Side A – Yasgrid
Yasgrid had thought Naosha’s barely voiced invocation of her eldest daughter was a reflection of how much Kayelle had shaped herself around the image Naosha projected. There was certainly some truth to that but the more proximate reason was simpler.
“My apologies for the interruption,” Kayelle said from outside the ground floor window she was peering in through. “I need to speak with my youngest sister. Would you know where I could find her?”
“Nia? Sure! How urgent is it?” Osdora asked, rising from her chair.
“Oh! Yasgrid’s here too!” Kayelle said, brightening as Yasgrid peeked around the chair to confirm that it wasn’t another Elf who’d stolen Kayelle’s voice or something equally odd. “You’ll do just as well! Better perhaps!”
“I can get Nia if you need?” Yasgrid said. She was tempted to check in on where Nia was, but Kayelle seemed to need her attention more for the moment.
“You may be a better judge of that than I can be,” Kayelle said.
“Come on in then,” Osdora said. “We have chairs to spare and you can bring us all up to speed on whatever fresh crisis is brewing.”
“Unless the time cannot be spared?” Naosha asked. Her expression and tone were calm and lightly interested, but her word choice was nearly a scream of concern for her.
“It can be, easily,” Kayelle said and walked away from the window to the door which Gossma had opened for her.
Yasgrid used the moment’s pause to glance over to Nia, who seemed involved in something with the Roadies. Which meant it probably wasn’t the best time to distract her.
“Is this about the Darkwood, or Nia herself?” Kyra asked as Kayelle hopped up onto a free chair Osdora had pulled over.
“Neither and both,” Kayelle said. “I went to check in this morning on one of the camps of Fate Dancers I visited before we became Bearers. I expected there to be difficulties for them in adjusting to the changes we wrought. What I found was that they are all catatonic.”
“I’m not entirely surprised,” Kyra said. “I was part of severing us from the fates we’d known and it was still a cataclysmic change. I suspect many of the Fate Dancers were completely unaware it was coming, and if any were engaged in our deeper rituals the shock would have been significant.”
“It seems there’s more to it than that,” Kayelle said. “When I arrived at the camp, others had already found them and were caring for them. Others including a group of Stonelings. One of them, she said her name was Pelegar, said that she recognized the symptoms the Fate Dancers were suffering. She said they were trapped in something called a Resonance State?”
“That’s not possible,” Osdora said. “There’s no Shatter Drums in the Darkwood, and it didn’t sound like the Fate Dancers were the sort to mess around with any magics except their own.”
“They may not have needed a Shatter Drum,” Yasgrid said, a question creeping up from the dark corners of her mind.
“Pelegar thought Nia might be a resource to understand how Elves and Shatter Drumming mixed,” Kayelle said. “But she said it should be impossible too since none of them had anything like a Shatter Drum.”
“Nia doesn’t need a drum,” Yasgrid said. “It might be possible that they don’t either.”
Side B – Nia
There was only one response Nia could make to Grash’s claim that she was a ghost.
She punched him.
Hard.
On the arm. She wasn’t actually mad at him after all.
“That feel like a ghost punch?” she asked.
“Don’t know,” Grash said, massaging his arm. “Was a bit light.”
Nia raised her fist and made it clear the next punch was heading towards his jaw.
“Could you have been hearing things?” Horgi asked. “Like maybe the piece of the drum you had was just banging around to the beat?”
“I was able to talk to the gods with it, and it sure felt like it was calling the magic like it had before,” Nia said. “Well, okay, not quite like it had before. With just the top the beats were a bit wilder.”
“A bit? A bit wilder!? She’s saying it was ‘wilder’?” Grash looked to Horgi as though his partner could translate from ‘nonsense’ into ‘Low Quand’.
“If you’ve got any broken drums I could show you?” Nia said. She could understand why the Roadies were confused, to some extent. Playing on the broken drum had felt like being caught in a swirl of madness. She was pretty sure she’d gone at least a little mad herself in order to work with the magics she’d unleashed, but then it had been a mad sort of moment. Grash’s confusion though spoke to something more profound than it being merely ‘difficult’ to play a broken drum.
“Broken? No! What are you saying! We would never break a…” Grash began, genuine anger rising in his eyes.
“Woah. I meant like one of the ones from the calling that broke. Not a good one,” Nia said, holding up her hands in surrender.
“They’re. All. Good. Ones.” Grash was restraining himself admirably, but he was clearly restraining himself.
“The broken ones were repaired?” Marianne asked.
“No,” Belhelen said. “They were returned to the mountain.” Her expression was somber enough that Nia had to ask herself why she hadn’t asked about what had happened to her drum from that day.
“The mountain reclaimed them,” Horgi said. “As it will all of us. Stone unto stone.”
“Until the world passes,” Grash said, completing what was clearly a ritual response.
“That she didn’t know that should tell you her question was innocent,” Margrada said, not imposing herself between the Roadies and Nia but offering her shelter nonetheless.
“For what it’s worth, that drum saved me, and maybe saved us all. I think the other drummers would have gotten a handle on it, but smacking the gods in the face had to have helped there I think and I definitely couldn’t have done it without the drum I was given.”
“We didn’t know,” Grash said, looking stricken, but not towards Nia.
“But we do now,” Horgi said, laying a hand on Grash’s shoulder.
“What do you need to do?” Nia asked.
“I don’t know,” Grash said. “The mountain reclaimed the broken drums. We reveled. We mourned. But the honor that was due wasn’t given.”
“This is not our place. We cannot and will not ask to intrude in your sacred rites,” Margrada said. “But we will help you.”
“This is beyond Shatter Drumming,” Horgi said.
“Then we will offer more than that,” Marianna said.