Eysin: The Giggling Curtain | Ch. 22 - The Drum, the Dance, the Giggle

*Falling whistle sound fades-in* Coosmic Psychopunk turns Absurdist Joypunk: Alephira would like to have a word. What do you do when grief hits you like a literal anvil? *TOLL*

The absence of his bells leaves everyone silent, not breathing—maybe even their hearts stopped beating.

Across the fleet, NSS goes quiet.

No toll.

No warning.

Just void.

Alexander’s knees hit the deck first.

Then his forehead—hard, deliberate, like he’s trying to knock sense back into the universe.

“Fuck,” he whispers, voice raw, cracking on the single word. “Our biggest gun just went out.”

He stays down, forehead pressed to cold metal, shoulders shaking once—sharp, involuntary—before he locks it down.

Valen’s hand freezes halfway to her mouth.

Sylrissa stares at the sky like it personally betrayed her.

A world-wide MOCK-SNORE rumbles through the skies.

Cassius—upside-down no longer—rights himself slowly, eyes wide, the bloing finally gone from his voice.

No one says it.

Ashera turns her glass face toward the moon—calm, weary, certain.

Her remaining 20% hums inside her like a low, private dirge.

Enough.

The Blindside in her command lengthens, reshapes—spear becoming harpoon, harpoon becoming judgement.

She’s thirty stories tall, the spear a little longer.

It’s an impressive sight.

But also the realisation sinks in.

“It’s too big. She’s too much…” Eysin mumbles, voice cracking on the last word.

They’re all mumbling it now—quiet, scattered, like a prayer no one believes in anymore.

Eysin stands frozen on the deck, eyes locked on the falling red marble that was Arkion’s last light.

NSS: Void.

The sight, the sound, the unceremonial end blocks all life-force—the fleet now as inert as the dead water below the Anomaly.

The Alephira halo orbiting around Eysin flashes once—blinding, ridiculous.

A long, descending whistle slices the silence—wind through a cracked bell, or maybe the world itself exhaling grief.

The Alephira halo flashes again.

Dù-d…

The crowd waits in silence—no more plasma, no more shriek—just lint rolling out of the Monument’s back. All life-force gone. No light. No hope.

The Alephira halo flashes again—so strong everyone nearby feels a shockwave knocking on their hearts.

Dù-dug…

Bloink-bloink.

Eysin stands, now crowned with two long, silver-dusted doe ears rising from her hair, twitching once as if tasting the wind.

Seven little twinkle stars spin around her hair like fireflies that forgot how to land.

She looks at the glowing ring in front of her.

“Knock-knock?”

The long whistle intensifies.

Sharp exhale, “who’s there?”

It flashes again.

“Defibrillation.”

Dù-dug… dù-d?

Then—TOLL!

“Ooh, that’s gonna leave a mark!”

A black anvil crowns Eysin with a thunderous clang that rings out like Arkion’s final question. The impact flashes blinding white—defibrillation burst from her halo, shocking the sky.

Her doe ears flick once, as if applauding.

Eysin chuckles, mutters, “you didn’t quite miss me, but…”

For one impossible heartbeat the world tilts sideways.

Dù-DUG!

The clouds above the Baltic part—like theater curtains yanked by an impatient god.

Moonlight pours through the hole, framing the Monument in cold silver.

Eysin’s laughter echoes across the water like summer thunder.

She starts to dance. Small at first—shoulders rolling, hips swaying, a quiet giggle bubbling up through tears. The tiara-anvil now crowning her head—tolls again, brighter, like it’s answering her.

Starburst - seven little twinkle stars spin around her hair.

“What on Earth is happening???” Alexander loses his voice into a large cymbal crash wave.

The light TOLLS again. Pure white. Hits them all.

Alephira!

« Oh bordel… on est dessinés. On est littéralement le papier peint animé ! »

Eysin keeps on dancing, and sing-songing, “She’s too much, it’s too big—Hah hah! And she’s not even real!”

The sea around them whispers a heartbeat in ancient language.

