The Condition of Fire
THE ELEVATOR RIDE TO the top floor of Gurnard Hall seemed to take forever. Brecken clutched her tote bag, waited for the door to open. Fifty minutes, she told herself. Fifty minutes and it’s over. The winter break on the other side of the class session, with a schedule of holiday gigs busy enough to keep her mind off her perplexities, felt like the Promised Land.
She went through the door, settled in her usual seat next to Rosalie. Julian was already there, of course, and looked pointedly away; Darren was there, too, and gave her a smile and a nod she guessed was supposed to be reassuring. Molly came in a few minutes later, just ahead of the others, and sprawled comfortably in a chair up front. Then the rest of the students poured in, filled chairs around the room. Brecken could tell, from harried looks and tense body language, the three others who hadn’t played their final project yet. That made her wonder what she looked like; she tried without much success to push the question out of her mind.
Professor Toomey was the last one through the door. “Okay,” he said as soon as he got to the podium. “You all know the drill by this point. We’ve got four pieces to take in and comment on, and once those are over we’re out of here. Everybody ready? Any questions? No? Then let’s go. First up is Susan Chu, ‘Center and Periphery.’ Susan?”
Brecken woke her smartphone, accessed the class webpage, got the comment form loading, and tried to clear her mind and listen. The effort didn’t accomplish much. Susan’s piece was eight minutes of vaguely avant-garde piano music, not particularly dreadful, not particularly inspired, not particularly anything, and Brecken struggled to find something helpful to say about it. The two pieces that followed it were even worse—Brecken thought she remembered that both students were performance track, doing composition class only because the department required it, and their compositions were bland formulaic things that met the requirements of the class and weren’t intended to do anything else.
Finally the moment came. “Brecken Kendall,” said the professor. “Concerto for flute and piano in B flat, first movement.”
A sudden silence. She got up, caught herself before she could walk up to the front of the class without her music or her flute, got both of them and her folding music stand as well. By the time she got there, Darren Wegener was already at the piano bench, stretching his fingers with the cold intensity of a surgeon about to make the first cut. She got the stand set up, the music on it, the flute assembled, then turned to Darren, who nodded the way he’d done when she’d gotten to her seat. Another moment of silence, and then he started playing the quick flowing arpeggios that began the movement. She waited through the first six measures, brought the flute to her lips, and started to play.
Right up until that moment she hadn’t been sure if she could actually go through with it, and perform the first part of her concerto in front of Julian Pinchbeck and the others. Once the music began, though, that and every other question faded into irrelevance. The theme—we live beneath the ground—melded with the piano’s harmonies, repeated itself a minor third higher, spun apart into fragments, flowed back together, dancing a quick bright allegretto around the B flat tonic, while the piano gave every note a shade of distant grief. She’d tried to catch some of what she’d felt as she listened to Sho’s stories and weave that into the movement, the memories and the sorrow, and knew as she played it that she’d succeeded better than she’d hoped; knew also that without ever quite intending it, she’d put some of her own memories and sorrow into the movement as well.
The intricate cascade of sixteenth notes in the middle measures took all her concentration, but she got through them with only a few quickly amended mistakes, and after that the movement practically played itself. The driving nervous energy Darren put into the piano part swept her along until she reached the B flat above high C that ended the movement, forte at first, sinking slowly to pianissimo as Darren’s final chord faded away.
Silence returned. She let herself look up from the music stand, and the moment shattered. No one applauded. They were all staring at her, but the only expressions that registered were the one on Julian Pinchbeck’s face, rigid with something that looked far too much like hate, and the one Rosalie wore, the hollow haunted look of a lost child.
Brecken turned sharply away, started taking her flute apart with shaking hands. Applause sounded behind her, but it seemed distant and muffled, as though people were clapping in another room. She managed to say something more or less appropriate to Darren, who had put on his big ungainly smile, but that was as much as she could manage, and once she had her flute in its case and everything tucked into her tote bag, she headed for the door.
