Her little chamber of sound, below the hatch on the outskirts of a large bordered up Mansion on the east of the Westend was her hideaway. There her music loud, her hits came, and the dis and re-assmbling of pinball machines-tampering with the Points system so that she was always the reigning champion (beating her consecutive titles each time under the name Owl), and staking out away from those who sought her dead.

Her collapse at the Inn was awful. She had lain cold and open to attack for a time, before regaining some sense of alertness and coming to consciousness fully-it was any wonder she managed to get home, the walk had seemed to take decades-and she knew what that felt like! She'd tread that path many times.

But now, pinball machines pieced together, music off, lights out, she sat frail and meek, entirely within her self, eyes misty and bronze-troubled. Her breaths kept a rhythem to any unguarded thoughts that might make her sick with their tragedy-a Trueblood did not sweat that much, so the process of letting the substance reduce in her absorption levels was going to be arduous, along with ignoring dark mental compositions of the 'Storm'. She had tempered her pain with adopting that Zen like pose throughout the night as she had atop the chimney, as it had called all four polar opposites, seasons, energies and Light her way-so that all shadowy sockets now filled with life, air and like beacons, pinpricks of cosmic light, guided her thoughts down a healthy route-clarity her chosen delight, before coming to rest on that couch and too tired to fight the tendrils whispering at her..

Curling further into the couch, ankles burrowed within the cushions, her hands nestled beneath her arm pits, she stared across the room to the rectangle chain-link bordered window that was the source of all natural and artificial light from outside. The blue-tinged glow of streetlight oozed towards her, spreading like elongated ghosts across the wooden-planked floor. She stared at them, intrigued by the patterns and imagery, stories and imaginings such misshapen shadows and light streaks could illicit from her shaky thoughts. But after a time of tragi-wonder, and staring out that small window, at the streetlight burning its pseudo-rays upon her hutch, she felt sleepy, and moved towards her squeaky spring post bed-stripped of all wood and now a skeleton of black nickle colour. She lay out across the bed, lowering as it caved at the middle, like a lame dogs back dragging at the floor, though not quite so severely, still it was a horror of a makeshift.

Sleep came easily to the Willow, not surprisingly so. Restful, her slight self hushed from movement against the darkness, her wan face gradually gaining colour as hours went by, and the ghost-jigsaws along the planked floor receded and daylight assumed that canvas, filtering the room in broad sheet of yellow light.

The following takes place within the Red Dragon Inn's 'Commons', off to the side, upon her favoured stool, she studies the silence and plays to the Unsaid. Her own disquiet soon blinded by merriment. See inside the Stringbean Siren's Art.

Upon her shoeshine's stool, feet to the side, she is suddenly there, and all at once with harp in her ginger grasp, drawing fingers tenderly across glinting strings, silvered lashes closed as the soft, wavering melody shifts and hunches beneath the quiet in the room-ringing within its four corners, the stairway leading upstairs, and to resonate within someone's heart-perhaps!

Chords are strum, reverberating against the flurry of fingertips, a wave of white against the cornfield brown back drop, as the golden strings still and fluster. The song is fast-paced and disonant-not to be followed or predicted, as she plucks at the 3rd last and final, bound string, her other hand pressing the 2nd and the 5th, as she sways gently, shoulders hunched



Pausing, her eyes open, falling to linger upon the movement of her hands, collecting the strings in awkward stretches of her spindle fingers-as though a white spider ravages in delicate weaves the pull of string to lull it to sound. Stringbean sways to a stop, as her foot begins tapping against the air. Her unearthly beauty glistens there

Despite the occassional shrill, polite notes that ought to cut the steely air with a certain knock, her attempts are in vain-this eve, the air is thick with tension, the draughts whistling through the doorway icey and forboding. The 'Storm' was warding off any attempts at breaking the thick, permeating disorder with the soft tricklings of her harp. But she would continue on, pulling at those strings in a flurry of tender pulsing finger tips, driving the music onwards, to course within the silence. She felt at ease. Despite the ashen grey Vibe

Sensitivities came to the fore while spirits were being unpinned from their host. A rattling of bones shimmied in her ear drums, as the Crickets took up their own chirping chorus within the forefront of her mind. Silvered lashes closed, focusing, breathing in her lullabye, protruding it through the tense aired surrounds, shining her Long light, into the Dark

