Side A – Nia
It began as it had to begin, with a voice and a beat. Nia felt both pulling her, what once were twin boundaries limiting her sinking in to her bones and becoming the foundation she was built upon.
The voice of the drum mixed with the rhythm of the Darkwood’s song, giving rise to a conversation Nia discovered she’d been hearing since the gates between the two were first opened.
We’re playing this for you? Aren’t we? she asked silently, trusting the beat of her heart to carry her words to the one to whom she was speaking.
Us. You are playing this for all of us.
Nia had expected her words would reach the spirit of the Darkwood, and they had, but the Darkwood wasn’t alone.
Was it the Stoneling Gods?
Nia listened for her one time adversaries, but, no, the chorus she heard wasn’t divine. The Darkwood wasn’t one of the Elven gods. The Darkwood was much closer to the elves than that. Far more a part of their life. Just as the drums were to the Stonelings.
The song moved onwards, from the base of Nia and Yasgrid’s peoples to the base of their families.
Through Osdora and Naosha, generations spoke.
Grandparents, great grandparents, aunt and uncles, cousins lost to time and friends who part of a family united by more than blood.
They hadn’t had any audience at all when Osdora and Naosha began the song, but that was changing with each beat and note. In two and threes, fours and fives, people were wandering into the crystal auditorium, drawn in with confused expressions on their lips and the spark of understanding growing in their eyes.
All of us.
The first drummer to join Osdora wasn’t Gossma, or Margrada, or Nia herself. It was someone Nia had never met before.
A drummer from Gray Falls.
And Pelegar joined him.
And then two others.
“How?” Margrada asked. “How did they know?”
“I wish I could say, but I don’t recall a thread where this happened before,” Kyra said.
Nia wanted to offer an answer, or a guess, or even a wild theory.
Instead she listened.
To the song. <It was hers but far from hers alone>
To Naosha and Osdora. <Had she ever understood how beautiful they were?>
To her own heart and to Yasgrid. <One beat. Shared and uniting them as they’d always needed to be.>
Each echoed the wordless message of the song, but it was deeper, even below the rhythm and harmony of the song which was growing in complexity and volume that she found the answer at last.
The drums were speaking.
And the woods were singing.
To all the drums that hadn’t been able to play in the Battle of the Bands and for all the voices that hadn’t been heard in the Resonance, the call went out.
Without urgency, with no alarm, and no emergency to compel attendance from anyone, the call was made.
The drums wanted to play.
The woods wanted to sing.
And it was Nia and Yasgrid’s story they wanted to tell.
Side B – Yasgrid
Yaasgrid couldn’t help herself.
She knew she probably should have resisted the urge. Using magic was something she was very new at after all.
And the song was so good without her.
It was leaping from glen to garden and hollow to peak on its own just fine.
But couldn’t it go a little farther.
Just a bit?
It wasn’t hard to give it that boost. Osdora’s playing was flawless, the kind of drumming only someone who’d invested her heart and soul into her craft could produce. Naosha’s singing was ethereal, her voice raised in an ernest joy the Darkwood and the mountains could not help but to echo outwards. Both filled Yasgrid with belief and longing.
In Osdora, Yasgrid found the strength which had always been her birthright, not as a Stoneling, but as the woman who Osdora had helped her to become.
In Naosha, Yasgrid found the role model she’d always sought. Grace and silent confidence had always sung to Yasgrid’s soul and in Naosha Yasgrid had living proof of what she might someday be able to achieve as well.
So Yasgrid dared to risk extending a bit of her newfound power.
The drums were calling to other drums and so she gave their voices greater reach, carrying their call into the Darkwood so that each tree could ring with each beat. To the mountains, she carried the harmony of the woods, sending it skipping from the peaks to swirl and wind around into the passes and along the spurs to find the hearts which would have been left out of the song otherwise.
It was so easy to give range and clarity to the song that she almost wasn’t surprised when it spoke to her directly.
Your time approaches.
Who was speaking to her? Yasgrid inhaled, breathing in the world she was so connected to only to find it far vaster than she’d understood.
Perhaps not just yet though, King wound around her legs before hopping onto her lap.
There was a sense of something retreating as he did, of the world exhaling and returning around her.
“This music is pleasing,” King said. “I would hear more of it.”
Yasgrid focused on breathing, wondering when she’d stopped, and how long she’d been inhaling.
More performers were joining the song, and more audience members were taking their seats. Where Yasgrid had expected the participants to mostly be Stonelings though, that did not appear to be the case.
In equal numbers to the Stoneling drummers, Elven singers appeared, and the audience was filling with both peoples.
“I hadn’t guessed we’d have some many, so quickly,” she said, turning towards Nia to see if perhaps both of them had been meddling with the song’s reach.
“There are more here than you imagine,” King said and Yasgrid felt another tail brush past her leg.
Even though King was seated quite comfortably on her lap.