Rosalie said something that might have been her name, Professor Toomey said something that might have been the same thing, but neither utterance turned into anything but random noise until later. The corridor outside echoed with strange sounds, and then she was in the stairwell, her footfalls beating an unsteady rhythm on the concrete steps, the space around her a maze of savage angles in which there were no curves at all.
The door at the bottom of the stairwell cried out as though in pain as she forced it open. Then she was outside, half-stumbling into the bleak gray plaza beneath a bleak gray sky, with the bleak gray mass of Mainwaring Hall looming up in front of her.
She drew in a ragged breath, made herself slow down. It’s over, she told herself. Over and done with. That wasn’t true, and she knew it, but it allowed her to push her shoulders back a little and raise her head.
Her freshman year, she’d made a habit of celebrating her last class each semester and bracing herself for the ordeal of finals week by buying herself some little treat or other, as often as not with a friend or two. This semester, though, there was precisely one place in Partridgeville she wanted to go and precisely one person she wanted to spend time with. She hurried across the plaza toward Danforth Street and the way home.
FINALS WEEK WAS LESS of an ordeal than it might have been. Composition I had no final exam—the final project filled that slot—and the test for The Fantastic in Literature was there purely for the benefit of students who’d slacked all semester and needed the extra points to get a passing grade. Intro to Music Education I was another matter. Brecken spent most of four days with her face buried in the textbook and the class readings, showed up at the classroom with her head crammed to the bursting point with memorized facts, and trudged her way through twelve pages of multiple choice questions, most of which made no sense to her at all. By the time she left, she was feeling so demoralized by it all that she spent half the walk home trying to figure out how she was going to deal with her first F.
Fortunately it didn’t come to that. She got the automatic email Friday afternoon of finals week, as expected, letting her know she could log into the campus website and see her grades. When she worked up the courage to do that, the letters that blinked onto her screen made her slump back onto the futon and let out a long sigh of relief. LIT 397, The Fantastic in Literature, A; MUS 265, Composition I, A; and MSE 241, Introduction to Music Education I, C: those were grades she could live with. She clicked on her laptop’s calculator utility and tried to figure out her grade point average, got lost twice in the figures, and finally had to pull out a notebook and a pen and work it all out on paper before it came out right.
The whole time, while she studied and fretted and sagged in relief, while she fended off invitations from Rosalie to spend time and money she didn’t have, and frowned when her occasional texts to Jay got no answer, Sho helped her keep going. The two of them shared the chores that kept the little apartment running, nestled down together to sleep each night, talked companionably when the demands of finals week permitted, and when the pressure on Brecken made her curl up in a ball on the futon with shoulders hunched and eyes clenched shut, a cool shapeless pseudopod or two flowed around her and held her until she felt better.
Sho found the entire system of university education baffling, and exams more baffling than the rest of it. The way shoggoths did things, so Brecken gathered, was to gather broodlings in a comfortable heap around an elder who sang something that was to be learned, over and over again. The broodlings sang along until they had it by memory, and the nearest thing to a final exam was that their broodmother or one of the other adults would ask them to sing it again from time to time. Curious, Brecken asked tentatively one night if Sho could bear to repeat one of the songs she’d learned in broodlinghood, and spent the next hour or so listening in utter fascination to an intricate keening melody that reminded her a little of Gregorian chant.
The song was in a very ancient form of the shoggoth language, and Brecken could only catch a word here and there, just enough to know that it told of doings in the distant past, when Sho’s ancestors fled from the empty city of the beings Sho called “those others” and Halpin Chalmers called the Elder Things. The sheer strange beauty of it made up for any amount of incomprehension. She settled back into Sho’s curves, for all the world like a broodling listening to a shoggoth elder, and let the music wash over her. Thereafter, when Brecken studied until she was too tired to think and too tense to sleep, Sho took to singing old songs, just as she’d done from time to time for her broodmother’s younger broodlings. It had the same effect, too: more than once Brecken blinked half awake to find her head pillowed on Sho and a pale green eye or two watching her with an expression she could’t read at all, and pulled herself off the futon just long enough to get ready for bed.