In that moment of serenity, like the oncomings of a wendigo and a sudden twinge of resilience, she drew a hand towards the harps neck, enfolding her cool fingers about its familiar terrain of worn wood and soft string, as she collected herself in tiny shards and pieced her own mysteries together. The disarray that once cast a teal glow within her mind now faded to a russet shade, as she smiled a crooked smile, faint as ever it was, and bent Her sword, dipping it towards the room as her hands continued to parry. She would soon be but a Veteran of Disorder. Her weapon was her heart. She had her bait.....Now she would wait

Sovereign sent harmonies, each string inviting a different emotion than the last, as the melody was inflected with her soft, faint smile and delight within the Peace she had there. The minstrel quips of the Harp delayed then huried, the tempo scoffing at the silence with a whimsicle foray into ears the sound had not yet travelled to. Stringbean was content to luxuriate in this state of being, to relish, to hold what was her Divine. With langour the faint smile disappeared, and her bottom lip hung there, eye lids heavy. Her feet skid limpy along the floorboards, a forever thigh, knee and ankle pushed before a chair nearbye, so she seemed as though she were a stick insect, harvesting a nestle of sugar within its wiery self

The Wan faced Long Light perused the scene through semi-dark hues, the unfurling scenarios decor for her song. The mood had changed, dipped from unease, and so too her music reflected what was, and took upon its delicate self a sombre twill

Infusing the song with tweeters of sorrow or malay was indeed only a skill for a practiced fingers, and hers though newly aqainted with this sorely painted instrument, she marvelled herself at the ease with which finger tips scuttled and zipped, pressed, pluck and strung beneath, propping the tune into directions she had not herself heard a harp venture before. A smile decorated her lips in pale coloured joy, as she swept those semi-darks from side to side, taking all in, yet appearing absent from it all and completely within the sound.

Delighting in broken silence the twill is tweaked by loving hands, stroking the strings with unharboured emotion, a strained small smile at her lips then, as the sorrowful lilt perked then sundered, a rapid blistering of lower chords inflicting a deeper sound, reverberating against the sheared quiet, shawn by her pluckings. She opened her eyes to the room then. She seemed to glisten, to sway some. Unmoored.

As though a sea of feelings had welled, a spilling estuary, it was all she could think to articulate, in her own mind, this governing of sound, an explicit yet dense way to portray emotion. The smile twinged, the corners of her lips straight, as her eyes fell downward, to eye the floorboards marred and pulled back, as though pushed from beneath by an unknown, a monster. A wendigo! Fanciful ponderings flittered away, as she focused upon the sea of mastery inducing her into a state of calm th longer she tinkered with this beast, this treasure, this forlorn cradle of tunes. She displayed the unsaid. A minstrel to the unspoken. Her music, a delayed reaction to the previous spires of Vibe that glistened there in quiet shadow doused heights, plummeting like shrinking sandcastles the longer they stand

Fading out, three counts before strings are drawn and the music vaporised, as she she lifts her gaze and completed her serenade to the quiet. A small smile, as she stands, the endless torso lifting to match the ceiling in white haired gleam, as she looks downwards, tucking the harp beneath her arm, in generous strides moves crescent about the bar, and into the backroom, chimes and tinkling to be heard, a subtle groan from the harp is emitted in muted gasps. Stringbean disappears into dark

Twilit sky, peppered moths and the odd flash of bat wing littered her view from a top her favourite perch. Her face was sooty, her hair too, having it no longer white-from a distance she certainly would have looked like a ragamuffin Granny, who somehow was still remarkably agile to mount a sketchy piling of scrapped tyres...

She was sure some Grannies were capable-somewhere. She'd been spectator to stranger.

So, subscribing to her sooty-silver lashed perspective, with the cool of late day brisk at her shoulders, she executed her demons letting the wilted shadow of the now crescent sun, and whippings of this fiendish ice wind, strike at them boldly, as she sat, pretending she was hollow, with a vaudeville troupe of wendigo's and meer (or was it mare?) urchins in cages, clawing and sniveling at their host. She smiled then, a faint and childlike grin, as she closed her eyes and shook her head and hair free of the ash and grime that covered her mercilessly.

The days would come that she and others could roam free. No fights to be had, no hearts to be won, no arrows of poison to duck (now, she was being dramatic) but here, this peculiar town, anything seemed possible.

