Eysin: The Giggling Curtain | Ch. 2 - A Kantele Tries to Murder Everyone with Feelings
The sci-fantasy soul tips her toe in a cooler brand of palace drama. Velvet songs on a kantele. Mulled wine medicine and folk dancing. And plankton-green planning of a prison break.
The mansion smells of pine resin, roasted boar, and laughter.
Long tables groan under cider jugs, smoked fish, and ordinary Polish apples that will never taste as good as the marzipan ones Arkion remembers: one perfect bite from a childhood autumn before the fruit rotted overnight.
White silk curtains drift from the rafters. Hidden fans brush the fabric against necks, setting the mood.
Eysin sits wedged between Arkion and a wall of noise.
Across the hall, Valen Rozenbäer tunes a silver-stringed kantele the size of a small boat. Charcoal dress, hair twisted up with a plain wooden pin. She hunts what she came for.
She still lights the stage the way only people who have never been hungry can. Eysin feels twelve, rat-small, and furious.
Valen begins.
The first note lands warm, honey-thick in the breastbone.
The second makes half the room forget their legs.
The third turns dancers to wind, to fire, to everything beautiful anyone here ever lost.
Then she sings—low, velvet, hungry:
“I want the crash of you against me,
I want the burn of skin on skin,
I want the world to end in pieces
so I can taste where we begin.”
Arkion watches with the polite detachment of a man appreciating a sunset he has no intention of marrying. He’s seen this before. Heard these promises.
When the song ends, Valen slips offstage. Five minutes later she’s beside them, close enough that Eysin smells orange blossom and danger.
Her gaze slides to Eysin—curious, measuring, almost gentle—then back to Arkion.
Valen strokes his trimmed beard with one lazy fingertip.
“At least you got rid of that hideous thing.”
Arkion leans in. “Tell you a secret.” He winks. “I only grew it to smuggle two little birdies across the border.”
Valen flinches—just a flicker.
Arkion doesn’t miss it.
Her smile reshapes into a question mark.
The curtains in the back peer closer:
Why did that land like a stone?
“Tomorrow then,” Valen murmurs. “Don’t make me beg.”
She melts back into the crowd.
Eysin gulps her mulled wine like medicine.
Arkion glances over. “Need a pacifier?”
“Just give me more of this.” She shoves the empty cup at him.
He sniffs, raises an eyebrow, finds the right jug, pours the last half-glass.
“Come help me wrangle algae tomorrow,” he says. “The tanks are lonely and the pellets won’t press themselves.”
She almost snorts. Almost.
*
Later, in the washroom—all tile and soft lamplight—Eysin hides in a stall, waiting for whoever entered to leave.
Orange blossom, amber, expensive and deliberate. Valen.
Water runs. Runs longer than necessary.
Eysin emerges, moves to the adjacent sink.
Valen glances over. Recognition dawns slow and deliberate.
“Oh.” Her smile is kind. Pleasant. “You’re the one sitting with Arkion.”
Eysin nods, drying her hands with more focus than the task requires.
“How do you know him?” Valen asks, conversational.
“I’m a student.” The lie slips out. Safer. Smaller.
“A student.” Valen’s smile holds. “How lovely.”
She turns fully, leans one hip against the counter. Her eyes are warm, searching beneath.
“He’s a generous teacher, isn’t he? So patient.” She tilts her head, voice softening almost to fondness. “I was the one who first showed him how… rewarding patience can be.”
Eysin keeps her face neutral. Her heart kicks against her ribs.
Valen’s smile sharpens, just enough — still kind, still pleasant.
“Keep it that way,” she says. “Student and teacher. It suits you both.”
She leaves, trailing orange blossom and the faint echo of a door that never quite closed.
*
The next afternoon the greenhouse is purple-lit and quiet.
Arkion is wrist-deep in green sludge, pressing algae into tiny pellets that look like rabbit droppings and taste—like enlightenment and lawn clippings, he insists.
Eysin sits on an overturned crate, legs swinging, watching him the way sailors once watched horizons.
She’s been quiet. Too quiet.
Valen’s words loop: complicated history. Entanglements. Keep it that way.
Maybe this is all it is. A week in a locked house with a man who was kind once. Who kissed her goodbye two years ago and sent letters that stopped. Who maybe sent one last letter she never answered.
Who’s probably too good to be true.
Arkion notices her fresh haircut.
“Could murder the whole mansion,” he says, “and still not get five quiet minutes with you.”
Eysin kicks a pebble. Tries to keep her voice light.
“Wanna go score some marzipans when you’re done here?”