That happened several times during finals week, but finally her music ed exam was over and so was the semester. Friday night, after ducking out on another invite from Rosalie—a party on Sorority Row that promised loud music, dancing, and plenty of liquor, the sort of thing Brecken liked to avoid even at the best of times—she and Sho dined on macaroni and cheese, and talked about the winter break ahead and the schedule of Rose and Thorn gigs that would fill the otherwise empty weeks. Brecken had already sent a letter to Aunt Mary explaining that she’d be staying in Partridgeville over the winter break, and gotten back a cloyingly cute Christmas card, a letter full of vague pleasant chatter, and a $100 gift certificate from a department store chain that had gone messily bankrupt and closed its doors earlier that year. Somehow no zucchini bread accompanied these, and Brecken breathed a sigh of heartfelt relief.
After dinner, Brecken got her printer working, not always an easy task, and printed out sheet music for Rose and Thorn—the new arrangements of “The Carol of the Bells” and “Ode to Joy” she’d worked up, half a dozen of their holiday standards she’d needed to revise now that Donna was part of the ensemble, and the biggest gamble of all, an arrangement of her own Bourrée in B flat. Not even her memories of the last session of Composition I could quite stifle the shiver that went through her at the thought of having one of her pieces played in public by musicians she knew could do it justice. Whatever else happens, she told herself, whatever else I do or don’t do from now on, I’ll have that memory for keeps.
SHE GOT TO THE Student Union Building right as the bells of the First Baptist Church were sounding the quarter hour, went down the stairs to the basement at something close to a trot, paced down the long hallway to the door of the Debate Club room. Voices came out the doorway to greet her as she neared it. Through the door, into the glare of the fluorescent lights, across the room toward the long glass case of trophies, it was a familiar route with familiar faces at the end of it: Rosalie, Donna, Walt, Jamal. Brecken said hi to everyone, made a beeline for the big oak desk next to the trophies.
“Hey, it’s the hermit,” said Donna.
“Oh, come on,” Brecken replied, blushing. “It’s called finals week.”
“You okay, girl?” Rosalie asked. “We’ve been worrying about you.”
“I’m fine.”
Rosalie gave her a skeptical look, but nodded and got back to work tuning her harp. Brecken got her flute case and folding music stand out of the tote bag, then lifted out the stack of sheet music and started sorting the pages into stacks, “The Carol of the Bells” here, “Ode to Joy” there, the rest in order, ready for the practice session.
Sound of the door closing caught her attention, and she looked up and put on a smile for Jay. It was Jay, all right, but he wasn’t alone. Barbara Cormyn was draped over him, her arm around his waist, his arm around her shoulders, and she had a big tote bag in her free hand from which two small instrument cases and a folding music stand protruded.
Brecken’s smile trickled from her face as that sank in. Before she could do much more than stare, Jay detached himself from the blonde and crossed the room to her. “Hi, Breck,” he said, in the wheedling tone that told her he wanted something. “Can we talk?”
“Sure,” she said, still staring at him, and let him lead her over to shelves full of reference books close to a window, far from the other members of the ensemble. “Look, I know we’ve been together for a while,” he began, but for some reason she couldn’t keep track of what he was saying, even though she knew from the first word what it meant. Phrases like broken shards—“these things happen,” “how much we have in common,” “you’ve been really distant”—spun and glittered in the still air. Three or four times, she tried to collect her thoughts and say something, but Jay kept talking, always in the same wheedling tone, and when he finished at last, it took her a moment to realize that he expected her to respond.
“Okay,” she said, for want of anything better. “Okay.” Then, clutching at the thing that mattered most: “I hope at least we can keep playing gigs together.”
“Well, that’s another thing,” he said. “Breck, I really do appreciate everything you’ve contributed to the ensemble, but let’s face facts, we’ve gotten into a rut and it’s time to bring in some new talent, find a new sound. I’m sure you can find some other group to perform with.”
Brecken looked at him blankly for a moment, then realized what he was saying. Her mouth opened, but she could find no words. He started talking again, but she turned away from him and started back across the room.
