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Side A – Nia

Nia hadn’t expected their song to reach beyond the bounds of Gray Falls, much less beyond the bounds of life itself. In the voices raised to accompany the drumming though, she heard them. All those who had gone before.

And her mother heard them too.

Or at least one of the voices.

Hi Dad, Nia thought, with no magic to send her words out or drum beneath her hands to shout the message to the skies.

Hi yourself daughter, her father, Ayas M’Kellin replied. I should make a joke now about how much you’ve grown, shouldn’t I? That’d be the proper Dad thing right?

Nia turned to her side to find the world flickering between the mountaintops and a familiar night shrouded glen. Her favorite refuge when Kayelle had driven her to the point of wanting to start biting things and never stop.

“How…?” she started to ask, checking as she did to see whether she’d somehow managed to pilfer a drum without being consciously aware of it.

“Was going to ask you the same thing,” Ayas said. “I mean, I was never able to get your mother to sing. Not like this.”

“No, how are we talking? I don’t have, well, anything.” Nia looked around, focusing on the mountaintop world. No one was looking at her strangely for talking to thin air. They all seemed entranced by the song, or they were adding to it, those without drums, raising their voices, those with drums following Osdora’s lead. Notably, however, none seemed to be speaking with the spirits of the departed which Nia could feel and hear growing ever closer and more present.

“I know I’ve been gone for a while, and I was never the smart one of the family I’m afraid, but I feel compelled to point out that, demonstrably, you have rather a lot at the moment,” Ayas said. 

Nia shook her head. This was the man her mother married? That’d he’d passed on so young was truly a tragedy. He should have lived so that Nia could have tormented him mercilessly and properly.

He was right thought. She had so much now. A fiance. A passion. A family that far from running away from, she was determined to hold as tight as she could and build with anyone else who would fit into it.

“What I mean, father, is that I don’t have a drum in my hands. Usually to do magic, I need, as you might guess, the magic drummy things that make the magic noises.”

“Do you now?” Ayas asked, with a smile that sparked the teenage rebellion in Nia’s heart which she’d missed out on enjoying against her father.

“Uh, yeah, it’s not like I was more than a hack at best with magic before I came here and found the drums,” Nia said, deciding that it was probably forgivable that her father hadn’t known that in light of the whole ‘being dead’ thing he had going on.

“So, all those times you’ve played without a drum then? And that tapping that you’re doing with your leg right now? Completely non-magical, mundane activities I presume?”

Nia stared down at her leg. 

Which was tapping to the music.

And making magic of her own.

Side B – Yasgrid

It wasn’t her magic. Yasgrid could feel the song swirling about her. She could feel ancestors she’d never known jostling close like a crowd all trying to get to the ‘good seats’.

And it wasn’t her magic that was pulling them in.

Not anymore.

You’re not the only one who can change the world you know, Grandma Lokona said. Thought, to be fair, our time for doing that sort of thing is a little bit past I suppose.

Is it? a new voice asked. I don’t remember agreeing to that at all.

The last time you agreed to anything was the 1st of never as I recall, Lokona said, in the sort of teasing tone that was only shared between the closest of friends, or, siblings.

Yasgrid let music carry her senses closer and say Grandma Lokona and a woman who could only have been her sister Unzola sitting together. 

Letting the world fade away a bit, Yasgrid took a seat opposite the two of them as the home her grandmother and grand aunt had grown up in rippled into view around them. Osdora could have raised Yasgrid there, but she’d been preferred her own house. Yasgrid had still spent plenty of time at the ancestral home, most of the days Osdora had been on the road in fact, so the environs were as comforting to her as they were to the two sisters.

“Hello! I, uh, didn’t expect you,” Yasgrid said, delighted to see her grandmother again, and fascinated to meet her great aunt who’d passed well before Yasgrid had been born.

“We know we can’t keep you long,” Lokona said, putting down a polished disc of stone she’d been chiseling a fine image into.

“But we’re glad to have at least a bit of time,” Unzola said, her smile a mirror of the one Nia’s face now wore. The resemblance was so uncanny that Yasgrid had to wonder if Grandma Lokona had been reminded of her sister every time Yasgrid came over. Except Yasgrid had never looked like Unzola when Lokona had looked after her. She’d grown into a likeness of her great aunt as she became an adult, only to trade away her inherited appearance for one which was inherited from far different ancestors.

“Me too, but how are you here? I wasn’t trying to call you, I didn’t want to disturb your rest!” Yasgrid knew it hadn’t been her doing, but she still felt it was important to clarify that while she had trounced all over several different natural orders, disturbing the departed was a line she refused to cross.

“Believe it or not, we don’t rest as much as you might imagine we do,” Unzola said.

“Don’t you worry though, it wasn’t you who brought us here,” Lokona said.

“That was my idea,” Unzola added. “It’s selfish and greedy, I know, but I just wanted to meet the niece who inherited my gift.”

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