Side A – Nia
Pulling herself partially out of the trance she’d fallen while playing proved more challenging than Nia had anticipated. Part of her, a large part, just wanted to linger within the constant magical waves of the beat.
It wasn’t even that the song was pleasant. There were hard angles to it and difficult sections to follow. Her hands were still in questionable shape, functional mostly because her fiery companion was bolstering her endurance.
Despite that, the song was hers. Hers and Margrada’s. And to play it meant to embody the two sides of herself, Elf and Stoneling, the growing green and the soaring spires, her past and her future.
Her future needed her past though, and she needed her mother.
“Hello,” she said, more timidly than she’d intended. “I’m sorry to kidnap you all like that but it didn’t seem safe to leave you there.”
“I see what you mean,” Marianne said to Naosha.
“Yes. I’m surprised I didn’t notice it from the start but when you know to look for the differences they’re rather stark aren’t they?” Naosha said, casting an appraising eye up and down Nia.
“What…where…what…why?” Kyra didn’t seem to be handling the transition from their subterranean prison cell to the heights of the Stoneling mountains with quite the aplomb Naosha and Marianne were managing so Nia turned her attention to the former-Fate Dancer.
“It’s quite a lot to take in, isn’t it?” Elgi said, stepping forward from the crowd to offer Kyra a cup of steaming tea.
“You’re a statue,” Kyra said. “A talking Elvish statue.”
“A rather new development,” Elgi said. “Infinitely preferable to the alternative I should assure you though. I assume the same is true for why you’re here rather than in the Darkwood?”
“I am…I am completely lost. There was one thin fate left to me and its gone,” Kyra said. “They’re all gone in fact. I’m…what am I now?”
“Not a statue,” Marianne said.
“And likely less constrained than you were,” Naosha said. “I wouldn’t expect your familiar magics to work here. Not just yet at any rate.”
“What are they saying?” Horgi asked, and Nia recalled that her linguistic proficiency in Stoneling speak had been granted almost magically through to her connection with Yasgrid.
“Apologies,” Marianne said in perfect Low Quand, just like the Stonelings around them.
“Our companion’s gifts have been disrupted by our journey here,” Naosha said, in Low Quand as well, but with the slightest of accents. Not a Elvish accent. No. Her accent was that of Stoneling who spoke High Quand by default. Polite, polished, and controlled.
Just like her Elvish was.
Nia could have been shocked. Could have wondered where in the Darkwood her mother and former crush could have found a speaker of the Stoneling tongues to learn from, but this was Naosha and Marianna. It honestly would have been more surprising if they hadn’t learned to speak a language they had no plausible access to.
“If we might impose,” Naosha said. “I believe my daughter is about to ask us to coordinate additional drummers.”
“We have about an hour to save both our realms,” Marianne said.
Side B – Yasgrid
The Darkwood was afraid. It wasn’t hard for Yasgrid to sense that. The dream they shared held one part form her and many parts from the Darkwood, all blended together and all imperiled by the increasingly chaotic storm of Ending’s released energies.
“You say that I can control this but this was never a part of me,” the Darkwood said, forgoing its omnipresent voice and choosing instead to incarnate in a form which matched Yasgrid’s.
“Ending was crafted by the same gods who crafted you,” Yasgrid said. “They build Endings from the some divine mandates which the grew you from. The difference is, they left you with the ability to keep growing. Endings could only ever be exactly what they’d created it to be. If they’d left open the possibility of change, it could have become something intent on endings the whole of the world. You however? You they created because they wanted to see what you would become.”
“I am the nurturing earth, and the spreading canopy. I am the rain and the winds. What you suggest will not work because for all that I can be, the one thing I am not design to do is end,” the Darkwood said. “I do not grow unchecked, but I can regrow from anything, so that the investment made in me will never be lost.”
“That’s what you are now,” Yasgrid said. “Those are the rules that have been chosen for you, the limits someone else has placed on your existence. Endings power is yours to claim, free and clear.”
“No. There is always a cost. Taking up the blade’s domain would fundamentally change who we are. No longer would we nurture life. We would hold absolute dominion, the beginning and the Ending, over not only ourselves but also those within our borders. With these eyes we see that you are right. We could take up Endings power, but we will not. You say that we would be free of the constraints of our existence, but whatever their source, we choose to embrace those limitations. Merely because we are limited does not mean we are not free.”
“Those limitations could be turned against you,” Yasgrid said. “It’s what Elshira plans to do. To make you into her own image.”
“There are still paths which lead away from that fate, paths where we do not abandon ourselves out of fear of what might be done to us,” the Darkwood said.
“There are, but they come at far greater risk,” Yasgrid said, already feeling the weight of the world she’d tried to build falling onto her shoulders.
“We would dare those paths,” the Darkwood said.
“Why? Why leave your fate for another to decide?” she asked, knowing it wasn’t going to buy her a reprieve but needing to know nonetheless.
“Because we are not alone, Daughter of the Woods.” And their words came not from the mirror image they’d conjured but from the millions of voices of the life within the wood. “You and we are together in this. You and we shall stand or fall and remains together no matter where our path shall lead us.”