The others were staring at her. Only when she felt wetness on her face did she realize why. Jay followed her, still talking, but the words dissolved into meaningless sounds. She reached the old oak desk, put her flute case and music stand back into her tote bag, turned to go, then remembered the music and turned back to gather it up.
“Breck, would you mind leaving those?” he said, and it wasn’t in his wheedling tone. There was an edge in it, one he hadn’t directed at her before.
She turned again to look at him. Off past him, Barbara Cormyn stood watching her, with the same surprised expression in her soft blue eyes and the same implacable look half-hidden within them. In that moment Brecken knew with cold certainty where Jay had been all those evenings he claimed he’d spent doing homework, and knew also why he hadn’t breathed a word about any dissatisfaction he’d felt with her as a girlfriend or a musician until she’d finished working out all the holiday arrangements for Rose and Thorn. Some unexpected depth in her burst open and flung up words for her to say, and she said them: “You son of a bitch.” A quick turn, and she scooped up the music, stuffed it into her tote bag, and headed for the door.
Jay went after her, his voice rising, but Rosalie got in the way, and when he tried to go around her she grabbed his arm and whipped him around in a tight arc. Her voice rang out, shrill with fury: “What the hell did you say to her?” He started to reply, but by then Brecken reached the door and flung herself out into the hallway. Jay’s voice faded, drowned out by the beat of her footsteps in the long corridor and a cacophony of other voices that rose to contend with it.
She was shaking as she climbed the stair, and she could feel tears on her face, but it all felt distant, abstract. Raw habit got her out of the Student Union Building and headed uphill on Danforth Street. Flurries of snow fell from a hard gray sky, and more than half the houses and buildings she passed had dark silent windows now; Partridgeville was emptying out for winter break. Bells sounded half past the hour behind her; had it really only been fifteen minutes, she wondered, since she’d gone to the practice in such high spirits?
That sent thoughts running down paths she desperately didn’t want them to follow, but this once she lacked the strength to force them elsewhere. She could see every detail of her relationship with Jay in a light as cold as the wind that blew snow in her face: how many times she’d set aside her needs for his, how often he’d made that the price of his affection, how little he’d obviously thought of her. Nor was it just Jay; the two boyfriends she’d had in high school had been variations on the same theme. They’d been less deliberate than Jay and less systematic, maybe, but like him, they’d thrown her aside once they’d gotten what they wanted.
Like a broken toy, she thought. Broken Brecken. The old schoolyard gibe surged up in her memories, whispered itself repeatedly in her mind.
By the time she got to the narrow walk between Mrs. Dalzell’s house and the neighbor’s, she felt numb and cold. Stiff fingers fumbled with the key. She got the door open somehow and went in, and the door clicked shut behind her. She took her coat and hat off, set her tote bag somewhere, stumbled over to the futon and slumped onto it, eyes clenched shut.
A whisper of movement across the floor meant nothing to her. A moment later, though, something flowed up onto the futon next to her, wrapped partway around her. A low troubled whistle sounded: ♪I think it is not at all well with you.♪
If the words had been in English they might well have stayed meaningless sounds, but the musical language of shoggoths cut through the numbness the way music always did, and Brecken burst into tears. Shapeless darkness reached for her and drew her down. Then she was crying hard, her face buried in Sho’s iridescent flesh as the shoggoth held her.
Later, she sat huddled on the futon with Sho half encircling her, and tried to find words in the shoggoth-language to explain what had happened. ♪I should have known,♪ she said finally. ♪I really should have. Donna and Rosalie even tried to warn me, but I was too stupid to listen.♪
A pseudopod tapped against her cheek, just hard enough to get her attention. Brecken gave the shoggoth a startled look. A pale green eye met her gaze squarely. ♪No,♪ Sho piped. ♪You are not stupid.♪
Brecken blushed, and flung her arms around Sho, nestling her face into the curve of one pseudopod. The curious fluttering motion passed through the shoggoth, and for a moment Brecken worried that something was wrong, but the pseudopods tightened, returning the hug, and the scent that reminded her of freshly baked bread reassured her. She couldn’t help thinking of the difference between Sho’s words and the patronizing comments she’d fielded so often from Jay, the putdowns she’d gotten from her high school boyfriends. I wish, she thought, that just once I could fall in love with someone like Sho.
