Side A – Nia
Nia felt an electric jolt of fear surge through her as she relaxed. She wasn’t shaping the song they were playing anymore. It however was quite definitely still shaping her.
Her body didn’t fall away or effervesce into soap bubbles but the magic was moving her in a way she couldn’t hope to articulate.
In the silent moments at the heart of each beat, she spun like a galaxy, light dancing from her fingers as the mass of her deepest wishes held the starstuff that defined her physical existence together.
Outside the torrent Nia had plunged herself into, Margrada worked with a sculptor’s grace, holding the music together as the greater force of Osdora’s drumming blasted it from every direction at once.
Osdora’s rhythm wasn’t foreign to the song Nia and Margrada had constructed though. It was something very similar but cast onto a far greater medium, a statue carved from the whole of a mountain reflecting a figure carved from a single stone.
Nia didn’t have Margrada’s of precision in her fingers or palms. Inside the music though, she didn’t need precision. All she needed was spirit and intuition.
A beat hit, sharp but with a long tail. It needed strength and she flowed into it, supporting the note so that it rang clear down its whole length.
Another hit followed, ringing just a hair too loud. It would drown out the next beat. Nia didn’t know what the next beat would be, but she knew it was needed to properly bridge to the rest that followed so she took the too-loud beat and stroked it with the merest brush of her fingertips, gentling it by less than a decibel but enough that the building surge of the song flowed smooth and pure.
Despite the ease with which she danced within the music though, when Osdora’s crescendo hit there was only one thing Nia could do.
Hold on.
Not to her drum. Not to the song. Those were impossible. Much too far away to keep a grip on. Instead, with hands ringing with exaltation, Nia grasped onto herself and held tight.
She might have been frozen in that position for the turning of an age, or a sliver of a second to short to have even happened. In either case, her memory held no impression of the transition from the last beat to what came after. All she knew was that one moment, the song was bursting within her and the next silenced reigned over all.
She breathed in, and only in the act of doing that noticed that the darkness she was standing in was because her eyes were closed.
Opening them, she’d expected to find an overturned drum in front of her, which was indeed the case.
Everything else was different though.
“Where…?” she started to ask as unfamiliar buildings loomed in the distance and, far worse, Margrada was nowhere to be seen.
“Of this is miserable,” Gossma said. “She’s never gonna shut up about this one.”
Nia blinked her eyes clear and looked around, taking in her surroundings.
And Gossma.
And Osdora.
In the impossibly far distance, a drum began to play again.
Side B – Yasgrid
There were guards at the entrance to the tent where Yasgrid had been jailed. When she exited the tent, they, of course, tried to stop her. Yasgrid wanted to feel some sympathy for them. They had been given a job to do, and it wasn’t an unreasonable one under the circumstances.
Except if the Fate Dancers had been willing to be even the slightest bit reasonable, the circumstances they were all faced with would have been worlds better than the ones she was about to have to deal with.
“I am going now to prevent the spawning of the worst Trouble the Darkwood has ever seen,” she said, leaving her hands empty.
“You assaulted Jelden,” the taller of the guards said.
“Yes. Jelden is due recompense for that,” Yasgrid said, surmising that Jelden was the name of the guard she’d assaulted to begin her plan. “Recompense that will come later.”
“We can’t let you leave,” the heavier guard said. She had knives in hand, but they were held in a defensive posture.
“By all mean,” Yasgrid said. “Try to stop me.”
It wasn’t even vaguely fair to take out her frustration and rage on the two unwitting souls who’d draw the short straw and been made her jailer. If they attacked her first though? The cold fire of her rage was hungry to see where that path would lead.
Rather than attacking though, both of the guards rocked back on their heels, gazing not at Yasgrid but at something behind her.
No. Someone behind her.
Kyra’s mother had exited the tent after Yasgrid and was glaring at the guards with a silent expression that weighed more than any mountain Yasgrid had ever seen.
“She can’t come back,” Kyra’s mother said. “If you find her, she’ll know that.”
“Hope for the future you can’t see then,” Yasgrid said.
“Empty promises. All the Bearers give are empty promises,” Kyra’s mother said.
“You don’t need my oath,” Yasgrid said, turning to face Kyra’s mother. “You don’t need to believe in me.”
She saw a deep echo of despair cross the older woman’s eyes, as though some quiet part of her hand been as desperate for Yasgrid’s reassurance as she was determined to reject it.
“Don’t believe in me,” Yasgrid said. “Believe in her.”
“She is no more.” The words were flat, spoken as though they’d been said a thousand times, a mass of denial so vast it could shatter a body, especially one where the heart was already broken.
“She lives,” Yasgrid said. “She lives and she hasn’t given up. On you. On me. On any of us. Believe in her, and remember her.”
“It is forbidden.”
Yasgrid drew Endings at last, splitting a beam of light so that its illumination seemed to make her grow vast in stature.
“Words cannot forbid what dwells in your heart. She is your child. The wind over someone else’s lips will never change that. Listen to what is true. Listen to the love they cannot take from you. Listen and believe in your daughter. She is the best of all of you.”