Side A – Yasgrid
At Yasgrid’s feet a thrum echoed and in the distance, beyond the fire and the dying village, leaves rustled as something other than the wind wafted through them.
“What was that?” Yasgrid asked, feeling the golden flames on her hands kindle down her arms and shoulders without burning her in the slightest.
“You can’t save them all, right?” Nia asked.
Except it wasn’t Nia.
Nia spoke with one voice.
Not a chorus.
“The town’s too big,” Yasgrid said. “I can’t reach them all, and some are too hurt to be saved already. I stopped it from getting worse, but making it better? There’s too much wrong.”
“Not if you’re not alone,” Nia said.
Another boom thrummed through the ground.
Yasgrid wasn’t sure if she was imagining the sound or if it was simply so low that she could only feel it rather than hear it. When the house beside her began to collapse though, she saw it didn’t matter.
Calling on the Shining Heart she held, the two of them reached out a single hand and drew the flames away, drinking them in like water.
Inside the house cries of alarm at the shifting beams came a moment too delayed. They weren’t in danger of being burned anymore. The house crushing them however was still very much a problem.
Extending her other hand, Yasgrid and the Shining Heart called on the burned and battered wood of the house. Together they spoke to it of the purpose it held, the shelter it offered, and the love of the family whose lives it was a part of.
Grow once more, Yasgrid urged the beams and roof and walls, returning the fire she’d drunk in as drops of pure vitality.
At first the lingering traces of Ruin’s touch fought against her. The house knew it had been destroyed. It knew that some of its family lay dead and that it had been broken and failed to perform the role which was central to its identity.
In ashes, its spirit sat, dwindling further with each crack of a beam and splintering of a wall.
You are not what you were, Yasgrid whispered to it. But you are still yourself. Even as you are, you’re sheltering those who love you. You are only Ruined if you wish to be, if you wish cast off what you were.
A palpable sense of loss greeted her words. The fire had claimed so much of what the house needed to be a house. With so much missing it couldn’t imagine having the strength to be a house much longer. It was so weak, and there was so little of it left.
What was lost is gone, but something new can still grow. Yasgrid said. If your strength is failing you, then take mine.
Extending both her hands, Yasgrid and Shining Heart turned the drops of vitality they’d been nurturing the house with into a torrent instead.
Side B – Nia
Nia felt the magic Yasgrid was working. Magic that was so fundamentally different from the ecstatic mania of Shatter Drumming Nia was wrapped within that it should have seemed entirely alien.
But it didn’t.
In all her time in the Darkwood, Nia knew she’d never encountered anything like what Yasgrid was doing and yet the power behind Yasgrid’s words echoed within her.
More than that – it echoed with the drumming she was riding like a tornado.
Drumming that was ready to make a leap she had absolutely no idea whether it would be able to make or not.
That gave her pause.
In the timeless moment within a beat, she hung suspended, the cosmos having swallowed her, and she the entirety of the cosmos itself.
She would return to who she was. She knew how to get back, and she’d done it so often that the transition passed without thought or awareness.
Unless she held it back.
Unless she wasn’t sure what the next beat should be.
She could see where the music wanted to go. Where she wanted to go. Yasgrid was in trouble and Nia wanted nothing more than to stand beside her.
But, just this once maybe, she needed to think about more than that.
She had taken leadership of so many other drummers. They’d planned to hurt her, but that was when they hadn’t known her, and when she hadn’t known them. That was then and now they were hers. To guide, to teach, and to protect.
She could charge ahead. Let the song go where it so dearly wanted to go at this point. She could cast caution to wind and risk it all to help Yasgrid, just as Yasgrid had done for her, but if she did, it was very likely that she wouldn’t be the one to pay the price for failure if her gamble came up against her.
The town Yasgrid was in had been damaged, people were injured and dying, but there was every chance daring to try to help would increase that number.
Would she be able to face her drummers if her harmless trick cost even one of them their lives? Could she ask them to risk everything they were for people they would never meet and never know. People who couldn’t thank them and were likely going to be terrified by the magic Nia was leading?
Yes. She could, because asking them her drummers was the right thing to do. She couldn’t make the decision for them, but she could let them choose. If she was ever going to believe in them, or herself, she owed them that.
This is dangerous, she said to her drummers as they coiled their song in close. We might lose more than the Battle.
But they’re going to lose everything, her drummers beat back to her, their awareness of the danger and their desire to help regardless as clear as the perfect notes they played.
And so, all together, they leapt.
Under Nia’s hands the cataclysm of music roared into the night, rising to the sky, and then rising beyond it.
Nia had no idea where they were.
But she knew where they needed to go.
And Starflame knew how to get them there.
Farther than any drum beat could sound, beyond the most distant walls any echo could return from, to a land too small and quiet to ever craft a Shatter Drum, Nia cast her heart and the hearts of all of her drummers.