Siren
by Tobie Abad
Genre: Horror
Archetype Cards: The Dandy, The Christ Figure, The Tomboy, The Siren and The Wrathful Father
Keywords: Blood, Dragon, Fan, Old Photograph, Wings, and Sacrifice.
All that remained was the old photograph in her hands. Pandora held the flimsy thing between her fingers, painfully aware of the sudden importance that its silver and paper held locked out of time. She held the last remaining image of the Dragon, the last dragon to ever walk the earth and hold it in its grandeur. The sole material proof of its existence was such a fragile thing. But its existence proved that once upon a time, all the legends and myths were fact.
The fires painted the skies the many shades of blood. With gluttonous tongues, the flames reached for the heavens despite not having any wings and trailed swirling dark whorls of smoke in their dance. The city was burning. Buildings were crumbling. Roads melted away and towers shattered as the immense heat continued to cause the very earth to seemingly boil. None of this mattered to Pandora, however. Just as the fact her parents had, unwisely perhaps, chosen to name her after the woman who had unleashed the most terrible of things upon mankind if mythology was to be believed, Pandora was the catalyst to the devastation that surrounded her. She was not, however, its cause. That was her father’s to forever own.
“Pandora!” his voice bellowed strong despite the rumbling of falling structures that were consumed by the flames. Though old he was in years, his wrath fueled the strength that channeled his voice against every other sound. He repeated her name over and over, demanding she reveal herself, but Pandora (once again so much like her namesake) remained defiant.
She pushed the wrinkled photograph into the sanctuary of space close to her heart and ignored each and every tear that escaped from her calm eyes. She trusted in its final words. She believed that the magic woven within them to be true.
“Pandora!” he cried out again, desperate now to find any hint of her daughter. Wrathful as he was now, he was still the same loving man who once cradled her in his younger arms. He was still the same man then who feared change, sought to hide from duty, and chose to love. What he did not see, however, was how so much love he had to give blinded him from the prison he had woven with its intentions. He named his daughter after myths, and found himself terribly afraid when she began to claim such myths were real. He had raised her to see the world through science-watered eyes, but though she readily embraced the numerical ballet of mathematics just as easily as she did the gymnastic orchestra of physics, she still claimed, nay, insisted that mythology was real and not simply some imaginary fancy.
“Dragons are real,” she would tell her father with such conviction that he could not accept to emerge from the mouth of one barely past her fourth birth year. “Magic is real,” she would insist as they stared at falling stars and drifting clouds and talked about the dream of someday finding a means to fly to the moon.
“We need rockets,” he would tell her then. “No father, we need dragons,” would come her reply.
Fifteen years of laughter, frustration and tears. Fifteen years of apologies and promises of contrition. Fifteen years of vast continents of silence where both raised the borders of what they chose to hear.
“Pandora… please!”
The words reached her ears this time. The second word rarely found itself spoken after the first. Pandora stood at the roof’s edge and scanned the burning skyline for her father’s shadow. It did not take too long for her to find him, despite the scientific odds of such a thing happening. Perhaps there was indeed magic. Her father stood at the top the skeleton of a building, with its foundations exposed by the rising flames. She stared at him and wondered what to say. He however could already hear the words she had yet to say. “I know,” he sighed and it was like all those fifteen years were happening once more in a single breath, “This is all my fault. My anger. My rage.” And he knew that to be true. He had silently made a promise to his long passed wife, Pandora’s mother, to care for her above all else. When the fifteenth year ended and the first day of her sixteenth year was to begin, he had hoped to celebrate it with her. He had even purchased a gift which was both meaningful and memorable – an antique folding fan of carved ivory, which had been pierced and carved. Paper leaf adorned it with the delicate painting of numbers on both sides, four hundred seventeen in all, the most number of digits that could be painted upon it. He remembered watching her as she marveled at its craftsmanship and recognized the sequence immediately as the four hundred seventeenth digits of pi. He was excited to know where she sought to further her studies but to his horror she instead spoke of a paramour instead. And worse, claimed it was inhuman in each and every way.
A dragon.
It was preposterous. It was mad. And his Pandora, beloved and lovely and sweet and wise, believed her very words.
Like a butterfly clipped of its wings, he immediately had her locked away from the world. He brought her from their home near the rolling hills and fog embraced trees to this very city with its cold towering buildings and labyrinth roads. He found the best doctors and psychiatrists and paid them to free her from his creative hysteria. He gave permission for every scientific cure that could be offered, be it ointment or needle, drill or shock, pill or pain, so long as medication was its name. Pandora suffered through them all without a single word. She became the very box of her namesake, locking inside of herself every horrible thing she could conjure to name her father’s rage. But when the day of her birth finally came, she realized she had enough. She unleashed the evils she knew her father to be and the spiteful words reached more than his ears.
It reached the Dragon.
The sole remaining one. The last living myth upon the world. It had spent the last three hundred and sixty-four days searching for her, moving through dreams and shadows hoping to find the woman who captured its heart. It rose into the sky, unleashing its wings and its fury and rained lightning and death upon all below. And just when the city believed it was to die under the rage of the devil made flesh, it was Pandora’s father who would come to their aid with his understanding of science to forge them the modern lance that would slay the beast, a desire born from the need to avenge the daughter he could no longer find. The Dragon found her, and the two hid among the ruins abandoned in hopes of finding hope despite the ashes. Every day they embraced as paradise was but another day the modern lance had for it to be forged. And when the time came when the governors of man left the father to wield his lance, it was the same day Pandora found among the ruins a relic even for its time, an old polaroid camera that captures images and bore them within seconds.
The flash captured the moment Pandora and the Dragon discovered how a Dragon can die. And as they fled once more to the ruins to hide, Pandora’s father realized the daughter he believed he was avenging had been safe all this time in the destroyer’s arms. The lance had kissed the Dragon’s heart. And the Dragon’s heart bled the blood of stars.
“Pandora, I am sorry,” he wept openly now as he spoke. His were the hands that tore open the box, this time. And the fires were unleashed upon the earth. “Pandora, please. We must leave. The fires continue to rise. The earth itself melts and burns.”
“No, father. I will not go with you anymore.”
“But Pandora,” he wanted to convince her to go with her. But he could no longer find the words.
“He is dead, father,” Pandora told him without breaking her gaze into his eyes. “You have killed the last of his kind. Just as you had killed me a year ago.”
“I was wrong.”
“You were,” Pandora closed her eyes now and added, “You are.” She spread her arms outwards and took a step past the edge. She heard her father’s voice but failed to grasp the words. She felt the winds surging past her but registered only the spark igniting deep in her heart. Just before the Dragon died, it begged her to accept its final gift. Just before it died, it wove a promise between its words. It wove rhyme and rhythm between each syllable. It wove a spell.
And just before Pandora reached the boiling lava below, the incantation the Dragon had made completed its song. She rose once more, carried by the winds that channeled beneath her great wings. She threw her head back against the sky and screamed for the death of myth and the birth of a terrible nightmare. She was the last remaining Dragon now and as she took to the skies and vanished among the clouds, she realized there will be more vengeance to come.
And her roar shall be a song singing of their murdered love.
About Tobie Abad
Tobie Abad is a game designer, indie creator and storyteller based in Manila, Philippines who lives with his partner, Rocky, and their dog, Yoshi. He shares his love for gaming each month at the G&Gms Philippines mini-conventions and hopes to someday legally marry his partner in this country.