Dù-dug, dù-dug, dù-dug, dù-dug…

It builds into an intense, hypnotic drum beat of triumph.

Valen presses against the railing. “What in the world is she doing? Is she—”

Sylrissa starts laughing, unstoppable.

Eysin’s dancing and laughing.

Points a finger at Alexander and yells back at the ship:

“Define too far! Remember? Now define too BIG! Hah-haaah!”

The beat matches her perfectly.

Alexander tears up, “what grand nonsense is this?”

Dù-dùg! Dù-dùg! Dù-dùg! Dù-dùg—

The Alephira blinds the Baltic with a grand flash—final. An AUM burst so intense its energy bleeds through time—past and future.

A breath.

For one heartbeat, the worm sings again, zerks experience spontaneous Ascension, curtains giggle in mansions long abandoned, hearts return to beating, and a future marsh already smells of midsummer moss.

As if a Luminary itself has graced the planet with their presence.

Somewhere in the dark water below, seven fallen Baltikons—including one very still figure with blue eyes—feel the burst wash over them like warm rain.

No one wakes yet.

But no one drowns either.

Scorpio’s skin ripples nearby, already reaching.

“I’m gonna turn your cataclysm into a beach party.

I’m gonna catch your harpoon like it’s a frisbee.

I’m gonna dance with your glass monument until it forgets it’s supposed to be sad.

And when you try to make it serious again,

I’m just gonna laugh louder.”

And when the flash is done,

A world-wide MOCK-SNORE rumbles through the skies.

Eysin is nowhere to be found.

22.1 – Extinction as Mercy vs Joy

The white moon looms full for added drama.

Ashera raises the Blindside—now a gleaming harpoon of judgement—aims straight at the moon.

“G. G.”

A small, stuttering, embarrassed giggle bubbles up—g.g.g.g.g.—like a laugh that forgot how to breathe.

Then the bolt fires.

Woosh.

TOLL.

Is this necessary?

A world-wide MOCK-SNORE rumbles through the skies—deeper than the first two, slower, lazier, like the entire planet just rolled over in bed.

Clouds stutter.

Gremlins freeze mid-scuttle.

The remaining violet loops in Ashera’s glass body flicker once — confused, almost embarrassed then start to stutter.

The harpoon slows in mid-flight, as if the air itself yawned and forgot to carry it.

The whole Baltic holds its breath.

And then —

a broken, glitchy, sparky Kaestus—size XXXXXXXL—intercepts mid-flight, fingers closing around the harpoon like it’s a toothpick.

Pan up: Eysin, five hundred stories tall, deer-eared, anvil-crowned, grinning ear-to-ear and coming in hot!

The titan—empress of extinction, librarian of a thousand dead worlds—sees herself reflected in Eysin’s giant, adorable cartoon eyes.

Ashera aims her palms at Eysin—CannonBLLLAST!

BOOM! Puff.

The hole where the moon was is now pitch black.

Oh no?—The curtains gasp—she blew the moon into a total eclipse???

A thin crescent grin through the perceptual void—Eysin’s tooned teeth glint in imaginary stagelight.

The moon peeks over her shoulder, safe. She blocks the path like a playful lady who just woke up on the fun side of the bed.

Ashera yanks the tape-line.

Eysin holds firm, twirling the harpoon. “Good Grief, next time you do the dishes,” she calls up to the anvil, voice booming yet intimate, “please also clean the sink.”

A beat.

She winks at Ashera.

“Let that sink in.”

Ashera pulls harder, tape straining.

“Too big to live,” Eysin muses, flexing casually, “too big to die!”

Ashera blasts plasma ropes to reel it back—violet fury whipping the sky.

Eysin catches one strand mid-air, fingerpaints with it—smearing dripping graffiti across the clouds: glowing “YAHU” in wolf-howl cursive, hearts that pulse like heartbeats, a massive “So long, suckers” pointing right back at the Sampo, moist letters dripping like fresh paint.

Alexander and Valen look up, jaws on the floor.

