The Letter and the Flight
The letter arrived at his Scandinavian getaway on heavy, cream-colored parchment, sealed with wax that smelled of river mud and old pine. It bore no return address, only a single line in elegant, spidery script:
The River is being drained.
Come.
The Maidens
Poliphilos knew the handwriting.
It belonged to the Rhine Maidens, the ancient guardians of the river’s memory and a cell of his Memory Keepers organization.
“When the Maidens write a letter, it’s time to go”, remarked his Messenger from his usual place on a pine tree branch.
“I’ll book the next flight to Cologne”, Poliphilos said.
On the plane, seated next to him, was a small, energetic Japanese film crew: a director, a cinematographer, a sound engineer, and a young lead actress. They were traveling to shoot material for a multimedia musical adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Shadow for the Takarazuka theatre.
“It’s about this man,” the director explained, sketching on a tablet. “Who hides on the rooftops of the city during the day. Only at night is he free to fly, because the sunset makes his Shadow disappear. He watches the world from the tree tops, unseen, but when he sees a mysterious woman across the street, he enters her room, breathing by her side. But she always vanishes at dawn.”
“Is he a ghost?” Poliphilos asked, eyes wide.
“Or a lover?” the cinematographer mused. “The script calls him the ‘European Son.’ He is like a spirit of the city. She is like a spirit of the water. We’ll shoot the rooftop scenes on the old buildings in Cologne. It’s the perfect setting.”
Poliphilos listened as the crew went along, while watching the otokoyaku actress brooding in her thoughts.
They were complaining about logistics. “We need parkourers,” the director muttered. “And snow. It’s August, but the script demands snow. And musumeyaku-looking stand ins. And a very bright spotlight.”
“I wonder how they are going to make her fly at night,” Poliphilos thought to himself as the plane started descending.
Both parties were unaware that shadows were already walking the streets below.
The City of Confidence
Poliphilos had been in Cologne before.
He remembered it by the smells: coffee, beer, and the river, but also the sharp tang of petroleum and chemicals from the industrial plants along the banks.
But now, upon landing, there was a new scent in the air.
Thick, charged, and strangely uplifting. It smelled of metallic gold and old pine, and somehow, proud.
Poliphilos walked through the airport, expecting the usual chaos.
Instead, he saw people walking with a rigid, synchronized stride. No one bumped into anyone. No one laughed. They moved with a unified, almost terrifying purpose.
A car picked him up, filled with the same scent as on the airport.
The driver, equally confident, played Das Rheingold from the car stereo at a deafening volume. He drove like the Trans-Europe Express speeding through a straight line, ignoring traffic lights, ignoring pedestrians – and it was all ok because everything was synchronized.
“It’s like ‘Bois d’Argent’, but this tree is a thousand years old”, thought Poliphilos.
In the city center, as he stepped out of the car, Poliphilos saw a group of locals in a park standing in perfect rows, staring at the sky, as if listening to something. Again a gust of wind brought the strange but inviting smell to his nose.
Close to the hotel, a woman dropped her ice cream; but she didn’t pick it up. She just stared at it, then at the sky, her face a mask of blank pride in anticipation.
“And wearing the very same perfume, I’m sure”, said Poliphilos to himself.
L’Or de Lei
After checking in to the Der Minnesänger Hotel, he decided to head straight to the underground office of the Rhine Maidens.
As he arrived, he saw the door was unlocked.
The office was empty, but there were signs of a fight: overturned chairs, a shattered glass of water, and a single, torn piece of parchment on the floor with the words “The Ring is forged!” scrawled in haste.
Stepping back onto the street, Poliphilos saw a square filled with people in traditional Tracht (national dress), singing old folk songs with orchestrated precision. They were singing for joy and marching in rhythm.
“What is going on here?,” Poliphilos asked himself, as if double-checking that whatever he saw was actually real.
He pulled out his phone and searched for the scent.
The results pointed to a single source: a new ‘L’Or de Lei’ perfume.
It was everywhere.
People were wearing it like armor so much so that the whole city was now a hive of progressive, uplifting pride.
And somehow, this was related to wearing the perfume.
He passed by a department store where the windows featured an endless row of images of the perfume bottles placed in the hands of various kind of mythical, Germanic looking people. The main marketing message seemed to be:
"Feel the ancient pulse of the river
rise within you,
a warm, golden embrace that
calls you back to the soil
and the stars."