A moment later, the next thought followed: and the logical conclusion is?
The imagery that accompanied the thought was anything but vague. Her face reddened further, and she tried to push the idea away.
THE IDEA WOULDN’T GO away. Over the week that followed, as Partridgeville finished emptying out for the holidays and flurries of snow flung themselves against Brecken’s windows, it kept circling back, sometimes whispering subtly in the small hours, sometimes surging up with dizzying intensity. It didn’t help that the holiday gigs she’d counted on to fill the time between semesters had gone whistling down the wind, so that she had nowhere to go but the apartment; it didn’t help that leaving the apartment was the last thing she wanted to do.
It occurred to her more than once, as the two of them lay curled around each other under the quilts at night, the almost-Brie scent of a shoggoth at rest surounding her, that she’d fallen half in love with Sho during those last few weeks of the semester. She told herself that letting herself fall the rest of the way, letting her world revolve wholly around the shoggoth, ought to horrify her, but it didn’t. She brooded on that, realized that any discomfort she felt at the idea was purely abstract. It didn’t touch her deeper places, didn’t keep a hand resting on Sho’s surface or a pseudopod brushing her cheek from making her heart leap and her body tremble.
Later, as it became clear to Brecken exactly what was going to happen sooner or later, she tried to convince herself that she couldn’t go through with it, and failed. That they were so different, that their species had no ancestors in common this side of protozoa, simply didn’t matter enough. She loved Sho, and that being the case, the cool shapelessness of Sho’s body had begun to waken familiar responses in her. What had started as kindness and grown into friendship was becoming something else, something that made its own rules and had no patience with her ineffectual protests.
Nor, she realized, was she the only one whose feelings had strayed into unexpected depths. One afternoon, after Brecken played half a dozen of the medieval carols she liked best, she tried to explain what they were, and Sho began trembling violently and huddled up against her, tinging the air with a sharp bitter scent. Brecken put her arms around the shoggoth and drew her close, held her until the trembling stopped and the scent went away. Afterwards, in a whistling tone so low and unsteady Brecken would have called the equivalent human voice an ashen whisper, Sho talked about very ancient songs that she and her broodmates learned from their broodmother. They were piped at certain points in the circle of the seasons, and they framed some of Sho’s earliest memories.
Later Sho taught her some of them, and Brecken played them on her flute.After that they curled up together on the futon in silence. Eyes appeared and vanished on Sho’s surface; she was just a short distance over onto the dreaming-side, Brecken knew, and guessed where the dreams centered. How long had it been, she wondered, since the shoggoth had let herself dream of her broodmates and broodmother, the little world beneath Hob’s Hill that had ended so terribly? She slipped an arm around Sho, felt her nestle closer in gratitude, and then pseudopods flowed out to cling to her; the curious fluttering once again moved through the shoggoth, and the fresh-bread scent appeared, stronger than before. Brecken thought she could guess what those meant.
The days before Christmas trickled away. The neighborhood went silent as the last students headed off to holiday cheer somewhere else; the rattle and rumble of city buses lurching along empty snowy streets boomed like thunder, and the tolling of the bells of the First Baptist Church up on Angell Hill, inaudible from Brecken’s apartment most of the year, came across the roofs of the Central Square neighborhood and through the cyclopean buildings of the campus. ♪Listen,♪ piped Sho. ♪In our language the bells say: hear and remember, be afraid and hear.♪
♪You used to hear them from Hob’s Hill, didn’t you?♪ Brecken guessed.
♪Whenever the wind blew in from the sea.♪ Sho’s whistle was low with dread. Brecken reached for the shoggoth and drew her into a comforting embrace, felt the fluttering again, and knew that they’d both gone too far to back away from the inevitable next step.
