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Side A – Nia

Having falling into roughly eleventy bajillion Resonance states already, Nia was neither surprised nor alarmed to find she’d fallen into another one. In a sense it was almost comfortable. She knew she’d been playing around at the edges of her skill and had been purposely dancing beyond what she was capable of doing because…

‘Because’ wasn’t an easy question to answer. She’d been trying to evoke the magic of the Darkwood, to connect to it through her drumming and celebrate her love of it.

In the endless moment she hung in though she was able to reflect on that impulse.

It hadn’t been a terribly smart one. The thought of explaining to Pelegar, or worse, Osdora pinged a spike of dread into her soul. Explaining to Margrada would be just as hard, but Margrada knew her at this point and at least wouldn’t be surprised.

Had she really been all that irresponsible though?

And, more importantly, had she really failed?

Pine.

The scent of it. The texture of the needles. The stickiness of the sap.

All the sensations washed over her and were undeniably a part of the Darkwood.

The Resonance she was in wasn’t a particularly strong one. She didn’t feel adrift in an endless cosmos as she had sometimes. Her home wasn’t impossibly far away. She could have left it immediately if she wanted.

But she didn’t.

Somehow her flailing efforts had worked. Not even vaguely how she’d intended for them to work, but she’d still managed to reach some kind of harmony with the Darkwood’s magics.

Or…

She breathed in the pine scent more deeply.

Had it been her efforts that brought her here?

In her heart the rolling tension of a beat unreleased was missing.

She took another breath, not out of any need in the frozen instant of the Resonance, but to draw in more of the pine scent. What filled her was more than pine though. It was the rush of winds which carried the scent of flowers and brush, decaying leaves and newly opened buds. The burbling sound of countless brooks road on those winds as well.

Nia looked around but saw nothing, as usual. She was immersed in the essence of that which she’d touched.

Because that was what the Darkwood had created this Resonance from.

“You should be resting,” a woman whose form shifted endlessly through the body every Elf had ever worn.

“I know. But I wanted to see if I could do this,” Nia said.

“Not yet I think,” the Darkwood said. “But I am pleased you tried. Mostly.”

“Mostly?” Nia flinched. Being scolded by Pelegar or Osdora was one thing. Being scolded by the incarnation of the realm she’d been born from was a little more fraught.

“Though you wear a form of stone, you are still one of my children. One of my loud children whose heart yells with the crash of the mountains, but mine nonetheless. As such, I am inclined to see you prosper, which I believe entails not pitching yourself into peril at every conceivable opportunity.”

That Nia heard the words in the voice of her mother. And Kayelle. And Marianne. And more or less everyone she’d ever met in the Darkwood shouldn’t have been surprising. That Osdora’s voice was in there however was not something Nia had been ready for or could find an easy explanation for.

Side B – Yasgrid

The conversation had turned from dissuading Osdora from experimenting with Resonance states to general theorizing about how Nia’s experience with them might have shaped her playing and how much of her upbringing had shaped the sort of Resonance states she fell into.

Osdora was particularly surprised to hear what the Calling had been like from Yasgrid’s point of view, and what Nia had actually managed to pull off during it.

“We knew she was playing up a storm. Naswulf came through clear as a cloudless day with how precise her beats are – and I’m not ashamed to say that after we lost the third senior drummer, we started hanging a lot more of the beat on her than we have ever hung on a first year player. Her playing was just that good, but there was an energy behind it, another beat that was gave it the force we needed to push through. I’d thought it was the juniors all falling in sync behind her, which I suppose it was in a sense, but it sounds like that only happened because Nia beat the hell out of the gods directly.”

“The other junior drummers did their part. I was close enough to hear them too. Nia just went above and beyond. It made me think…” Yasgrid trailed off, trying to decide if she wanted that to be a part of her past anymore or not.

“Think what?” Naosha asked, a tiny crease between her eyes being invisible as a Stoneling social cue, and easily missed as an Elven one, but, for Naosha in particular, speaking volumes about her concern for Yasgrid.

“It was hard not to wonder if that wasn’t why we’d switched places,” Yasgrid said. “Nia had similar thoughts but from the other end. Where I was thinking how lucky we were that I wasn’t the one who’d been sitting there, because there’s zero chance I could have done what she did, she was worried that it was her presence that had riled up the gods.”

“You may both have been right, but I think you were each wrong about at least one thing,” Kyra said.

“I’m pretty sure it wasn’t one fledgling drummer that set the gods off,” Gossma said. “Not from what we saw of them a few days ago.”

“And I’m pretty certain your gods would have failed quite poorly if they’d tried what they did while you were behind a Shatter Drum,” Kyra said.

“I’m not that good of a drummer though. I mean, I’m not bad, I think I probably would have made the Band tryouts even without being a Kaersbean but I’ll never be the drummer Nia is, much less able to do what either of these two can,” Yasgrid said, nodding toward Osdora and Gossma.

“Perhaps,” Kyra said. “But if the gods had truly pushed you I don’t believe you would have fought back with only your drumming. I believe they might have discovered well before they were ready what it meant to face a Sorceress when she had no reason to hold back.”

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