Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Christopher and the Siren

Another part of my series of myths

 

D

Christopher held a blade of light, searching the fogs, dancing over the waves with his winged sandals. He had followed the song of the siren through the winds, caught them and with his careful ear flitted through their labyrinth until he had spied the siren. She was only one siren, a pillar from the water, but beneath her coiled  a mile of dragon. Her song was not enough for what he intended, because he intended the one at the bottom of the sea, beneath the dragon, but the dragon coiled in the waves and was thick as a brain.

He skirted over the waters, and saw that once in a while, a coil of serpant would breach the surface, but randomly. He got nowhere near the siren, who would like to grab him in her arms in love and drown him in her painful ecstasy.

But the coils were not random, and soon he had figured their pattern. When the next coil rose, he threw out his blade, which bent forth far as a stone throw and sliced the coil in two.

The sirens song shrieked high, but never ceased being music. And where the coil was cut, a new siren grew out of the tail and now there was two sirens singing, and the severed tail of the first siren sank down deep.

In such a manner, he had cut out coils and coils till ten sirens sang in seductive harmony.

Their song overlapped into a wind, and he quickly flew into the wind and breathed it in. It was the breath of life, pure self generating oxygen.

Having gained the breath he could now dive without loss of focus, and yet he remembered to dodge away from the embraces of the tens sirens. Their words were as tempting as a crucifix, but he would not submit.

He dove amidst them; his sword hissed away to the hilt, and he tucked it into his belt. He followed the ten tails down, down, down, swimming exhaustively yet never short of breath, amidst the tails which intersected like lines of a web, or a great net, and at the very bottom was the Spider woman herself, the great jaws of the guardian of the deep, whose mouth held the tail of the serpant siren.

He let himself fall into her arms, and she bit upon his foot, and hand, till he kissed her and pressed a breath of life into her.

Started to receive what she had not intended to receive, she trembled. The ocean floor dodged and shook and gamboled, as her great roots split a little, and a crack opened up on the face of the depths, and a fresh light as bright as the sun broke out and spiraled up into the sky

This is why he had come.

He broke away and rode the beam of light up, and burst out of the ocean. He caught a gleam of the light and rekindled his wand, pen, sword, where it had fizzled to the hilt, a stronger light, a greater power.

 

 

ÿ

Perfection Is Easy

www.msu.edu/~junedan

 

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