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Side A – Nia

Was Nia a Stoneling? Could she lay any claim to that given that she only been living as one for half a year? Did she even speak their language or was her ability to understand them just some weird artifact of the switch she and Yasgrid did? Had she learned any of their history? What about their personal rituals? The taboos they wouldn’t tell outsiders about?

She was in love with a Stoneling woman. That she was completely certain of.

But had she ever approached love as a Stoneling had? Did she understand what it meant for Margrada to be pledging herself to someone like Nia?

Or was Nia just an Elf playing pretend?

With a few purposefully mistimed beats, Nia shook that idea out of her head.

She wasn’t lying about who she was.

Not anymore.

But could she claim to really be an Elf either anymore?

In the body she belonged in, she was never going to soar from tree to tree again. She’d given up her place in the harmonies of the forest, and her heart would never accept returning to them. 

And why should it? 

Had she ever really fit in her former life? The song had asked if she understood the history of the Stonelings, but could she even claim to know or really care about Elven history?

If she rejected the lessons of the Darkwood’s past as not applying to her, then was she right and wouldn’t that mean that she wasn’t really  an Elf at all?

As the drum under her hands carried Nia deeper into the dream, she began to see not just the things that Elves and Stonelings shared, but more and more of the things they didn’t, and maybe shouldn’t.

Should the Elves gain the boisterous volume of the Stonelings? Should the Stonelings gain the quiet whispers of the Elves? If they met in the middle, would both sides be losing something precious?

Nia didn’t stop her playing, but she did slow her beats.

Those weren’t her questions.

The song was asking her for answers, both around her own identity as well as the identity of the people who were joining in to play it.

And for once in her life, Nia felt like she had answers to give.

“Listen,” she spoke with words formed from the beat of her drum. “Listen to the Elves. Listen and find the gentle harmonies of their songs. Listen to the Stonelings. Listen and feel the crashing rumble of their drums. Listen to both and hear what I have heard.”

She gave the song, or the being behind it, or the entity the song was conjuring, a long moment to listen as she’d requested.

“Every time we’ve come together we’ve made a magic neither could on our own. If we’d stayed separate, if we’d insisted on remaining ‘pure’, as the gods imagined their creations should be, we never would have moved past the Elven Troubles or the torments of the Stoneling volcano gods.”

So you wish to your peoples to evolve into something new then? For Elf and Stoneling to sunder the gulf dividing them and rise as a higher unified people? the divine song asked, speaking not only to Nia but to every heart which was joined within it.

Side B – Yasgrid

King asking a question hadn’t been an attempt to solicit an answer from Yasgrid.

It had been a warning.

One Yasgrid had needed as another strand of the song was spun around her.

“All songs should end,” she said, speaking as much with her magic as anything else.

She wasn’t calling for an end yet though. It was too soon. First she needed to understand what she’d done, and who was bending her song into something she’d never intended it to be.

Her magic was still a part of the song, still an integral element of weaving together the dream that had ensnared to singers and players, which was both helpful and not.

On the helpful side, as a part of the song, Yasgrid had a natural awareness of its shape and substance. She could feel its flow and sense the areas where it was strong and weak.

Unhelpfully though, the depth of her involvement gave her so much connection to the song that detaching from it and finding separate strands of magic to view things from a fresh perspective proved to be far more difficult than she’d expected.

“If you can’t see the one you wish to search from from without, you may wish to look within,” King said, neither amusement nor encouragement in his voice, though Yasgrid still suspected both were there.

She wasn’t sure how ‘looking within’ would help her, or even how she was meant to do so, but lacking any other strong options, she closed her eyes and focused on her own breathing.

She couldn’t drown out the song. It was too loud and she was sitting at its center. What she could do though, was borrow serenity from Nia.

Nia was playing her Shatter drums. She was breaking reality and reforming it with every stroke of her hand. She was thundering louder than she could think.

And she was at peace.

Across the vast distance of the few feet which separated them, Yasgrid could feel Nia working within the song to find answers of her own, but for all the tumult of Nia’s playing, there was the peace of joy and purpose in her heart.

And that was all Yasgrid needed.

Just a place to stand where she could feel safe and welcomed.

“Let’s see who has joined us,” Yasgrid said, recalling threads of her magic which she hadn’t intended to cast into the song and sending them outwards in search of the presence which had become part of the song without an invitation.

She expected the thread she cast to pull her outward, but it carried her deeper into the song instead.

In a place lit only by the glow of her and Nia’s soul, she found herself standing back-to-back with a divine reflection of the woman she could one day be.

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