Side A – Nia
It started, as so many things do, with something small. With so many drummers (clumsily) sending their beats across the arena to assault her, Nia didn’t have the time to setup any elaborate rhythms to snare them into. All she could do was play and send her own beats out like a rabbit for the foxes to chase.
As she’d predicted, the fledglings on the Gray Rift Shatter Band pursued her all too eagerly. That some few of them of them managed to sling a beat into her like a boxer landing a technically valid punch accomplished little more than to drive the rest into a frenzy to land their own attacks. So many of them crashed into each other in doing so though that the net effect was nearly silence from their side of the stage.
Had the ones who succeeded been aware of the fact that their blows had landed largely because Nia had judged them safe to absorb, their spirits might have faltered, which in turn would have been disastrous for Nia. She needed the untrained and the overeager to give it their all. They imagined themselves to be the secret champions of the battle, the aces-in-the-hole who were going to lead the Gray Rift Shatter Band to their first victory against Frost Harbor in ages.
How could they not be? No one expected them, and Frost Harbor had no one who could play against them. All they had to do was beat down on the weakest player on the Frost Harbor side and then move on up the ranks, weakening their opponents so that the regular band members could overwhelm Frost Harbor’s good players. It was a solid plan. It was a great plan! And Frost Harbor had played right into it, sitting in the usual line order from most-to-least senior! The weakest Frost Harbor player was sitting there, all too obviously struggling to stay at her drum, as they rained the beats down on her!
Nia could feel the self-congratulatory cheer radiating through their playing, even as they made mistake after mistake after mistake.
Fending them off shouldn’t have been possible at all. That she was managing it was a far greater testament to their ineptitude rather than Nia’s skill or drive. By playing up her struggles though, and taking the odd hit here and there, she kept them thronging around the rhythm she was laying down, which the most astute of them had to suspect was buying precious time for the more experienced Frost Harbor Shatter Drummers to work freely against their counterparts on the Gray Rift side.
In a sense, Nia was helping Gray Rift though as much as she was helping Frost Harbor by keeping the fledglings away from the main battle. Had the fledglings been free to join in with the better players, they would have threaded so much chaos into the performance that the entire arena might have gone up like a bomb.
Since that would have turned out terribly for everyone, Nia felt confident enough to try her brilliant masterplan out.
And so she started playing with them.
Side B – Yasgrid
In Yasgrid’s heart, Trouble stirred. It had slept there for weeks? For months? Did time have any meaning in the dreams of comfort it had been swaddled in? Not really. Its existence wasn’t one which was bound by time. Not in the same manner as the mortals it was designed to vex and torment.
They danced to the cycle of the sun and seasons, their levels spinning ever downward into decay and dissolution. It had watched them walk themselves into early graves and loveless lives and it had been forever immune to those pitfalls, knowing neither mortality nor sentiment for anyone or anything.
Something had changed though. As it woke, the Trouble’s Heart felt all that it was missing. It had lost. A battle. It’s power. It’s purpose for being.
And it couldn’t be happier.
It couldn’t be happier and nothing could have been more alien to it. The Trouble’s Heart knew only a precious few things, and paramount among them was the central tenet that it was never to know happiness.
It’s existence was separate from the flow of time. It needed no sustenance or rest. It would never diminish with age. It could never change from what it was. What it had been created to be.
And so, it could never know happiness. Or comfort. Or peace.
It existed as the projection of an unbearable torment. A mote of malice, and rage, and pain, and every shattered emotion, all cast out as unworthy, unendurable, and unwanted. Twisted and cut-off from it’s source, the Trouble’s Heart was nothing except the pain and despair which had led to its creation.
It had lost something though.
Some part of itself?
It reached out along familiar pathways. It felt for the rage which kindled the endless fire of madness which drove its actions. It searched for the sorrow to direct the unbindable passion which moved it. It looked for the despair which cut edges into its existence and gave it form and function.
It reached for the familiar and all it found were things wholly alien.
Comfort.
Warmth.
Understanding.
There was a voice calling to it, beckoning for it to awaken, to unwrap itself from the dreams of contentment and peace and face the crushing torture of the world once more.
The voice was calling, but it did not demand. The Trouble’s Heart felt the voice’s words land not like a hammer blow but as a caress. Not ‘it must appear!’, but rather ‘would it rise?’, with no admonition held against the choice to refuse.
That, more than anything else, was new and beyond the Hearts ability to grasp. Not the voice, not the request, but that simple fact that it was being given a choice and, more astoundingly, that it could make one.
And so it did.
And in doing so, became something else.
Something, which was at last, itself.