“I’m certainly feeling a pulse”, Poliphilos thought. “But it’s making me feel very nervous”.
Eisenherz
“Messenger”, Poliphilos called.
In a whoosh he appeared. “Yes?”
“What do you know about the maker of this perfume?”, asked Poliphilos.
“It was launched by Eisenherz GmbH last year”, told the Messenger.
“They have a very sleek corporation headquartered in a brutalist (if you don’t mind me saying) stainless steel cube on the banks of the Rhein. When you think about it, the building communicates the total opposite of what the perfume is promising.”
“Frankly, it looks like a vault. A prison.”, exclaimed Poliphilos.
“You don’t say?”, said the Messenger. “If I was you, I’d look for the maidens in there”
Poliphilos got an idea.
He booked an appointment with CEO Albert Richter under the guise of “discussing international export plans.” and managed to get one already for the next day.
He also booked a dinner table in a local restaurant and was surprised to see everyone eating in silence while the waiters seemed to float in the air when waiting the tables all while the scent of the perfume mixing with the smell of the food.
“It’s like a bunch of Messengers with no sense of humor”, he thought.
Then Poliphilos retired.
That night, he dreamed.
He is sitting in a movie theater, but the seats are made of cold, hard steel.
On the screen, the Japanese film crew is shooting the Shadow in Cologne. The lead actress is climbing the rooftops as The Shadow. As she jumps from roof to roof, she leaves behind trails of golden perfume that turn the people below into statues of pure confidence.
The director yells “Cut!” but the camera keeps rolling. Poliphilos realizes the camera is pointed at him. The director steps out of the screen, holding a bottle of L’Or de Lei, and says, “You are the extra we needed. Put this on. It will make you real.”
Poliphilos tries to refuse, but the bottle opens itself, and the scent fills the theater, turning the audience into a single, synchronized choir. They break into the final passage from Musume Dōjōji while the lead actress turns into a snake.
<snap!>
He woke up disoriented the way you do when you have traveled for days on end and don’t know what day and what city you are.
The Cube
He composed himself, got ready and headed to the Eisenherz cube.
Inside, the lobby was sterile, silent, and cold.
While Poliphilos waited, he spotted a door marked Laboratorium. It was slightly ajar.
“Screw the meeting,” Poliphilos thought, and slipped inside while the guard looked away.
The descent was a spiral staircase into the earth. Below, the facility hummed with a low, vibrating frequency that made his teeth ache.
He entered a room where massive screens lined the walls.
Screen 1: A live feed of the Rhein Riverbed. Giant drills were piercing the sediment, extracting a glowing, liquid gold. “That must be the Rheingold!” gasped Poliphilos.
Screen 2: The gold was being crushed, dissolved in chemical baths, and bottled as L’Or de Lei. “Ah ha!”
Screen 3: A global map showing social media sentiment shifting from “cautious” to “positively pro-Germany” in real-time. “Ring of Will” 56%, a number said. It wasn’t just a ring of silence; it was a ring of forced unity, a golden band binding the will of the people to the will of the company!
Poliphilos couldn’t believe it:
- The Rheingold myth was real.
- It was being mined, exploited, and sold to further Eisenherz purposes.
“And I know who are behind those”, thought Poliphilos.
“Interesting view, isn’t it?” someone said behind his back.
Poliphilos turned.
Albert Richter stood there, flanked by bodyguards.
“I can see you see into the future, Mr. Poliphilos,” Richter said, nudging his head as the guards approached.
“And you may be wondering what it is that we are doing here. The short answer is that we are curing the nation of its guilt. We are forging a Ring of Will. And this time, you won’t stand in the way, like you did in Trivandrum.”
“That gold belongs to the temple”, said Poliphilos.
“The same way you belong in prison”, spitted Richter.
Having said that, Poliphilos was dragged further down by two guards, and thrown into a soundproof cave-like cell.
The walls were lined with lead and velvet, absorbing every sound. The air was stale, recycled, and cold. It felt like the inside of a tomb.
And then he saw them, the Rhine Maidens, in an adjacent cell.
Not chained, but silenced by a high-frequency emitter that dampened their voices. Without their song, the river’s memory was trapped, and the perfume’s effect was absolute.
