Side A – Yasgrid
Yasgrid jerked awake with the memory of teeth filling her mind. A moment earlier she’d been asleep? No, that didn’t sound right. A moment ago a cat’s maw had engulfed her entire head and she’d caught the briefest of glimpses of a mouth filled with the night sky before teeth like silver spear tips had slammed shut somewhere near her neck.
Her neck which was still very much intact? She took a quick survey of the rest of her body. Nothing was punctured or missing. But what had…?
“Are you okay?” Nia asked, appearing in between Yasgrid’s blinks of disbelief.
“I think so?” Yasgrid said and stretched her fingers and toes out. No pain there either. If anything she felt wondrously refreshed by her nap.
And starving.
“What happened to us there?” Nia asked, patting herself down as though searching for the same sorts of wounds Yasgrid had expected to find on waking.
“I did,” King said. He didn’t so much appear as make his presence known, as though he’d been with them all along but hadn’t been interested making them aware of that fact until then.
“What did you do? And how are we back in our own bodies?” Nia asked. Though she was standing near Yasgrid, Nia’s appearance was only one of their usual projections. Yasgrid could feel that Nia’s body was still laying in a wagon bed that was parked on a snowy mountain pass somewhere far from the borders of the Darkwood.
“You seemed to be stuck in the small forms you’d assumed,” King said. “And you expressed concern that your foe would know to seek you out by searching for similar creatures. Now you are free and she may search for as many small bits of prey as she wishes, with each one a measuring a precious moment of time lost to her.”
Yasgrid had to admit that both of those outcomes were positive ones. The method of achieving them however left a lot to be desired.
“That does lose us one avenue of attack on her though,” Yasgrid said.
“Are you planning to attack her?” King asked and continued to lick his front paws clean.
“Not directly,” Nia said. “Not yet at least.”
Yasgrid was tempted to correct her on that. Planning to attack Elshira was very much something Yasgrid was doing. She was considered quite a wide array of plans focused on that general theme. Sadly, she retained enough of her reason to recognize that all of the plans she had were bad ones.
That didn’t stop part of her from wanting to grab Elshira by the throat and see if a ghost’s skull could be converted into a Shatter Drum. Or just shattered. That would be agreeable too.
“If it’s blood you crave, you may find disappointment awaiting you,” King said.
“For now I think our focus is on protecting the people Elshira is trying to use in her schemes,” Nia said.
“We may have a more pressing question to deal with,” Yasgrid said and she rose from her bedding on the forest floor and pulled the roots which had grown over her away. “How long were we asleep?”
Side B – Nia
Nia had leapt back to Yasgrid’s side the moment she’d awoken and in doing so had failed to take stock of her own surroundings beyond a vague awareness that a stormy dawn had come.
“It can’t have been that long,” Nia said. “Someone would have woken us up. Wouldn’t they?”
But there hadn’t been anyone near Yasgrid to wake her.
And Shatter Drumming in a dream hadn’t turned out anything like she’d expected it would. Could the backlash have left her trapped in slumber for a day? A week? Years?
Nia shook her heard. That couldn’t be.
But then plants had grown over Yasgrid’s sleeping body.
“You didn’t rouse three sun rises ago,” King said. “Your companion was most upset at that.”
But Yasgrid didn’t have a companion with her?
“How did these things grow that much in just three days?” Yasgrid asked, gesturing with the fresh roots in her hands.
“Magic,” King said.
Nia heard the echoes of her dream song playing. The one where she’d asked the forest to hide Yasgrid and keep her safe. So that checked out.
But who was Yasgrid’s companion?
Nia felt a hand gently brush down the side of her face and panic shot through her.
It hadn’t been Yasgrid’s companion who’d been terrified by what Nia had done.
“I’ve gotta go,” she said and blinked herself back into Margrada’s arms.
“Decided to finally wake up?” Margrada said, her voice softer and calmer than Nia had ever heard it.
“I’m so sorry,” Nia said. Or tried to say. Her throat was so dry the words came out half strangled.
“Take it easy,” Margrada said. “You ran into a bit of burnout. You’re going to be weaker than you can feel for a little bit.”
Burnout? Unbidden, Pelegar’s words from one of their recent lessons came to her mind. A warning about how practicing too much could lead to a form of backlash that knocked a drummer’s legs out from under them. Pelegar had been amazed they hadn’t run into it already with the sort of playing they’d been doing but she’d chalked it up to the vigor of youth and the luck of fools.
It was tempting to lean into that story. Pelegar had been training them pretty hard, but she’d been careful to watch for the signs that they were surpassing their limits and never pushed them terribly far beyond that.
But she could have made a mistake.
Nia didn’t have to shoulder the blame for what she’d done in this case.
With one look at Margrada though the real story came tumbling out of Nia’s lips.
She’d had to hide who she was for too much of her life already. If she was going to be in a real relationship with Margrada, then Nia didn’t want to hide anything from her. The good and the bad, the brilliant and the idiotic, she wanted Margrada to accept the whole package, not just the perfect image she’d been raised to project.
“What your saying isn’t possible,” Margrada said, but then stroked the hair from Nia’s brow and smiled at her. “But with you? I don’t know if that phrase has any meaning anymore.”
“I’m so sorry,” Nia said. “I didn’t know any of that would happen, and I definitely didn’t mean to leave you worried for three days.”
“I was only worried for the first morning,” Margrada said. “Once I heard your music though, I knew you were okay.”