A pasty hipster-looking guy stood in the center of the recently downsized weapons cove. Szczeosny was supposed to find something in here. Some weird English word he wasn’t familiar with. Yeah, that made it much easier. At least he enjoyed these kinds of mental puzzles, even if they were made infinitely more difficult by language barriers. He could handle it.

The walls were solidly lined with stones. Like a mosaic. Peering close in the bad light, he could see symbols glowing with inner light, and shaped like weapons. This one was a bow, and this one was a spear. Some of them were completely unrecognizable. Fascinating. Was there some pattern to this, a puzzle maybe? But there seemed to be absolutely nothing to go on. At his touch the various tiles lit up with strange shapes and colors. Purposeful, sharp, each one different. There was a pattern to them, though. Here, a sword. There, an axe. Weapons. They were drawings of ancient weapons.

His searching was leading to a sinking feeling in his stomach. More than superstition - if he were only superstitious he wouldn’t be here now. Something about this room was giving him the creeps, and it wasn’t just the near-darkness. With the speed he’d brushed his hand across the wall, it was as if dozens of invisible eyes had suddenly turned their focus on him. The hair on the back of his neck creeped up. Each tile sent a jolt of emotion through him like a mild static shock. Most of them gave off a sleepy curiosity, but a few burned with hatred. There were whispers too faint to make sense of, a paranoid’s nightmare. He took a step back, recoiling from the tablets.

What the hell kind of machines were in this place?

That was when he first heard it. Not a song or a voice. Just the wind; in his ears, in his head. It silenced the other voices that had creeped in. Never before had his mind seemed to be such a crowded place.

“It’s just the wind...” he mumbled in his mother tongue, conjuring up the image of tiny crevices between the tiles. It were all just the wind, just a trick to put him on edge.

As if in indignation, the wind picked up into a roar. Something flashed across his mind’s eye in the most distressing possible way. A vision that... wasn’t his. Teeth, a seemingly unending row of teeth that coalesced into a jagged, simplified sawblade. The symbol burned into his mind with a sense of urgency and the faintest rustle of windchimes. Szcseosny was no artist; this was more vivid than anything he could have imagined up.

At least something was guiding him now. If this was what he was supposed to be looking for, he may as well get it over with quickly. His eyes darted behind his glasses, searching. The wind stopped abruptly as he reached up to a specific tablet and traced the symbol lightly under searching fingers. It was jagged, vertical, and flared to life in bright blue at his touch. Before Szczeosny could get to theorizing, a feminine-sounding voice let out a puff of breath, half surprise and half relief, that he’d finally found what he was looking for. It only took a small yank to dislodge the tablet.

“Co-!” he let out a yelp of surprise. Metal suddenly and violently clashed with the floor, yanking him downward with it. The tablet was no longer a small stone block but a huge saw, with his hands wrapped around a very organically horn handle. He could only be distracted hefting it around for so long. It was awesome, but it created more questions than it answered. As if aware of the flurry of confusion in his mind, the windy ‘voice’ jingled lightly, like laughter. Whatever it was, it hadn’t gone away.

“Can you speak?” he asked, glancing around. He was hesitant to directly address the inanimate object. The weapon gave no indication either way, the voice whistling a slow and haunting tune to its audience of one. “Can you understand me?”

Again, nothing. Neither of them seemed to share a common language, which would maybe have been more endearing if it wasn’t so frustrating for her to be in his head. She didn’t understand his Polish, and he didn’t understand... wind-ese, or whatever she was trying to say by making air sounds. But maybe that was why she helped him in the first place.

“Have you got a name?” he asked, the last question he could think to bother with. ‘Name’ - the word echoed even without translation. It conjured up the most basic ideas. And it conjured up his own. “I’m Szczeosny. It’s easier to pronounce than you might think at first.”

The weight that doubled him over righted itself suddenly, back to being nonexistent. He straightened up and opened his hands to find them clasped around a small keychain that looked like a lucky rabbit’s foot, if rabbits came with a nasty elongated set of claws.

The letters traced themselves in curly blue-ink handwriting across his psyche, followed by the saw symbol from before. Her identity was the saw as much as her own name. The weapon - she was the weapon. It was - alive?

IRDLIRVIRISISSONG

And one by one, as if evaporating away, the letters vanished, leaving a single syllable of a nickname still seared in his mind’s eye.

SONG