Lyra heard it.
Breath caught, strained in the silence
Heartbeat too loud.
Twisted and drunk with sleep,
She rose
Listening:
Strange music skittered
Light-fingered across
Consciousness.
Furtive she stretched
Wincing at the creak
Of mattress and bone,
Still listening,
Still reaching
For a sound that questioned
Sanity’s grip.
Again!
Again it whispered,
Called sibilant,
A susurrus over
Thoughts like fingers
brushing her unbound hair off her cheek,
Intimate phenomena,
A life’s work.
Up and moving in time
She reached back—
Soft lights blinked
On a recording console
Beckoning—
She reached and reached to grasp the dance
As it swirled across the Sphere facility,
Gossamer and winged in the two moons’ light.
Shaking fingers touched,
and console blinked red,
primed to capture,
and the music
spun into ether
silenced.
Author’s Note 🌿
This one was a hard one to pin down and took me nearly a year.
I had developed the accompanying illustration last year (2025) around various reference images of unusual rock formations, one of which were the Trovants or “living rocks” of Romania. One of my favorite artist pastimes is to study photographs and real-world geology, botany, etc., and then try to imagine those shapes in context of science-fiction civilizations. Star Trek episodes like “Encounter at Farpoint” (Season 1, episodes 1 and 2, known as “the space jellyfish” episodes) and Farscape with Moya further cemented this fascination.
So then, what sort of facility would these be? I pondered and kept returning to the artwork, month after month, brainstorming and considering different angles.
A science facility is an obvious (and admittedly easy) answer, but then we get to play with the juxtaposition of logic/emotion, data/mystery, and control/freedom, concepts supported by both narrative and artistic design (circular construction is unusual and more challenging to work with, compared to square/brutalist design that automatically gives a nod to control). Lyra became a character who has spent her life documenting and recording, likes things just so, and gave room to explore an encounter with something not so easily quantified, recorded, and explained.
I’ll let you decide for yourself how she responds!
❦ Heather
Thank you for reading Pen-Scribbled Stories, a haphazard archive of experimental prose and story. Pen-Scribbled Stories is a subsidiary of the Heather in the Blue Mountains newsletter.
**If you enjoyed this creative ramble, please consider checking out some of my other work. 🌿