“How do her bones hold at that size?” Alexander calculates himself to insanity.

“We’re way past bones at this point, brother.” Sylrissa picks up her jaw.

Ashera yanks viciously; the tape bends Eysin’s arm into an impossible Matrix pretzel.

“Do not try to break the bone!” Eysin’s voice rattles the sea. “That’s impossible—For there is no bone!”

Ashera hisses and shrieks, “You’re insane! Yield!”

“It’s not the bone that breaks,” Eysin’s laughter infects all the ships with laughter, “it is only your SELF!”

Eysin yanks the spear—Blindside stripes itself in bold black-and-white, cassette tape still dangling from the handle like a leash.

A classic beach umbrella bobs in Eysin’s giant cartoon grip.

Ashera’s glass eyes widen. She reaches instinctively—

“Non! That’s mine!”

Eysin laughs, twirls the umbrella once, then lets it drift upward on its own.

“Finders keepers, tall bitch. It’s on vacation now.”

The anvil-tiara tolls once more.

Is this necessary?

Red filaments lance across the sky from the anvil itself, precise surgical strikes threading through Ashera’s glass form, deleting a few more loops.

Ashera staggers, begins to fall.

Eysin slams her shattered Kaestus forward—grabs her from the remaining line of tape, whips it to shorten by coiling it around Ashera’s thigh.

She plants her feet in the sky, heels digging cartoon trenches through clouds, and hauls.

Ashera stops short from faceplanting in the Baltic sea.

Aawoo! Yahhuu! Hah haa!

Eysin reels her in—heave, ho, up, up—while singsonging, “Pa, LOOK! We caught a really BIG one! Can we keep her?!”

The last pull propels her up like a flying fish—and she yeets herself after her.

22.2 – The Dance

Ashera—unshielded, archives flickering like dying film reels—hangs in the sudden silence.

The Solaris mist still drifts in fractal spirals below, giggling in colours that don’t exist.

Eysin flies right at her, now with matching size, (still tall) and grinning like a maniac who just discovered mercy has rhythm, reaches out.

Ashera parries her flight, turns, and sees Eysin has stopped between herself and the Moon, flicking her ears.

Ashera stares at it, waiting for the next dash, an attack.

She leaves herself full of openings—and nothing.

Eysin puts her hands on her hips, sways like she wants to dance.

“Taunting me. Have it your way!”

Ashera’s hands turn into sharp thorns, lunges an attack, a series, a flurry - full violence.

Eysin dances through it, first dodging the attacks, then, catching the attacks and turning the struggle into a dance of two.

Her voice comes out small, dry, very French, very tired:

“Danser? Maintenant? C’est absurde.”

Eysin’s laugh booms across the Baltic like warm thunder.

Takes Ashera’s thorn and it turns it back into the glass hand, and pulls her into the first step.

They begin to turn—the old circle dance scaled to the cosmos.

Hands clasp, release, clasp again—the same rhythm the wolves stomped around the bonfire,

the same rotation that proposed marriage in the mist.

Eysin’s steps thunder soft across the clouds,

each stomp a heartbeat the earth feels continents away.

Ashera—still thirty stories of cracked violet glass, studies the doe-eared creature, wearing an anvil for a crown. Tolling exactly like Arkion—

Ashera sees Arkion in the anvil, and realizes the giant dancing to her is the same girl he’d been spending the last week with, pulling tricks like miracles, using witchcraft unknown to her archives to turn her so… Loyal?

Ashera cries, living through the tragedy.

She screams louder than the shriek, indignation lights up in her eyes like hellfire.

“How about this?” Eysin makes an experimental spin.

It snaps Ashera out of the memory loop, the anger.

She is trying to make sense of what is going on.

This girl just saw her lover die, she is handling unspeakable power that could end her with a slap, and she’s laughing—

Was this man possessing her like I was possessing him, and now she is free? What compels her to dance with me? And laugh, with relief, and gratitude?

TOLL!

Is this necessary?

