Side A – Nia
Nia felt a cat’s tail brush by her ears as soft padded feet skipped from one of her shoulders to the other. She was so lost in the music that was forming around her that the fact that it wasn’t a cat at all which hand snuggled down onto her left shoulder didn’t register as a problem at all.
“Um, Nia?” Belhelen asked with utmost care in her voice. “You…uh…”
Nia reached up to give the princeling a scritch on the top of their head, which the cat-adjacent bit of shadow gratefully accepted.
How did Nia know what the princeling was? She didn’t bother reflecting on that. The music was calling to her and her fingers were starting to tingle with anticipation.
Also, it hadn’t used its claws, so it was obviously being on good behavior.
That it was a princeling was a far longer intuitive leap, but then its purr was so similar to King’s there was really no mistaking it as being unrelated, and, having met King for more than five seconds, it was obvious that only he could hold that title.
“Will you play soon?” the princeling asked in the uninterested tone of someone for whom the answer was of such vital important that it demanded an immediate reply.
“Very soon,” Nia said, glancing over to Yasgrid.
It wasn’t really a check to see if Yasgrid was ready. This was their song. They could both feel it moving through them, calling the past to the present, from years before they were born and on up to when they each took their first breaths. What Nia was looking for was if Yasgrid was done having fun with her magic yet or not.
Yasgrid shouldn’t have looked surprised that Nia had noticed the spellworking, it was a part of their song too after all. A tiny hint of guilt at having been caught playing around from Yasgrid was met by a shake of the head from Nia. No guilt was required or allowed. Playing around was entirely the point.
“Can we play too?” another princeling asked, settling onto Nia’s right shoulder.
“That depends,” Nia said. “Would you like to hear my song, or do you want to shatter up your own?”
“Yours!” both of the princelings said in unison.
“Then I’ll need you to listen real close and when we’re done, once you’re sure you’ve heard it all, you’re job will be to tell me which parts you liked the best and what the song made you think of.”
“We have a job?”
“A job for us!”
Both princelings scampering off her shoulders with great bounding leaps to vanish into the shadows cast by the growing crowd of people.
“What were those?” Belhelen asked.
“Not what. Who,” Nia said. “They were King’s.”
“King’s what?”
“I don’t know if ‘kids’ is the right term. ‘Subjects’ probably isn’t either. Where they come from is very different from here, and I am will be extremely glad if I don’t stumble into that place ever again. It’s not somewhere people with bodies who need to do things like ‘breath’ or ‘have blood moving around inside them’ tend to do very well.”
“How did they get here then?”
“The music. I think it called to them. I think it’s calling to everyone.”
Side B – Yasgrid
Nia wasn’t wrong. Yasgrid could feel her magic sending the music of the Darkwood and the mountains skipping beyond the horizons of the world.
“Your audience is growing,” King said. “I imagine she will be delighted.”
“Who?” Yasgrid knew Osdora would be thrilled to know that her playing had been heard in place beyond those she’d ever visited but something about what King said made Yasgrid think it wasn’t Osdora he’d been speaking about.
“You can’t hear her?” King asked, the faint hint of either surprise or disappointment coloring his words.
None of that helped Yasgrid puzzle out who he was referring to though.
Not until she listened more closely.
“Grandma?” Yasgrid blinked and felt around with her magic. Had she cast the song beyond the veil between life and death?
No.
At its outer reaches, she felt her spell extending beyond the physical horizon she could see, and beyond some of the horizons of the physical world itself. She’d stepped into King’s realm, if only briefly, and she’d stepped in the nightmare realms which adjoined the Darkwood and so her spell had carried her music there and beyond. None of those place were where she’d met her grandmother though and since Yasgrid hadn’t been inclined to disturb her grandmother’s rest, her magic hadn’t reached out to the starry skied shore where her grandmother’s campfire had been.
It hadn’t taken Yasgrid’s magic to carry the song there though.
Osdora had been playing for herself and for those who came before her. Of course she’d called out to her own mother.
“How is this possible?” Gossma asked. “They’re here.”
Yasgrid didn’t need to look around to see who Gossma was referring to. She could feel the ghosts gathering in close.
Not just her ghosts. Each of the Elves and Stonelings who’d joined the impromptu songs had brought their own pasts with them.
But why?
From what Kyra has said, the fates of everyone, Elf and Stoneling both, had been shattered and their futures were no longer chained to what their pasts had been. That was the message she and Nia had wanted to share with everyone.
Yasgrid turned to listen to the song again. Had Osdora and Naosha built something different from what she and Nia had intended?
Well of course they had.
But it wasn’t in opposition to their message.
Osdora and Naosha’s prelude to the song was just that, the beginning. It was a movement which neither Nia nor Yasgrid, nor either Osdora or Naosha alone, could have created. They’d brought their unique voices into play to lay the foundation for Nia and Yasgrid just as they’d been asked to do.
Just as they’d done for years.
So why had the ghosts come?
“We never wanted you to be bound by our past,” her grandmother sang to her. “We’ve always wanted your futures to be your own.”