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Side A – Yasgrid

Finding her voice in the cacophony wasn’t hard for Yasgrid. Not when the words within her had been waiting to pour out for as long as she could remember. In the riot of sound the impromptu performance had become, it felt safer to speak from her heart than ever since her words would be lost in the swirl of music that had gripped the town.

“I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen,” Nia said, a note of gleeful mischief in her voice.

And she was right.

Yasgrid sang of her time in Frost Harbor. With words in Elvish, she sang of the sea and the stones, change and solidity, the source of her life and its refuge. She could have found the words in of her birth tongue, but singing her story in Elvish spoke to the dimension of herself she’d never recognized until it stared back at her from her reflection.

“They can all hear me, can’t they?” Yasgrid said, in words only Nia could hear.

“Of course they can. This is your song,” Nia said. “Our mothers led everyone to us. All the other singing and drumming? They’re asking questions that only we can answer.”

When Yasgrid searched for her answers, she felt her words stumble. What could she say that everyone would understand? How could she present her life and the message of embracing change that she carried in a way that would reach their hearts?

She couldn’t. For a trio of beats she fell silent as she searched and found that she didn’t have the words to convince everyone of anything. She wasn’t sure she could convince anyone in fact.

“Good thing we don’t have to,” Nia said and continued drumming, showing Yasgrid, through the rhythm she beat on the drum, a path forward. 

Their path forward.

Silence hadn’t fallen, even when Yasgrid hadn’t spoken, because Nia had been there, playing their story in a wordless and fundamental form which nonetheless spoke eloquently to those who were listening.

On the next beat, Yasgrid resumed. Her Elven throat wasn’t ideal for singing in Low Quand, but the common language of the Stonelings suited her spirit. She’d never felt like she wasn’t a Stoneling, just that what she was wasn’t what people expected a Stoneling to be.

And so she sang alternating between Elvish words which matched her heart but not her people and Stoneling ones which grasped the world she’d been born into and the rich connections she still had to it but missed her inner reality.

It made for an odd and discordant song, and Yasgrid could feel some of the players and singers begin to pull away, while others tried to reassure her through their music that one side or the other would understand and welcome her.

But she didn’t need the reassurance or the welcome, nice as each was to hear.

She continued on instead, mixing her Elvish heart and her Stoneling tongue, the softness of her mountainous voice and the boldness of the forest winds that blew from her lungs.

And little by little people began to understand.

Side B – Nia

Nia, unsurprisingly, was the first to work out what Yasgrid was doing, and the first to grasp what magic Yasgrid’s sorcery was working.

When Nia has spoken to Yasgrid through the bond, she’d only meant to encourage Yasgrid by reminding her that they weren’t playing to change those who heard them. Their song had a much simpler aim. All they needed to do was was share their story, to show people how even a change which had seemed impossible to make had been so right and powerful to embrace.

In the wake of Elshira and the Volcano gods defeat, in the first days of the new connection between forest and mountain, and with the shattering of old fates, everyone stood in an instant when change was not only possible, but a choice which all had to make. 

Nia beat her drum, forming the foundation for Yasgrid’s song and thought about something other than change though.

Under her hands a living piece of the mountains resounded, each beat ringing to the ends of the world and beyond. With each one though, she became herself. Remained herself. She had so much changed who she was in becoming a Shatter drummer as she had discovered what was already within her.

It took only a glance out into the crowd to find her mother, Naosha, watching her with glittering eyes. Naosha who had always been too quiet and too calm for Nia to ever fully resemble. 

But that was a learned and practiced quiet. A calm that arose from a strength greater than stone or steel. 

Nia was her mother’s daughter. Where Naosha’s strength was turned inward, in Nia that same force was meant to explode out into .

And yet, both women remained themselves. No force would change Naosha against her will, and no drum would ever shatter Nia. In an ever changing world, even with their fates severed, neither Naosha nor Nia would give up on the ones they loved.

They weren’t frozen in time though. Naosha’s sorrow at Ayas’s loss, and Nia’s stubborn refusal to break didn’t mean they were fixed and unchanging, but rather, Nia’s song told those who were listening, that the choice they were faced with wasn’t embracing a new life at the expense of their old one but rather carrying into the new life before them the things they chose to retain while letting their old fears and old limits fall away into the past where they could serve as the milestones and guideposts to the future they were meant to be.

Nia didn’t have the words for that, but as a drummer she didn’t need words. Under her hands, she let stone and percussion speak for her, each beat doing more than simply conveying the message her heart wanted to share. Woven together with Yasgrid’s song and the magic which had flowed between them since their first meeting, their song carried with it something entirely new.

A language born from the union of Elvish and Stoneling tongues, which all who listened found they could understand and speak with ease.

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