Side A – Yasgrid
Osdora calling a Shatter Drum ‘a little too good’ had caught the attention of every drummer in the room.
“What do you mean…”
“A little too good?” Horgi and Grash asked together.
“That they’re in fine shape,” Gossma said and elbowed Osdora.
I was probably intended to look like she was chiding Osdora for exaggerating the drum’s state, but Yasgrid knew her mother. There was no exaggeration there. Something had happened with the drums that Osdora was trying to come clean about.
What could it be though?
Yasgrid’s imagination lit up with possibilities. The Darkwood couldn’t have claimed the drums. They were a part of the mountains, and a magic from a different domain than the woods. The beats of the drums and the harmonies of the Darkwood played well together but they were still distinct things.
The drums weren’t visibly different either. They were sitting in their display cases just like any other drum would be. No bits were missing. No obvious scuffs were present.
Yasgrid hummed softly, so quiet that no one could hear her.
No one except for Marianne and Naosha, but that was less a case of them hearing what she was doing and more that they were paying attention to the right thing in the room as usual.
Yasgrid’s humming was more than just idle sensory stimulation. It reached out to the drums and resonated with them, the vibration of the hum an echo of the song Yasgrid had felt in the Darkwood’s winds and waters.
And the drums answered.
It was subtle and oh-so-very quiet. Almost enough to escape the notice of the drummers in the room.
Almost.
Nia was the first to rise. She didn’t advance on the drums, but that was more from the instinctual wall of willpower she’d erected to prevent herself from grabbing any Shatter Drum that came within a dozen paces of herself.
Horgi and Grash, for all that they were more aware of the drums than the drummers in general, missed the drum’s answer to Yasgrid’s hum. They did not miss the drummers reactions though.
“Wait,” Horgi looked around finding a room of stunned faces and turned to Grash.
“What is that?” Grash asked, hearing at last the whisper of a song echoing from the drums.
“Those drums are special,” Yasgrid said.
The song the drums had sung had both been hers and something else as well.
There was magic in them. A lot of magic.
A new kind of magic?
Kyra’s gentle touch on her arm woke Yasgrid from a reverie of curiosity. Pursuing the drums magic was agonizingly tempting, but neither the drummers nor the Roadies would have been happy to watch the kind of things Yasgrid had in mind for the drums.
She wouldn’t really have been disassembling the drums. Just speaking to each piece individually. It would have looked a lot like talking the drums to pieces and banging on the bits individually though and that would have appeared worrisome.
Still…tempting though.
Side B – Nia
Nia did not cast a glance at Yasgrid. The wisp of song from the drums was both too compelling and too dangerous to blame on Yasgrid. Instead she glanced over at Osdora and Gossma who were, for some clearly unimaginable and entirely innocent reason, not looking at the drums.
Almost as if they’d heard that particular song before.
Almost as if they’d been hoping that by being away from the Darkwood no one would hear the echoes of the forest when the drums sang, or, if they did, would lack the familiarity with the harmonies of root and bramble, bough and bower, to know where the song sprang from.
A quick glance at Horgi and Grash confirmed that the Roadies were too focused on the drums to notice the guilt the two elder drummers in the room were concealing.
As the Roadies’ friend, Nia felt honorbound to a certain extent to make them aware of what it was they’d just heard, and that Osdora knew exactly what it was.
As a drummer though? As a drummer Nia already knew she had to stand with her band.
If there’d been an imminent danger to the drums, whoever played them next, or those who heard the song, Nia would have been tempted to break ranks with her fellow drummers. The more she turned the song over in her head though, the more she suspected the drums were not only safe to be used, they might be exactly what she needed.
All the more so because the song they sang wasn’t leaving her mind.
It was, in fact, speaking to her.
“Well. That’s interesting, isn’t it?” Nia addressed her comment to Yasgrid – who looked so much like someone else in that moment that Nia was baffled how anyone had confused the two of them for each other.
“Oh. Uh. Yeah. Sorry there,” Yasgrid said, coming perilously close to confessing what she’d done.
“Sorry about what?” Grash asked, without turning away from the drums.
“The drums, they’re sensitive to the Darkwood’s magic,” Nia said. Her grasp of the Darkwood’s magic was likely weaker than it had ever been but she stated her claim with a certainly more solid than the core of the mountain they sat on.
“We are definitely taking them then,” Horgi said.
“Not yet,” Nia said and both Roadies turned to her, worried violence in their eyes. “They’re okay. We just heard that. And I know you need to be sure of that, but this is new to everyone.”
“Almost everyone,” Margrada said, her gaze completely on Nia.
“Almost everyone,” Kyra confirmed.
“Are you actually considering…?” Kayelle asked.
“She is.” Yasgrid answered.
They hadn’t joined into any trans-temporal mind space this time, but having struggled together in a common Resonance, the five women retained an understanding that didn’t entirely depend on words.
“She. is. What.” Grash asked with infinite patience.
“She wants to play them,” Horgi said as though it had to be the truth because it was the most horrible thing he could conceive of.
That he was also correct came as a surprise to literally no one though.
“Guys. Look at me,” Nia said, walking over to kneel down so she was at eye level while they remained seated. She felt light as the winds and more solid than steel, unbound and free, yet moved inexorably by the growing echoes of the song the drums whispered on inside her. “Right now, those drums have something to say. And I have something to say. Not saying it will hurt me, but that’s fine. I can be hurt. I’ll get better. You’ve seen that. The drums though? Those drums right there? We are not going to hurt those drums. Are we?”