Pylo drifted into the next locking mechanism in that churning conflicted anxiety she had felt building up and down her entire body since this all began.

Every necessary bit of drudgery and delay simultaneously a welcome further respite from her fear and time to brood terribly upon it. She was going to have to correspond with her mother’s message cache.

She was obligated to and she honestly wanted to. There had been a long time since she had taken in the pollen of another siren. Known another in the language she was born of.

Nevermind another member of the family.

But communication meant facing everything again.

Pylo focused her attention on the security measures, narrowing her focus to just the pass phrases. The lock and key interlocks of communication, the encryption mechanisms. All the little subtle nuances that at first simply identified herself as a siren with functioning senses and reasonable education.

Puzzles of communication and knowledge, basics of etiquette, embedded into the flavor and grain of the gates. Shaped to practically be begging to be known and expressed. Blatantly obvious and full of the voids that yearned to be said and fulfilled.

Locks which to Pylo and any of her sisters practically screamed and shook with the need for the precise and yet ever different answer.

Oh and the nice cleansing sterilizing agents which would keep most any pests out and any uncivil communication in.

She relished it all with the bitter sting of hints of her time as a sapling and the undoing of itches and irritations she had not even noticed.

It was far more refined and delicate then the shower she had on Tunie but technically also a bit less secure.

It did not scour away into her ovireticuli, it gently coaxed and soothed instead, it drew out imperfections and impurities, moved along with her like a dance of enzymes and caustic payloads that tickled and teased her own cells and tissues.

To any non-siren, to anything bereft of the abilities of one it would have barreled through their tissues and rendered them dissolute shreds of ash.

After those basic pieces of drudgery and delay things started to get more complicated. There were the standard credentials of passage. That required she present the familial lineage of Courtesan, something only a siren who had once been fully blooded as part of the line of the clan could know.

Pylo unfolded and grew the emblematic expression of a courtesan child, the twin and partner whole and uniquely matched to the one that nestled in potential within the gate that only those both raised, grown and intimately twinned in the line of Mother and her sisters and aunts could ever produce.

And then after that there was The Scrambler.

It was disturbing, there was a cycling whirling maelstrom of chaos in its structures that shredded and distorted all resonance. To pass through it intact could only be accomplished through the right collection of Secrets.

No sense of Pylo could reach past the scrambler, there was no mechanism of resonance or artifice she knew that would be able to pass the volume that it occupied and surrounded the vault with.

It buzzed and fed on the tumult of every form of light, every form of resonant pattern, everything it possibly could. It glowed with a shredding surface that was faintly warm.

It scorched its volume in chaotic wroth and joy. A madness bred and honed to fill the space and further refined, trained and manufactured by urban secrets known to no one Pylo was aware of.

The source of The Scrambler commissions used by the family was a deeply held secret within Courtesan.

There was no way for Pylo to rush this step, there was no way to slow it down. Opening the way through The Scrambler took precisely how long it took. And it was long, boring and tiring.

To open the Scrambler one had to make a precise mirroring shape, a twin to a portion of it. An Antithesis stabilizing element. The pattern was hidden and the mirror would be imperfect, inherently so, drifting out of alignment after a prescribed time window.

Pylo herself had only the skill to make a mirror just sparsely coherent and synchronized enough to allow her to pass through immediately after its completion.

It was rumored to her as a child that there was a master key, a secret which with care would allow a Siren of Courtesan to bring down or permanently open The Scrambler.

But she did not know it.

So only after exhausting, draining work up and down her cortices in communion with its roiling chaos was a way opened.

By the time she finished the last alignment to allow passage through the scrambler the next room was welcome.

Welcome but also painfully unwanted.

It was warm, cozy, soft and comfortable.

It gave her pangs of the eroded memories of the past.

It was not really remarkable, except for how closely it came to the endlessly proliferating and changing rooms and cozies throughout the courtesan estate.

Even under all the weight of time it felt like the gentle soft comfort of home.

And that burned worse than any shower.

There were flutes of deeply refined grist at just the right calorie content for a siren, flavored with blends of vitalloys and rarified poetry that while kind of bland and stale from lack of truly living still gave a tingling joy to the confections.

It was kind of light and flowery tasting and if the room itself was a nagging amputated phantom memory of home this was already tearing at the scars that had grown over it.