Early the next day, Christmas Eve, Brecken put on street clothes for the first time in days, bundled up against the cold, and headed for the First National grocery on Meeker Street four blocks away. Shopping for two was complicated when the two in question belonged to different species, but she managed to fill the basket with things they both enjoyed, and hurried home as the wind began whipping snow down from the clouds.
Christmas Eves during Brecken’s childhood had been an orgy of cookie-baking, with the whir of the big countertop mixer and the moan of the old spring-loaded oven door half drowning out tinny carols from the cheap CD player in the kitchen and mindless chatter from the never-silent television in the living room. Some years those memories hurt too much to reawaken, but this once Brecken did as close to a fair imitation of those bygone holidays as she could manage, and got sugar jumbles, snickerdoodles, and thumbprint cookies with apricot jam in the dents baked and cooling on racks before dinner. Later Brecken played her flute and, for the first time, Sho sang harmonies in response, setting strange sweet dissonances chasing one another through the corners of the apartment. Later still, Brecken changed into her flannel nightgown and the two of them sat on the futon with quilts wrapped around them, curled up close together shoggoth-fashion, and talked and ate cookies.
Something Brecken couldn’t name put bright shimmering edges around everything, but mostly around Sho’s black curves, since that was where Brecken’s gaze rested nearly all the time. She watched with fascination as Sho picked up one cookie after another with a delicate pseudopod, and then engulfed the cookies slowly or greedily—the latter was the fate of the thumbprint cookies, due mostly (so Sho confessed) to the apricot jam. As the last of the cookies got eaten, the talk turned personal.
♪No, I had no broodlings of my own,♪ said Sho. ♪My broodmates and I were still too unripe. Another two summers, maybe, or three.♪ With a tentative glance at Brecken: ♪And you?♪
♪It’s more complicated with us,♪ Brecken said. ♪I’d have to find a partner, someone I want to have children with—if I decide I want them. I’m not sure I do.♪
♪With us, the budding comes when it comes; there is no choosing. But broodmates always ripen together. We were made that way.♪ In a low sad tone: ♪Sometimes when it was cold we would gather close together and talk about which of our dreams we would tell to our broodlings. Now I must remember their dreams to share with mine.♪
Brecken reached for Sho, and the shoggoth flowed close. ♪In A Quiet Cavern,♪ she said; it was Sho’s name that day. ♪It must hurt terribly to be left so alone.♪
The answer came in an unsteady whistle, and with the same curious fluttering: ♪But I am not alone, not now, not when I am with you.♪
It was a simple thing to do after all, Brecken thought later: a matter of saying ♪I’m glad,♪ and letting herself bend to kiss the shoggoth’s smooth cool surface. A pseudopod flowed out in response, curved around her cheek, left a sudden dampness there, tinged with the fresh-bread smell and something else, something dark and rich like soil. Brecken placed a hand over the pseudopod, holding it gently in place.
♪I—I wish...♪ Sho started to say, fell silent in confusion.
The damp place on Brecken’s cheek tingled and enticed. ♪The, the moisture,♪ she said. ♪That is the thing between broodmates?♪
♪Yes—yes, it is.♪ In sudden frantic notes: ♪I am sorry, I do not wish to offend—♪
♪I’m not offended,♪ she replied. ♪I’m very glad.♪ It was true, though she was trembling nearly as much as Sho was. She kissed Sho again, and made sure this time that the kiss was good and wet. Sho flowed against her, trembling even harder, and a pseudopod traced a line of wetness from the point of her cheekbone around to the back of her neck, waking every nerve.
♪Your body has special places for so many things,♪ Sho said then, shyly. ♪I am wondering if it has special places for this too.♪
♪Y-yes. Yes, of course.♪
♪Will you show me?♪
Heart pounding, Brecken pulled off her nightgown with shaking hands, and showed her.
LATER—HOW MUCH LATER, Brecken had no idea then or afterwards—they lay still again, curled around each other under the quilts in a single damp shape, so intertwined that Brecken was no longer entirely sure where her body ended and Sho’s began. The rich dark scent of Sho’s passion and the salty musk of her own blended, intoxicating, and through it Brecken caught another of Sho’s scents, the washed-mushroom odor of simple happiness.
