Side A – Nia
Nia looked around for some co-conspirators to recruit and found Gracella and Pomdrin, two of Her Drummers, near enough to drag over.
“We’ve got to play again together sometime,” she said, dragging them two of them into a “private huddle”.
“Sleeping Gods Yes!” Gracella shouted, much too loud for their little huddle but still almost lost in the overall din.
“Absolutely,” Pomdrin said. “But maybe not tonight. My fingers are numb still!”
“I know. I feel like we were wrestling with lightning there,” Nia said. “I’m really glad you all were able to bring us back – I had no energy whatsoever at the end there.”
“What are you talking about?” Gracella said. “You were the one who got us there, you had to be the one who got us back.”
“What? No. This is your town. How would I find a path back here? If I was calling us back, I’d have brought us back to Frost Harbor, right?” Nia knew that wasn’t evenly vaguely true. If she’d had to pull everyone back on her own, the only place she could have brought them would have been where her body lay.
Explaining that to Her Drummers though was not going to get them asking the right questions, and it was only if they asked the questions and found the answers for themselves that the person who was most deserving of accolades would receive them.
“Wait, if it wasn’t you, then whose rhythm did we follow back here?” Pomdrin asked.
“Check with your bandmates,” Nia said. “See if any of them can play the first few beats that we heard calling us back. I know the both bands joined in, but I’m pretty sure there was just one drum that started it off.”
“Oh yeah. Yeah, you’re right,” Gracella said. “I remember that!”
“We’ve got to find them,” Pomdrin said. “Now, before the party is done!”
The huddle broke quickly with Nia’s Drummers scurrying off toward the older Gray Rift drummers.
“What are they up to?” Margrada asked, her curiosity mild still.
“Oh, nothing, just looking for someone,” Nia said, fighting to keep the delight from her expression.
She failed.
“You are not planning another drumming session,” Margrada said, more as a demand than a statement.
“Not for tonight,” Nia said. “Or any time soon. I’m a bit concerned the music hall wasn’t the only thing transmogrified by the song.”
“You mean like Osdora was?” Margrada asked.
Nia paused at that thought.
Was that what had happened?
Had the Darkwood reached out and transformed something inside Osdora to fill her with the mania she’d immediately shown when they got back?
It seemed both impossible and disturbingly likely.
“Osdora heard something in the Darkwood that I don’t think any of the rest of us picked up on, at least not to quite the same extent,” Nia said. “I’m hoping that won’t happen to my drummers.”
“Your drummers?” Margrada asked, teasingly amused at the expression.
“They’re my responsibility at least,” Nia said.
“Well, if you’re concerned enough about Your Drummers to act sensibly for the rest of the night, then what else did you send those two off to discover?” Margrada asked before freezing in place. “No. No you did not.”
To which Nia could only offer a big toothy smile.
Side B – Yasgrid
The Darkwood was confused. Yasgrid could tell that in how the wind danced around the trees. In how the water spun and eddied in the small brook beside her. In how the animals had grown silent but not still.
She passed from tree to tree, landing only once she was far from village or path, deep in an untamed part of the wood.
With calm and reassuring steps, she walked on ground where the wood’s power and peril was at its height.
Had the Darkwood desired, it could have swallowed her then and there. Drawn her down into the earth and held her there to till rot turned her to soil and roots lifted her back up into the sunlight.
Yasgrid didn’t invite the wood to do that, but neither did she threaten it in order to dissuade it from trying.
“If you want to make me a part of you, you need only wait”, her touch upon the leaves whispered. “I am not ageless. I will pass before any of your great trunks are brought low, and then you will have me.”
But what of the time until that day. What chaos might one so quick and so dreadful cause? The wood asked without a voice.
“No scrying waters can reveal that future,” Yasgrid said, giving breath to the idea so it could join the winds and be carried through the trees.
She could have promised to do no harm, but to the wood, promises from someone like her weighed less than the breath that spoke them.
“Any spark may bring such chaos though,” Yasgrid said. “You’ve burned before and you will burn again. Each burn changes you, but the whole remains. Your trees always stand tall, your canopy shelters all. Brooks run and glens call to the dancers who walk within you.”
And it will be thus with you? The wood couldn’t ask that, but Yasgrid heard all too easily that was what it wished to know.
If she was only a brief, transitory presence, then no matter how alien she might be, no matter how wrapped up in a divine fire which no longer bore the makers mark of a divine hand, the Darkwood could wait and let her pass, as it did with all mortal things in the end.
It would have saved Yasgrid a great deal of difficulty if she’d let the Darkwood believe that her mortality would define the limits of the change she would inflict upon it. That if it only waited, she would fade away like a passing season and in time everything would return to how it was.
Honesty isn’t always the best policy, because the world is too complex for that level of simplicity to ever be universally true.
For Yasgrid though, honesty was both a weapon and a shield, and she wielded it so.
“Someday, I will pass away, but in my wake, you will never be the same.”