Pylo was too exhausted by the effort so far to deny the refreshments.

But the flavor of ancient love and poetry is crisp as when she was still a sprout and only dulled by the ongoing static preservation of it.

If this had been home every taste would have been vibrant and alive, new and fresh and yet perfectly fitting into every previous taste and memory of it. But here far from the estate and under such security it could only be static.

And it gouged at the pain of the past precisely how Pylo did not want to dwell.

She chuffed coolant and sighed like a terran.

Beggars can’t be choosers and exhausted, starving sirens had to recoup in the cozy after their duel with the scrambler.

The intent in every line of the room was comforting, gentle, even hints of her mothers worry for her had been etched into the fibers of the wrought bone of the room.

This was to be a place to relax, for her and her sisters to relax. But it just made Pylo more tense. It was seeped in the almost forgotten echoes of home. Not aimed directly at her, but at any Courtesan that was acting as courier to get this far.

She was not looking forward to making her past even louder then it already was but after resting as long as she could stand in the cozy she moved on.

And was promptly denied exit because the room was not certain she had metabolized enough grist to go on.

It’s voice was soft and gentle and soothing and completely and utterly unintrusive or sharp in any way. Neither rude or curt. Not judgemental or even demanding.

But incessantly filled with experience, expression and rhythms of Pylo’s own body and oh so softly sweetly, totally polite about what it had to say and why it refused to open.

That required a rather frustrating argument with the door, which worried at her state in the not quite manner of her elder sisters. It was not really any of them, it was not quite a full child of Courtesan. But it was borne of them and had its own thoughts and ideas on the matter of Pylo’s health and it took even longer to eventually placate the door then it did to open The Scrambler.

This was accomplished by the not at all acquiescence by pylo in having another longer dose of refreshment, pumping a healthy puff of coolant vapors and then demanding that she was healthy enough to read her mail.

That had finally convinced the door to let her pass which left Pylo annoyed, it was not even a security measure and it nearly required more effort then the most intense Barriers of the vault.

And then came The Shape.

It had a number of shear sides, the number varied but they always seemed to be pentagonal with three converging at each corner? Sometimes the sides and edges would curve and distress in a way to suggest fewer or more sides.

There were structures within, secrets Pylo could not really hold inside herself. Not without rebuilding the thing itself. She somehow knew that if she were to reach out and touch it it'd be soft, so soft.

It was distinctly and aggressively boring to perceive for Pylo.

It was totally safe.

But she needed to utilize it.

Here deep inside the guarded volume of the scrambler there were two folds to its use.

The Shape was a volume that contained and was the key to the gate after this one. Furthermore it was itself the gate for this chamber itself.

Security measures like it had been used on the Estate, mostly to lock a younger Pylo from going where she should not. When she was younger she had never even been able to remember that they were there.

It was incredibly boring like that.

More pain from the past hitched in her cortices, feeling lodged in her ovi-reticuli even though they were softly cleaned earlier in her traversal of the Vault. Distractions drawing her to stop thinking about it.

She turned her attention back to the shape.

Pylo pondered and worked through the necessary secrets to unlock and confirm at once the nature of The Shape itself, and how to utilize it.

As had happened before and yet always was forgotten Pylo immediately regretted this action.

The Shape Spoke.

“Hello again Little Pylo Courtesan.”

She had forgotten what The Shape was.

She Had Forgotten.

What.

The.

Shape.

Was.

“Here for your mail I presume? Yes, Your second cousin once removed came with new deliveries. It is so nice to see you again, child. I was there at your creche before I was brought here after all. And every one of your visits here has been a delight. So good to see you so well grown again.”

The Shape was not safe, not to be trusted, not to be listened to with anything but the deepest of suspicions. And yet also civil and professional and in the employ of her family.

The gelatinous shape now that she apprehended its true nature made Pylo want to flee this place. To never come back, to burn away her memory that it had been, to panic and forget everything about her family and her friends if she should become trapped, to make sure she contained no record of any other siren.

If she was merely an infant sprout Pylo probably would have dissolved herself right there having realized the thing before her.

An adult siren without records of The Shape’s nature might have done so if they somehow snuck past all the other gates to this point.

That is assuming they had realized it was even there, The Shape might have taken action instead.

It did not move and yet it was here. It practically lounged.

