Callsign: King - Blackout

48

Fiona, wide-eyed with fear, looked at him and opened her mouth. The black hole’s gravity was making it impossible for her to breathe. She tried to shout back at him, a plea for help, but what came out was a barely audible squeak.

King held her gaze. “Fi. Remember what you were trying to do? The mother tongue? Singing this thing a lullaby? You have to keep doing it. You’re the only one who can.”

She gave her head a quick shake, fearful that any movement might dislodge her from her precarious position and send her plummeting into the black hole. “Can’t,” she mouthed.

“Yes, you can.”

“I don’t know what to say.” This time, she got words out in a hoarse whisper.

“You do know,” King insisted. “You just don’t know that you know. Start talking, start singing. It will come to you.”

“He’s right, Fi,” Sara said, whispering into her ear. “The words don’t even matter…”

Despite her own looming death, Fiona could not help but smile as she finished Sara’s statement: “It’s the thought that counts.”

But wasn’t that the truth? Alexander’s recordings had used the correct word, the precise frequency that should have prevented the black hole from reawakening, but it hadn’t worked because the words weren’t coupled to a specific intention.

She thought back to the words she had spoken to stop Richard Ridley’s golem; words in the ancient mother tongue, the language of creation, and wondered if her intention at that moment had been a source of greater power than the words themselves?

Those words would be of little use now. So also, she realized, was Alexander’s Bhuddist mantra. That word was meaningless to her; how could she believe in the power of a word she didn’t even understand?

But there was a language that she did know intimately, a language that had its roots in the ancient mother tongue, a language of which she was now the sole living guardian.

Fiona sucked in a breath against the crush of gravity, then freed one hand and began clapping it against her thigh, beating out a steady, insistent rhythm. Then, she began to sing.