Side A – Nia
Nia tried to stop bouncing her leg. But she didn’t dare stop it either.
“I don’t suppose you know what’s happening here?” she asked the father she’d never known and yet who wore a smile so insufferable it couldn’t help but feel familiar.
“I was rather hoping you would,” Ayas said. “Though I don’t mind getting to watch as you discover it either.”
“Watch? Wait, have you been watching me this whole time?”
“Here and there,” Ayas said. “I’m no more omnipresent nor omniscient than I was in life, but it is one of the gifts we’re given to be able to look in on those we left behind.”
“Is that what all these ghosts are doing?” Nia found herself hoping that Ayas had been ‘there’ rather than ‘here’ on several hundred occasions over the last few months.
Most especially the moments she shared with Margrada, though, somehow, those felt sacrosanct in their own way, and the magic she was tapping out seemed to agree.
“I haven’t talked with most of them. Some of course, but you have quite an audience here, and time moves with the beats of the song.”
“Which means this will end before too long.” Nia found that a depressing reminder. She’d danced through a panoply of emotions towards her departed father over the years, from resentment at his ‘abandonment’ of them, to anger at the state it had left her mother in, to fantasies of what a perfect father might have been like and the kinds of things they could have gotten up to together. Ayas was different from all of those though, and the reminder that she would lose him again with the ending of the song grated on her.
Her agitation began altering the rhythm of her tapping foot and some rather dangerous thoughts began to bubble up in her mind. Thoughts that her tapping began to hint at enough for even Ayas to notice.
“We are so terribly alike,” he said.
“We’re what?” Nia asked, the temptation which had been slithering up her halt freezing in place for a moment.
“Your mother is careful to a fault isn’t she?” Ayas asked.
“I wouldn’t say to a fault.” Nia frowned at the small lie as she told it.
“I love my wife and part of loving her is acknowledging who she truly is. Naosha, gift to the world unparalleled, does have a few traits which do not always serve her well, an abundance of caution exacerbated by my passing decidedly being one of them.”
“So you admit that you shouldn’t have left us then.” Nia wasn’t sure why she felt the need to score points on her father.
But she did.
She’d always longed for a relationship with him.
It very definitely did not have to be a warm and cuddly little one though.
“I will not argue that at all, but I also am not looking to upend the cosmos. My story continues on in you, and I wouldn’t take that from you even for the world itself.”
Side B – Yasgrid
Yasgrid had felt like she was the continuation of a story from as far back as she could remember. She’d imagined it, for so many years, to be the story of the drumming tradition which her mother stood atop the peak of.
But then she’d cast aside her role as a drummer.
Cast aside everything that tied her to her past.
“I’m not a drummer anymore though,” Yasgrid felt guilty admitting that aloud, though she also had to question whether she’d ever really been one at all.
“Neither was I,” Unzola said. “Oh, I mean I picked up one. Learned to play pretty well even. Hard not to in a family like ours right?”
“I had lessons from the day I said the word ‘drum’,” Yasgrid admitted, feeling a kinship growing with her Great Aunt.
“My niece always was an overachiever,” Unzola said. “But drumming was her gift, not mine. Mine was similar to yours, though the hues in you are brighter in some places and more muted in others.”
“Hues?”
“That’s how I learned to see things, as a palette of colors the world was painted in. Inner colors which could blend and flow together and which were shared through the connections we make with those around us,” Unzola said. “I think each of us finds our own metaphor and creates our own understanding of the magics we carry to give ourselves some means of grasping what we can do and how to avoid conjuring the things we don’t wish to see come to pass.”
“Conjuring? You were a sorcerer too? You’re still one now?” Yasgrid felt thunderstruck. She’d come to the mountains in search of a mentor and sitting right beside her, if somewhat problematically on the wrong side of the veil of death, was one of her own blood!
“We are always who we are,” Unzola said. “Understand though, our connections change, or relationships with the world and those in it are not constant. What I could once do as a living woman in my youth was not what I was capable of as a woman grown. Nor were my limits the same. And as I am now that remains true.”
“But you could still teach me, couldn’t you?” Yasgrid asked, her mind turning in sync with Nia’s across thoughts of far deeper changes that could be wrought upon than the world than any they’d considered before.
“Alas, I cannot make connections for you, nor understand the workings of your heart in your place,” Unzola said. “Had our times overlapped? I can’t imagine what heights we might have climbed together. Or perhaps not? Maybe this gift can only be held by one heart at a time?”
“And what if new time could be found for you?” Yasgrid asked, the terribly temptation winding around her heart as it slithered around Nia’s.
“What makes you think I lack for time?” Unzola said. “My time here has finished, but there is so much more that follows.”