The light fixture overhead still shone, casting dim rainbow splashes of itself on the few parts of Sho that reached out from underneath the quilts, for Brecken hadn’t been able to muster the fortitude to leave the futon even for the few moments it would have taken to go to the switch. Her mind circled around an unfamiliar word that Sho had piped in her ear, soft as a whisper, at one intense moment. It was related to the word for broodmate, that was clear, but there was a cadence at the end that intensified other words. Broodsister, maybe, was the closest she could get in translation: an endearment, possibly more.
Sho was still on the waking-side, her eyes opening and closing slowly, looking at her with what Brecken had come to recognize as a dazed delighted look. What her own face looked like just then, Brecken didn’t try to guess. The word repeated itself over and over in her mind, and she guessed dimly what it would mean if she spoke it aloud to Sho. A rush of affection as the shoggoth brushed her skin with a drowsy pseudopod settled the issue, and Brecken repeated the word in a quiet whistle.
A dozen eyes opened at once, then closed as pseudopods drew Brecken close. A moment later a sharp repeated tremor began to shake Sho’s form. Were those the shoggoth equivalent of tears? Brecken did not know, but she wrapped her arms tight around Sho anyway, pressed her face into the shoggoth’s surface. Somehow, despite the vast differences between them, the motion seemed to communicate.
LATER STILL, BRECKEN WOKE to find the first traces of daylight filtering in through the blinds. She lay still for a time, watched a very few of Sho’s eyes drift open and shut with glacial slowness, then untangled herself gently from her broodsister and slipped out from under the quilts. Cold air stung against her bare skin as she crossed the room, turned off the light.
She turned and, despite the cold, stood there for a time watching Sho as she dreamed. Her scent and Sho’s, mingled inextricably, brought a cascade of fresh memories with every breath. Old habits of thought tried to convince her that she should be shocked and horrified by what they’d done, and failed.
Now that it’s happened, she asked herself then, is it what you wanted? She had no answer. All she knew for certain was that she’d crossed over a line, and there would never be a way back. She glanced down at herself, considered the soft curves and gawky angles of her body. It would not have surprised her unduly just then if she’d found herself beginning to sprout tentacles, but improbable as it seemed, nothing had changed that she could see.
As she started back to the futon, the bells of the First Baptist Church rang in the distance, announcing the sunrise service. Listening, Brecken remembered the words Sho had drawn from the notes of the bells tolling the hour, and the familiar sequence of the carillon stretched and shifted into a theme: the opening theme of a movement, Brecken knew at once, a largo to balance the allegretto first movement of her concerto. In the moments that followed, the rest of the movement sketched itself out in her mind.
She went to the end table beside the futon, stood there irresolute for a moment, then sighed. I’m tired of fighting it, she told herself, but she didn’t feel tired; she felt light, trembling, newborn. Pulling her composing notebook out from under a stack of books and finding a pen felt like the first steps out of cold echoing darkness into greenery and sun. She wriggled back into her flannel nightgown and settled back on the futon. Tucking her feet up under her, she got the quilts settled in place and shifted toward Sho, who flowed drowsily against her.
The pen scratched in the silence of the dawn, and after a moment a luminous eye peered up at her. ♪It is well with you?♪
♪It is very well,♪ Brecken whistled. ♪So well I don’t know words for it. And with you?♪
♪Today my name is Brought Out Of The Empty Places,♪ Sho said simply.
♪I’m so glad.♪ Brecken paused, and thought of one way she could welcome the future the two of them had just set in motion. ♪Today my name is Embraced.♪
Sho trembled. ♪Broodsister, broodsister—♪
Brecken put an arm around her, held her close. The trembling stilled, and after a time Sho slipped back over to the dreaming-side. Brecken looked down at her, dizzied by the intensity of the feelings the shoggoth wakened in her. Then, moving slowly so the movements of hand and pen did not disturb Sho, she let herself fall into the condition of fire.