Bordertown had seasoned her soul. She was rich in resilience, yet poor in self-belief. Too much had been cast her way, a sundered radiance from exploited talent. She dropper her face into her hands, as the last rays shone across the many scattered rooftops and chicken-wire fences; now nickle coloured in the shade. She too felt black, as twilight crept across to a dark blue, and smothered her in proper invisibility, high up upon those battered tyres-torn and fragrant of tar and fumes.

She stayed there a while, crouched and meek, thoughtful and anxious.

The sunset was delirious in its beauty, and that puffed her chest in an aching sigh. If one was patient, life could be beautiful. The clouds were regal in their form-majestic and uninhibited-displaying their wealth of fluffy white and moody gray towards an ever-darkening horizon-unabashed like the neon lights that flickered to life, right now, somewhere reflecting against a wet pavement, back home, on the Border.

The clouds hovered, and she wished to cling to them, as they sailed like a mighty ship. Just to sit on a mast and blow with its sails-unsoot-i-fied-in sky-nautica symbiosis and weightlessness.

At just the thought, she trembled.

Dust-ridden stair case and cracked chandeliers refracted strange, ghostly, glossy shadows all over the walls and floor as he crept along, closing in distance towards the back porch, where the night was creeping beneath the door, singing its strange song.

He opened it and let night time wash across him, the eve sprucing his hair up and down, as though invisible hands toiled, and led him windswept into the garden.

Towards a moss covered bird bath he walked, the moons glow across it giving it a tombstone aura-cracked stone and stained with white, he reached out a hand to touch it, without much effort his long fingers were there, moving across the rough surface-sandpaper against sandpaper as he withdrew his own calloused hand and held them. He thought briefly then to that Geisha, and her insanely soft manicured hands. He recalled her with a smile, as he headed off to the broken, and bent-askew fence lining the back-thickets and starbeams grew together there-earth and light-encompassing his gray shadow, long and sullen, as he crept into the thorns, like thistle torn from that earth by a lonely, desperate breeze.

In his cycle of movements, his small storm leading him further into the wasteland as dustbunnies kicked and frolicked madly at his shoes, a tremble of ground shook his shoulders, all he could hear through the wind was the occassional pulse of sound from the the basement hatch that he had seen, inconspicuous and tattered-beamed, neighbouring his residence. As he spun into his own turnstile oblivion-six parts wind, two parts unease, and one part magic-then, he was gone.

Smothered by the blanket of dreamland air, he walked in the shadow of the old land, a shade darker than the gray of his own. For that land was a malice to the human flesh.

The ghost, it walked with the shadow of the Native land in him. Light hit it, he was home. Not yet. Not yet.

"Y'see?"

The quiet parallel opposite-of-sex sat crossed legged opposite me. Her hair like some tundra had collapsed on her forehead and sunk to its back. Her eyes were golden. She was my polar opposite.

She nodded, and had been quite docile the entire hour we spent talking. I had felt her eyes for day, and was certain she too had been in the field with the cat-sentinels a day or more ago.

"Bu' why's ye leavin' me too soons" Ye jus' tel' me all th' I nee' ta knows!"

Her lips, pale and expressive were hynotising. I felt nothing for the Elf more than camaraderie, a sense of kinship, yet I felt that I could watch her for longer than the hour had let-she had become droopy, lethargic, and I'd had to leave her beneath the latch, on her bed, with ash smeared in a wave across her forehead. I had to go. I had to tell her what would help, then close the relationship for now.

I told her all I could. That the Storm was nearing. That all sides to this battle were related. That the crease was welcome, but she had to spend time with him longer if she was to be accustomed to the heavy, blanket-like air. And to him.

We had left it at that, and I had taken her harp. It was a token of committment. She was Hider. I was Seek.

I had to keep her motivated. The Music, the Art, could not be a dependency. Not when her Dreamwalk, this fragile witch of the wind, had abandoned to drugs and then to being a backdrop.

I sat watching her sleep, the smudged ash fade the longer I stayed. She would understand come morning, it was the dreadful silence of her dreams she would have to overcome first.

I did not doubt Her. I did not doubt her Blood. The True Blood gave her signals, gave her a compass. I trusted her direction, and that she would find me.