Chapter 3: First Interaction.
An endless abyss, motes of light littering its expanse like stars on a night sky.
It was cold, really cold. A little scary with its vastness, and Elian felt a uneasy... almost like he was being watched.
"That is because you are, Kid."
The yelp left his mouth before he could even process what had happened.
He stumbled backwards, and when his legs failed to find footing, his balance broke, Elian involuntarily bracing for impacting as gravity pulled him down.
Only, the impact never came.
A long moment passed before he finally found the courage to crack an opening in his eyes, and he saw that the same blackness of the abyss stood there, unchanging as his weightless body floated along its infinite expanse.
"Just what in the..."
"I’ll stop you right there."
The voice came again, female, steady, exemplarily feminine, like that of singer who had spent her entire life in perfect the control over her vocal cords.
Elian shifted his gaze towards the source of the voice.
It took him a moment to properly adjust his eyes to see in the darkened expanse, but once he did, his eyes widened.
There it stood, the source of this otherworldly voice, with all its poise and dignity.
The Everbloom staff.
"What the hell."
The staff shifted, as if it was changing its stance, and the reply came a moment later.
"Same, what the hell. It’s been hundreds of years since someone’s been able to reach me."
Elian blinked.
He must be dreaming.
Or maybe this was some kind of hallucination.
There was no way the staff was... actually talking to him.
Elian, of all people.
"You’re real?"
A beat of silence.
"What kind of question is that!? Of course i am!" The staff snapped at him.
"I... sorry, that’s not! Uh..." Elian floundered, because apparently the one thing more mortifying than fainting in front of forty relatives was being scolded by a floating length of ancient wood.
He cleared his throat, regaining his composure.
"You’ve just never talked before. In six generations. You’ll forgive me for needing a second."
"Six generations of people who never got far enough to hear me talk," the staff said, tartly.
"There’s a difference. Most of them let go before the first petal even warmed up. One of them cried. I’m not going to name which one, out of respect for the dead, but it was your great-uncle and it was extremely undignified."
"That’s... comforting, somehow."
Elian pulled his knees up, drifting slightly in the weightless dark, trying and failing to find any posture that felt less ridiculous than the last.
"So what... what even are you? A spirit? A person?" A pause. "Please don’t say cursed soul, I’ve had a long day."
"I’m not a person," the staff said, with the specific patience of someone who’d clearly explained this before, possibly to a very different kind of audience.
"...Well i used to be once. But right now, I’m Resonance. Old Resonance—older than your house, older than most of the names carved into that stairwell you keep walking past without reading. I don’t have a soul trapped in me, if that’s what you’re picturing. I just am. Nothing more, nothing less, just... waiting."
"Waiting for what?"
A long moment of deliberate pause.
When the staff spoke again, some of the snap had gone out of its voice.
Not gone, he corrected himself, just banked, like a fire someone had decided not to smother after all.
"For someone honest enough to hold me without flinching."
Another long beat of silence.
"You didn’t manage that, for the record. You gripped me like you were trying to strangle a confession out of both of us. But you got further than anyone in two hundred years, so, congratulations, I suppose."
Elian felt his face heat, which was an absurd thing to happen in a body that currently had no discernible floor beneath it.
"I wasn’t flinching! I was following the ritual... There’s a whole mantra-"
"The mantra is garbage," the staff said, flatly. It’s voice falling like a gavel onto a Judge’s desk.
"Whoever wrote it down clearly never spoke to me either."
It shifted.
"’Yield the self, still the want’." It quoted mockingly. "I don’t want you still. I want you loud. That crack you put in my petal wasn’t from all that chanting, sweetheart, it happened the one half-second you forgot to do it right."
That landed somewhere uncomfortable, and Elian didn’t have a ready answer for it, which was somehow worse than if the staff had just kept mocking him.
"I don’t know what you want me to do with that," he said, quieter now.
"Neither do I, yet. That’s rather the point."
The staff shifted again, that same restless motion, like it was pacing without legs.
"You’re not finished. You’re barely started. But I’ve been shut for six generations and you’re the first crack of light I’ve seen since before your grandmother’s grandmother learned to walk, so forgive me if I’m not in a rush to let you go back to pretending none of this happened."
Somewhere very far above—or maybe very far outside, it was hard to tell direction in a place with no floor—Elian thought he heard his name. Faint. Roderic’s voice, maybe, or his father’s he hoped, pitched with something that sounded uncomfortably like worry.
"I think," Elian said slowly, unbearably drowsy all of a sudden. "...someone’s trying to wake me up."
"Mm. Probably."
The staff didn’t sound especially bothered by this.
"We’ll talk again. You’ll want to, whether or not you’re currently willing to admit that to yourself." A pause, almost... almost, fond. "For now, try not to lie to your own reflection quite so hard next time, Elian Rose Valcourt. It’s tiring to watch."
It hesitated for a moment, then spoke again, before Elian could correct it’s mistake about his name.
"And... before i forget it, keep me with you at all times, don’t settle for less than that."
The abyss didn’t fade so much as it simply stopped being there, the motes of light smearing into brightness, sound rushing back in a wave..
...and the last thing the staff’s voice said, right at the edge of hearing, was something that sounded almost like an excited chuckle.