“You’re joking.”
She lifts one shoulder, eyes not quite laughing.
“Three-day hike through drone country for apples that rot in a week?” He shakes his head, almost smiling. “You’re adorable.”
The refusal lands like a stone in her chest. Of course.
She looks down, mouth settling into something sincere.
“Half-joking,” she says quietly. “The other half already has her boots on.”
Silence.
Just the soft plop of pellets and the low hum of the tanks.
Arkion works. She watches purple light play across his shoulders, across hands that used to correct her stance, that wrote letters she memorized, that might have proposed something she’ll never answer.
He pulls the last press.
Decision made.
“7A basement door. Twenty-three past twenty-three.”
She straightens like someone called her name in the dark. “Oddly specific time…”
“All time is specific. Gear up. Three, maybe four days outside. Pack warm.”
Her face does something—a thousand years of weight lifting, relief crashing through like light through breaking clouds.
She wants to laugh. Wants to cry. Wants to ask are you serious and why me and did you mean it all at once.
Instead she grins, wobbly and bright.
“Okay.”
Somewhere high in the rafters a single lace panel rustles like it just heard the best gossip of its life.
*
The late feast turns feral.
Cassius—currently orbiting a slightly higher plane—has brought a single enormous wheel of something that smells like grace left too long in the sun. He’s losing a noble fight with a dagger.
He nods at Arkion without pausing. “Offer her some cheese! It’s basically confession in dairy form!”
He leans in. “Also—my door’s open tonight. Brought something special from the monastery. Real vision quest material.” A knowing grin.
“Raincheck,” Arkion says. “Headed to the Orchard.”
Cassius slips him a small pouch anyway. “Ah, gonna see if you can score some Marzipan. Nice. But still—for the road. Bison dung shrooms. Best on an empty stomach, sunrise view recommended. Headed to the Lighthouse, too?”
Arkion thinks. “I don’t think so. I heard Morris and some of the guys might be there.”
“Oh, no-no, I think they’re staying at the Temple.” Cassius cuts a small piece of cheese.
Arkion steals that corner, offers it to Eysin like contraband.
“Forgiveness in edible form,” he says. “Open your mouth and think of every idiot you’ve ever been.”
She bites.
The taste is indecently kind. She almost cries.
The music explodes into stomping thunder.
Bodhrán like war drums.
Someone sawing a kantele drunk on cider and fury.
Tarantula.
Old shanty gone wild—festival fever, conquest, plenty, booty. The room roars the chorus:
Stomp so hard the floorboards turn to waves,
make the house a ship, the ship the sea!
Dance like curtains watch and laugh and praise,
like every ghost in lace is drunk on thee!
Eysin grabs Arkion’s hand and drags him into the circle.
They vanish: tramping, spinning, sweat and laughter and cider steam.
Every turn she loses him for three heartbeats and finds him again, reaching.
The rhythm builds—wilder, faster—bodies moving like one great breathless beast.
Then mid-spin, mid-collision, Arkion catches her hand and doesn’t let go.
Doesn’t spin her back.
He pulls her out, through the edge of the circle, away from the music still climbing.
She’s breathless, laughing, confused.
He leans close through the noise.
“Time,” he says against her ear.
*
They separate—each to their own space to grab packed gear.
Twenty minutes later they meet at the 7A basement door, wrapped in black rags over their zerks, hooded cloaks low.
Eysin shoulders her pack, eyes shining.
“What’s in the baaaaag?” she sing-songs.
Arkion winks, taps the side of his nose, and opens the door to the night.
Outside, the air is cold and perfect and waiting.
The new umbrella tech hums softly overhead—barely two years old, still rare enough that the world outside can sometimes feel like theirs alone.
Inside, the silk curtain in the rafters finishes the lowest, funkiest bass line it has ever dared, throws its invisible hymnal in the air like confetti, and faints dead away in a puddle of its own joy.
From the limp lace a small, absolutely plastered vaudeville voice croaks toward the reader:
Next: 8-bit forests and exploding dragonflies, Goomba trucks flipping in the rain, bandits learning physics from angry plumbers, and a cathedral-sized worm that swallows light, dignity, and maybe your soul.
Five veils left.
Bring coins and an umbrella. Don’t touch that dial.
Continue reading:
Eysin: The Giggling Curtain | Ch. 3 - Moistest of Woods National Park & Gift Shop
A gonzo sci-fantasy action romp through absurd wilderness: 8-bit action, exploding dragonflies, Goomba trucks & Gauloises in the rain. Continue coins available on level completion.