Side A – Nia
Playing the drums wasn’t going to be a problem. Nia believed that despite the small tremor in her hands. She knew nerves when she felt them, and she knew she could play through them with a bit of effort. All that wasn’t going to matter though if she couldn’t get to the drums in the first place.
“There is no chance in this world or the next that you are getting to touch one of these drums,” Horgi said.
“It’s not personal though,” Grash said. “None of you drummers are going to lay a finger on these things until we’re back home safe and sound in Frost Harbor.”
“And even then it’s going to be, what, a month? Two maybe?”
“Call it three. If things go well. Worst case we’ll have some new training drums made up for you for the next calling.”
Nia looked from one of them to the other.
“You both know I’m going to be playing that big drum over there before nightfall right?” she asked.
“Before some nightfall maybe,” Horgi said. “Not the upcoming one though.”
“And she’s going to play that solid green one,” Nia said, gesturing to Margrada as she looked over to one of the band’s prized drums.
The two Roadies laughed.
“We don’t bring that one out for even most of the battles,” Grash said. “Trust me, that one, neither of you are ever gonna lay your hands on.”
“You sure about that?” Margrada asked, her voice growing frosty.
Nia considered how unwise a move it had been for Grash to suggest that Margrada wouldn’t ever be the best player in the band. Deciding that violence was not only likely but imminent, she stepped forward.
“Not only will we be playing those drums, you’ll be the ones asking us too,” she said, closing with Grash till there was less than an inch between their faces.
“I forgot how funny you were Kaersbean,” Grash said.
“Never gonna happen,” Horgi said.
With anyone other Stoneling, Nia was reasonably certain those statements would have been punctuated with uppercuts, but despite their unfriendly demeanors, Nia knew she and Horgi and Grash were still in good standing with each other. If they weren’t neither of the Roadies would have hesitated to lay her out the moment she opened her mouth.
Which she potentially deserved given that the current crisis was more or less her fault on some level.
Not that the Roadies knew the extent to which that was true. But they didn’t need to. She’d been right at the center of the finale of the Battle of the Bands, and she’d been one of the drummers who was playing when the rift appeared and began to grow. The Roadies were many things but stupid was not one of them.
So why didn’t they hate her? Or at least feel she deserved a punch or two for what she’d done? Nia wasn’t sure, which made her next play more perilous but they’d left her no choice.
“Come on,” she said to Margrada. “Let’s go talk to some of my other friends.”
Side B – Yasgrid
Sleep was something Yasgrid technically didn’t need, or at least could do without for an arbitrarily long time. Between the power she wielded as Endings Bearer (a role which needed alertness for days and weeks on end occasionally) and the power she’d awoken in herself through her communion with the Hearts she carried, her ability to restore her body and even mind would have terrified the Fate Dancers beyond all reason if they’d understood what she’d become.
Despite all that however, Yasgrid found herself drowsing under a sun dappled elm tree in a lonely and forgotten corner of the Darkwood, far from both the busy thoroughfares most Elves traveled and the abandoned roads the Fate Dancers favored.
They would find her. Kayelle when she needed to and the Fate Dancers when Yasgrid allowed them to.
Until then, she rested not only her body and mind but her spirit as well.
You have not called on us, one of the Darkwood’s nightmares whispered into the gauzy dream Yasgrid was resting in.
“Not yet,” Yasgrid said.
I could have gifted your enemies such agony as no living Elf has ever known, the nightmare whispered.
“They’re not my enemies,” Yasgrid replied, speaking perhaps only in the dream, though she suspected her words carried quite a bit farther. Elshira at least might hear them if she was listening, and the Fate Dancers likely had more than a few tricks to ferret such things out.
They seek your destruction. They would break you. Cast you down and cast you out.
“Only because they do not know themselves yet. Or me,” Yasgrid said.
Mortals never know themselves.
“Because we are always capable of becoming more than we are,” Yasgrid said.
They will drag you to ruin and feel righteous about it. They will hurt you and find joy in your suffering. They will take you from us.
“I won’t leave you,” Yasgrid said. “Not as you are, and not as long as you wish to remain with me.”
That is not a promise mortals can make. You are brief. Limited.
“My limits are only a part of who I am. You know there is more than that. To me and to everyone else. Even if our time here ends, we persist.”
In dreams. In memories. Not here. Not with us.
“Always here. Always with those we hold close,” Yasgrid said. “This small part of me I may leave behind,” she gestured with one hand to another, “but I am more than that. Even should my heart no longer beat, what it holds will not vanish, will not dissipate. In that, all of those who are ‘mortal’ partake in eternity. You fear your ending, because you can see nothing beyond it. For you who have known millenia of time, and slumbered through the aeons, the time beyond this existence is an unknowable country of oblivion, but for those of us to whom an ending is given from the moment our beginning faith is granted and examples abound that from one ending a new beginning will rise. Sometimes we forget, or doubt, but the promise ever remains.”