then, after a piece of news that seems to hit the power that shelters and protects us very, very hard with shock and grief and anger and betrayal and a smidge of confusion, a flood of power that is alarmingly familiar to me presses close against our shelter, against us.