No, she is still wearing him, absurd—as an anvil on her head.

A golden bolt tickles her, “what is this absurd thing?”

Eysin laughs, “grief! I think!”

“Then you must take your revenge to get rid of it.”

Eysin rises eyebrows, keeps laughing, keeps dancing, “I won’t have grief define me and defile me into violence.”

The expression on the glass face changes.

Lips parted, brows furrowed, wonder and confusion.

Her glass feet lift from nothing,

drawn into the circle like a partner who finally hears the music.

They rotate —

slow at first,

then faster.

Clasp, spin, release, return.

Every stomp loosens a loop:

a battlefield becomes fireflies,

a genocide becomes children chasing bubbles across the sky,

a final scream becomes a saxophone solo that sounds suspiciously like Alexander’s horn on a good day.

Ashera resists at first—stiff, intellectual, trying to hold the pain in place.

“Non… si je lâche, ils disparaissent pour de bon.”

Eysin spins her faster.

Clouds whip into spirals.

Lightning flashes in time with the beat only they can hear.

“You’ll be what’s left when you stop needing the memories to mean anything.”

Eysin whispers, voice everywhere and intimate at once. “Let them become weather.”

Ashera’s cracked face flickers.

She tries one last injection of pain—a violet bolt straight into Eysin’s chest.

Eysin catches it in her free hand.

Turns it into a bouquet of cartoon flowers.

Hands it back.

Ashera stares at the flowers.

Then—almost against her will—her glass feet begin to follow the steps.

She’s dancing.

Really dancing.

The rhythm is merciless in its kindness.

It pulls her higher, lighter,

until her glass form rises with Eysin’s —

not growing,

but lifted by the same ancient steps that once bound strangers into family around a village fire.

The moon belongs to us—yahu!

they sing without words,

voices braided into one living chord that rattles stars.

Three hundred thousand years of grief cracking like ice in spring.

She starts to laugh—small at first, rusty, then helpless, rolling, absurdly French and completely undignified.

The circle accelerates.

Sky spirals.

Stars blur.

Until Ashera is laughing too—centuries of exhaustion pouring out in helpless, healing peals that make the clouds glow crimson-gold from underneath.

When the music only they can hear finally slows,

they drift to a stop.

Face to face.

Breathless.

Hands still clasped.

Ashera’s remaining loops flicker, embarrassed, and fade.

Her glass face wears the faintest, wondering smile.

“Je ne sais pas comment on arrête de danser quand la musique est finie.”

Eysin grins, gentle.

“Then don’t stop. Just change the song.”

22.3 – The Interview

Eysin appears cross-legged amid the drifting space trash around the Earth, one hand on her chin, eyebrows arched in that classic thinking pose—half anvil-crowned philosopher, half cartoon doe-detective.

The anvil tolls again, a single heavy bolt lancing through the silence and striking drifty Ashera like a question mark made of iron.

TOLL.

“Is this necessary?” Eysin asks, her voice echoing with the toll, soft but insistent.

Ears twitch, ready to listen.

Ashera’s glass form drifts, barely reacting. Her voice is calm, certain, French-weary.

“The next scream is already forming.

I can feel it — the next war, the next child asking why, the next blood demanded.

I must eat the next war before it eats them.”

Eysin tilts her head, hand still on chin.

“Forgive us.”

Ashera pauses — puzzled, almost thrown.

“I don’t understand.”

“Forgive us — the classroom can get quite messy. You seem uncomfortable with disorder.”

“It distracts.”

“You record the sounds and sensations of suffering. You had them all so neatly organized that it sounded like a heavy funeral song. Suppose… you keep track to hunt better, huh?”

“Keep track — you mean the collection of these poor souls and suffering?”

Eysin gackles softly — not mocking, just delighted by the absurdity.

“You’re a catalogue of neither soul nor suffering.

But somehow, every time these loops play over, the pain is grasping for the shape of the soul that it was once surrounded by.

