The Voices

The voices, Nuriel decided, were not going to stop. They had been mumbling on, barely audible, for three straight days. Occasionally approaching coherence, but always slipping back into senile whimsy. Last night, the voices had counted ducks for two hours, pausing periodically to argue about the count.

It had taken Nuriel the first six hours to discover that the voices did not have a source. She had searched from noon until sunset trying to find a source, before giving up and trying to sleep. The voices would have none of it. Their chatter seemed to swell whenever she was about to drift off. The worst part, she thought, was that their chorus hovered just slightly below a b-flat, so that Nuriel found herself humming the true note in an effort to correct them.

She did not sleep that night. The next day she realized that her horse was completely unfazed by the commotion, if it even heard it. She resolved to put in as many miles as possible, and simply leave the voices behind. After a hard days riding, with no slackening of the incessant chatter, Nuriel tried once more to sleep. And once more failed. That had been over a day ago, and still no sleep.

Nuriel had ridden her horse to exhaustion (and almost to death) before she once more tried to rest. This time she managed to drift off. Only to wake, seconds later, to find that the voices had stopped chattering and begun to scream. Their was no mistaking it now, the noise came from inside her head (and still just below a b-flat).

The next morning dawned to find Nuriel a shadow of her former self. Their were deep gouges on her ears and cheeks from trying to stop the noise and the blood had caked in her hair, forming gruesome dreadlocks. Her eyes were blood shot and moved constantly. She was muttering incoherently to herself, in a perfect b-flat.

When the horse sought her out for its breakfast, she did not notice him until he bit her shoulder gently, then she leaped on his back, startling into trying to buck her off. She rode him hard for most of the morning.

Then, around noon, she crossed a mountain stream, and the voices stopped as though cut off by a knife. Nuriel was so startled that she fell of her horse and into the freezing water. When she had caught her horse again, she pulled out her map and circled a large section of the forest. Inside the circle, in large letters, she wrote one word: no.

She was still chuckling to herself at this little witticism when she fell asleep. Chuckling just a little below a b-flat.