Anthem for the Drowned
Chapter 7
The next morning, I was awakened by a sharp kick to the stomach. All of the air was knocked from my lungs as I almost rolled off of the ledge I'd fallen asleep on. Gasping, I tried to sit up, my eyes flying open as I did so. In front of me, Ophelia was laughing, floating in the air above me.
"Come on, time to get to work" she said, aiming another kick at me, but I swiftly dodged it. Her guitar was already in her hands and I retrieved mine from a rock against the wall.
"I don't really know what…"
"Teach me how to fight with it. I want to cause pain, I want to hurt others."
"You and me both…" I said, pulling my pick out and setting it against the strings. She watched as I dialed the volume up and began warming up. At first I went through power chord sequences, and we both took note of how they affected the environment. Lighting smashed the earth and cracks formed as it crumbled from beneath. Ophelia quickly picked up on the chord sequence and, after a few minutes, it sounded coherent. I stopped, listening to her play it on her own. The lightning and quaking also stopped, with only an occasional random burst or so.
She wasn't getting frustrated and she kept trying at it, banging out the same four power chords, trying to put it all together. After about half an hour, I suggested that we take a break but she was resilient. Something was driving her from inside, some inner spark that had now found fuel and was turning, slowly into a flame. Before long, I was able to stop and the lightening would still flash on, unabated. I grinned, not bad Ryan, not bad. Wrapping my hands back around the neck of my guitar, I started into a solo over the chords Ophelia was now playing with some sense of consistency. She was learning faster than he had ever imagined someone could.
Something was happening in the water behind me. The combination of rhythm and lead had caused some sort of reaction. Without stopping, we both turned and stared at the sea. From its depths burst a creature that looked like the Grim Reaper himself. Behind it followed more hooded figures, holding fiery blue scythes. And behind them still came more creatures, great black horses that seemed to form from the tears themselves. We both stopped playing, the last note reverberating through the air, shaking the ceiling and sending a frenzy of fire through the air. Ophelia went to meet the reapers, arms rested on the body of her guitar.
"Yes, these will do, don't you think?" she said. I nodded in approval, walking to stand beside her.
"Welcome to the Army of Black Tears" she said, holding out a T-shirt, similar to the one I was given. T-shirts really mean a lot about your allegiances here I thought. The reapers bowed their heads as they mounted their horses and rode across the bridge into the chapel.
"They're beautiful" she said in a state of awe.
"Ya, so, you said army…" I said inquisitively.
"Yes, I suppose I did" she answered as if to say so what? Her face darkened a bit.
"N-nothing" I stammered under her stare. Her face changed back to normal and she laughed,
"Don't worry, you'll know all soon enough."
"Ok, so does everything we play affect this world?" I asked.
"Of course it does, at least from what I've seen" She replied.
"Let's see what this does then." I played the solo I'd been writing the night before and watched as tears from the sea rose and flowed in our direction. They began forming some sort of coherent form in front of me as I continued to play. The tears began to solidify into glistening crystalline forms and combining with each other. They were constructing something, but it was not yet apparent what.
Officer Perry sipped his coffee slowly at the scene of the wreck, wracking his brains silently. This just didn't make any sense; he'd never seen something so puzzling in all of his years. Sure, sometimes you had a crime scene without a body but it was usually discovered and there were usually signs of someone walking away or being drug out. But here, there was only the car, totally smashed in like a small black hole had erupted in the middle. The interior was covered in some sort of black water and, he could only assume, blood from the victim. But then, since there was no body yet blood everywhere, why was there no blood from a body leaving the car or signs of a struggle?
Another puzzling fact was that the police had to pry the door open with a crowbar, indicating that no one had left it after the crash. They would have been sealed inside by the bashed in car door. It was surely the most mysterious of circumstances he had ever witnessed. Upon searching the rest of the car, authorities had also found shards of broken glass, not matching the windshield, a rubber stopper, a guitar case with no guitar in it and a T-shirt for some punk band. So he was some sort of teen rocker metal head, Perry thought as his eyes feel on a Mastodon CD sticking out of the pile of things from the car. He was probably drunk…