In your sounds there is just a void where the spirit should be…”

“If I let go of them, I will forget…”

“You tell them: your pain matters so much it must never end. And when you come here with all this empty spooky drama… guess what happens to everyone that hears it, feels it?”

“Suffering. I am…”

Ashera drives her fist into her own chest — once, hard.

Glass rings like a broken bell.

The last loops spill out in frantic flickers — screams turning to whispers, whispers to silence.

She raises the fist again, higher, ready to finish it.

Eysin’s anvil tolls again — louder, brighter.

TOLL.

“Is this necessary?”

Eysin slips between the fist and the wound, arms wrapping around Ashera’s neck in a fierce, protective hug.

“Record this hug, Mrs. OCD.

You’re not suffering —

you’re a vessel.

You’re a vase…”

TOLL.

Is this necessary?

Ashera freezes.

The fist trembles.

Lowers.

Eysin waits, then speaks.

“Imagine a flood comes. Or a solar flare.

Every machine-wonder we built—fries. Every book burns. Every archive dissolves into static.

Do we lose God? Do we lose love? Do we lose the knowing that joy is the only real direction?

No.

We lose our ego’s favourite horror museum. We lose the justification for staying asleep. We lose the pain’s immortality project.

But THE SKY is still there. Terror can’t touch it.

Clear as ever.”

The last slow violet echo.

“But to dissolve the record at will—You’re asking me to kill them all over again.”

“I’m asking you to stop torturing them with immortality.”

The last loops come to a halt.

One by one, they fade to transparent.

A long silence.

Then—soft, almost shy—Ashera whispers a new name.

“Christos.”

The glass cracks.

Gently.

Like ice on a thawing lake.

Light pours through the fissures.

Not violet.

Not archival.

Just light.

Eysin looks at the lady in her arms, offers a stern nod.

“Anyway, this suspension is wearing thin. My zerk’s doing overtime keeping me from turning into a rainbow thing and dissolving into the cosmos. I’d very much like to get down now—preferably in one recognizable piece.”

Eysin closes her eyes, breathes in every good place from the last week in one deep, grateful inhale:

“If I’m gonna be turned to pulp,

let me do so

by landing in the mellowest of marshes below.”

Ashera closes her eyes and breathes the image in with her.

A marsh is the earth’s soft, wet, forgiving mouth.

It’s the place where land gives up trying to be solid and water gives up trying to be deep, and they meet in the middle to make something slow, green, and indecently alive.

It’s warm peat that sighs when you step on it, reeds that whisper filthy gossip in six languages, dragonflies stitching blue thread through the haze, and a smell like tea left too long in the sun—sweet, fungal, a little drunk.

Eysin opens her eyes, grinning like someone who just discovered mercy has a thirsty sense of humour.

“Woah. Wouldn’t have guessed you’d have poetry in you.”

“Sorella,” Ashera answers, light voice dancing, “I’m literally a library.”

“So don’t die,” Eysin holds her hand again. “Come with me.”

Ashera thinks; calm lines cross her dress—just poetry now.

She opens the mouth that never spoke, and exhales an ancient incantation, rolling like thunder from the first libraries of Uruk:

“Dù dug-kur-ra, nam-dug nam-til”

(Fashion me as vessel of the deep—let good form endure, let life remain.)

Her form folds inward—glass softening, violet light coiling into delicate curves.

The fall accelerates.

She opens the mouth that never spoke, and exhales an ancient incantation, rolling like thunder from the first libraries of Uruk — soft now, almost shy:

“Dù dug-kur-ra, nam-dug nam-til”

(Fashion me as vessel of the deep—let good form endure, let life remain.)

Her form folds inward—glass softening, violet light coiling into delicate curves.

The fall accelerates.

Non-linear. Curved.

A vase.

From every naked scrap of lace still fluttering across the Baltics, a single collective voice—soft, fond, and utterly satisfied—rises one last time:

The lace is naked, the windows are gone, and the giggler just turned the cataclysm into a soft landing.

The moon is safe, the marsh is waiting, and every body learned a lesson.

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