It was fat with secrets and approachable but also utterly implacable.

There was nothing to know or speak to in it but for her sake it accumulated a crust of words and meanings and language that tasted like lies and danger the longer she looked.

Pylo tried to hold herself together and speak with authority and grace as she was taught.

“Hello again, I am indeed here for my mail if you woul-”

Her cortices were losing synchronicity, occasional single ones falling into utter panic or a complacent bored trance incongruously with their neighbours.

"Do not be afraid."

The command did not actually help her feel better, but it gave her enough terror and focus to combat the boredom torpors that threatened to placate her into a disassociated coma.

Trembling with involuntary flight spasms Pylo pondered the shape deeper than was strictly necessary and longer than was required.

It was terror incarnate to any Siren. Not even spoken of to sprouts.

You did not need to be taught to fear The Shape. You had to be taught to stand to be near it.

And yet the past was so much harsher and crueler than this polygonal thing.

The Shape was not even strictly malicious to Pylo.

Like it said, it had known her and watched over her and all of her creche-mates and her sisters before her.

But her cortices in realizing its presence could not release fear in spite of this.

The Shape was the Hunter of Sirens. All but extinct, all but lost. Only relics, assassins or contracted specialist guardians like this one.

It was forged, made, grown, evolved, adapted to eat of her flesh, of her family, of her court, of her children.

It was everything it needed to be to hunt her and go unnoticed, and slay her and her kind without even being recalled.

And still Pylo lingered.

“You should really find someone to talk to about this issue of yours Miss Courtesan.”

Of course it could read her mind, her innermost secret thoughts. And even if it could not it had been here for previous visits, and Pylo always lingered. She was in such a rut that it had seen her hesitate so many times already.

Still the words were dangerous.

Do not trust anything you hear here. Forget it as soon as you pass. It is Danger.

“I’m Fine”

This was nearly the last measure.

After that there would be almost nothing between her and finally facing the missives from her Mother and Family.

Confronting the Past.

And for all the visceral terror in this chamber with this glutton of Siren flesh before her it was still easier to face right now then moving on.

It never got easier, every cache and vault was always the same and she spent a long time trying to smother the memories again and again.

She always thought, hoped it would be different each time. Better somehow. That this time it wouldn't hurt so much.

She gently spoke the meaning to The beast that was the Shape and it opened as The Key that was a Gate. She passed through to the next chamber.

Armed with the knowledge of its nature that would only survive long enough to be used, Pylo opened the next gate almost immediately.

And wondered why she had herself in such a terror filled disarray.

And then at last was the final door.

It was small, just large enough for Pylo’s own mother to pass or three of Pylo herself to move through it comfortably without touching.

She spoke her own simple secret. An embarrassing incident she shared with no one, not even her mother.

Every time a new cache was prepared The Mother Courtesan left a personal secret only she and her Child knew as the passphrase for Pylo. To be replaced with one even more private and secure by her daughter.

The courier sisters did not pass beyond this point, they deposited the missives via pollen through filter meshes and sorting mechanisms Pylo did not honestly understand.

A Courtesan Urban magic that would let pass only the pure knowledge of correspondence in the mother tongue of Siren.

Only Pylo had ever entered the chamber beyond since its construction.

She spoke the childish but nonetheless utter secret only she knew.

The last gate opened, a final decontamination shower poured over her through the precipice.

Just as gentle a dance and aching a reminder of her childhood as the last one.

And at last Pylo found herself in the cramped little kernel of the whole vault.

A barely large enough space made all the more cramped by the blocky shelves along every surface of the chamber.

Crowded further by the rough woven cloth sacks that drifted in the corners and edges of the mail room.

Even further over full with the fibrous weaving threads of the sorting apparatus that wiled away the eras between deliveries and Pylo’s own reading time by sorting things into the proper shelf or bag.

Every speck and grain a brilliant tapestry of long form storage of Siren Mother Tongue.

Pylo curled up into the tight little hollow in the very center. Her mere presence and ambient charge sending the sorting apparatus to curdle and furl away into tight knots and whorls.

Charging and feasting on the gradients of her presence to store away for the deep long fasts between her visits when it would need to toil on barely a breath of motion.

There were no more delays, there was no more time.

Pylo parted herself and began pulling in the messages from her mother.

And she Remembered