Poliphilos tried to speak to them, but his voice was swallowed by the walls.
He tried to gesture, but the emitter created a static hum that made his head spin. They were trapped in a bubble of silence.
An idea struck him.
The Sound of The Big Hill
Poliphilos realized the only way to break the silence was to counter the sound with something that neutered it.
The guards had removed all his possessions, but not the secret device he had stored in the heel of his shoe. He activated it, sent a message to his creative partner Isomaki.wav explaining the situation.
Soon enough, a sound file downloaded to his device together with a text: “Play this”
“Don’t ask,” gestured Poliphilos to the Maidens. “Isomäki… he doesn’t just produce music. That guy is a one-man SETI program. And this… this must be a frequency that doesn’t belong to this timeline. Perhaps a sound from before the first stone was laid. Anyway, here goes nothing!”
Once Poliphilos started playing the new sound, the vibration immediately disrupted the emitter’s frequency. The Maidens’ voices returned, amplified by the acoustics of the underground facility.
“Thank you”, they said, “We must act quickly”.
And once they got going, they were magnificent.
They began singing.
And like his vocal coach always said: “Everyone has a voice”. “But these voices”, thought Poliphilos. “These you cannot produce by taking lessons”.
Their song was like a wave of raw, unfiltered, collective unconscious.
First, it flooded the facility’s ventilation, seeping into the chemical mixture of the perfume.
The Eisenherz personnel froze.
The “confidence” evaporated.
Next, in the square above, the people in Tracht stopped marching.
They dropped their flags.
A man in a suit fell to his knees, weeping.
A woman looked at the sky, her face crumpling with sudden, overwhelming sorrow.
The guards in the facility dropped their weapons, clutching their heads as the weight of history returned.
Then, the Ring of Will shattered under the force of truth.
*
Back at the cave, Richter came running in, and saw his machine silent and his “destiny” again broken.
He looked at Poliphilos, his eyes hollow.
“The shadow… it will return,” he whispered.
“We’ll find you”, said Poliphilos in return.
And then, Richter stepped back into the darkness of the corridor and vanished, leaving only a faint, cold draft behind. But there was a determination to his vanishing.
Next, the Maidens stepped forward and began to seize the facility and expel the Eisenherz personnel.
They all stepped outside, while watching the stainless steel of the building began to rust and crumble, as if the metal was returning to the earth through an alchemical reaction triggered by the river’s song.
Last, they reconfigured the Rhein extraction drills.
*
They continued to make L’Or de Lei, but the formula was changed. The Dose: Instead of the “pride” data, they infused the perfume with a micro-dose of the Shepherd’s Frequency. The perfume would no longer create a “hive mind” of aggression. Instead, it would instill a mild, grounding sense of pride and a deep connection to the land.
“It will remind the wearer of who they are, not what they can conquer.”, said the Maidens.
At the end of the day, the lead one, the Iron Maiden, thanked Poliphilos.
“The river is safe now. And the gold remains. We will not let it be wasted.”
“Indeed. Also, we need to keep our eyes open for Richter’s return. This is the second time he’s attempted this,” said Poliphilos. “He will seek the gold where it is most desired. What do you think? The Arabian nations? American West? The hunger for gold never dies.”
“It, indeed, does not”, said the Iron Maiden. “There’s one more thing, though. Come.”
A Gift from the River
They descended to the deepest, untouched stratum of the Rhein caves.
Once they reached a cave that Poliphilos felt was definitely ancient, they started singing a new tune that he had never heard before.
It was different.
It was reminiscent of mythical Germany, a sound of sheep bells and wind in the pines.
By doing so, a new frequency began to emerge—a single, pure note from the river’s essence, a sound that had echoed in the valley since the Ice Age.
“This is the Shepherd’s Song,” the Iron Maiden explained. “An ancient Germanic tune, used to call sheep home. A sound of safety, home, and simple connection.”
They wove this frequency into a melody.
“This melody,” she said, handing Poliphilos a small, glowing vial of liquid, “is a chorus that you can use in one of your songs. Every time anyone streams that song, they are releasing the Shepherd’s Frequency back into the world. Not as a weapon, but as a reminder of home.”
Poliphilos smiled. The shadow had been defeated.
As the Maidens swam back into the Rhein they waved and said: “Your song… your song is now a Song of Europe.“
Discover European Son in here.
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