Daniel June series: Christopher and the Siren

Young philosopher Daniel June uses a crystalline symbolic prose to write of the author's struggle - and victory - with the Muse.

Christopher held a blade of light, searching the fogs, dancing over the
waves with his winged sandals. He had followed the song of the siren through
the winds, caught them and with his careful ear flitted through their
labyrinth until he had spied the siren. She was only one siren, a pillar
from the water, but beneath her coiled a mile of dragon. Her song was not
enough for what he intended, because he intended the one at the bottom of
the sea, beneath the dragon, but the dragon coiled in the waves and was
thick as a brain.

He skirted over the waters, and saw that once in a while, a coil of serpant
would breach the surface, but randomly. He got nowhere near the siren, who
would like to grab him in her arms in love and drown him in her painful
ecstasy.

But the coils were not random, and soon he had figured their pattern. When
the next coil rose, he threw out his blade, which bent forth far as a stone
throw and sliced the coil in two.

The sirens song shrieked high, but never ceased being music. And where the
coil was cut, a new siren grew out of the tail and now there was two sirens
singing, and the severed tail of the first siren sank down deep.

In such a manner, he had cut out coils and coils till ten sirens sang in
seductive harmony.

Their song overlapped into a wind, and he quickly flew into the wind and
breathed it in. It was the breath of life, pure self generating oxygen.

Having gained the breath he could now dive without loss of focus, and yet he
remembered to dodge away from the embraces of the tens sirens. Their words
were as tempting as a crucifix, but he would not submit.

He dove amidst them; his sword hissed away to the hilt, and he tucked it
into his belt. He followed the ten tails down, down, down, swimming
exhaustively yet never short of breath, amidst the tails which intersected
like lines of a web, or a great net, and at the very bottom was the Spider
woman herself, the great jaws of the guardian of the deep, whose mouth held
the tail of the serpant siren.

He let himself fall into her arms, and she bit upon his foot, and hand, till
he kissed her and pressed a breath of life into her.

Started to receive what she had not intended to receive, she trembled. The
ocean floor dodged and shook and gamboled, as her great roots split a
little, and a crack opened up on the face of the depths, and a fresh light
as bright as the sun broke out and spiraled up into the sky

This is why he had come.

He broke away and rode the beam of light up, and burst out of the ocean. He
caught a gleam of the light and rekindled his wand, pen, sword, where it had
fizzled to the hilt, a stronger light, a greater power.