Movement 1: The Dream | Score I: A Ballad Before Iridia
Resonance | Key of Attunement
“Amadea,” her mother had said.
The name that would become a crown, the weight that she would spend the rest of her life trying to deserve.
Four syllables and a cruel joke abandoned to a world of dying static; whether it was a command or hope, it didn’t matter. The silence opened before either.
A sudden cascade of explosions flared right where her mother should have been.
The cinders shook the tail of the cart. Then light — too much light — and the memory suddenly stopped to nothing but the ringing sound in her ears.
For a fractured moment, the blinding light etched the shadow of a reaching arm into the wet cobblestone outside as a dark, permanent stain on the ruined bank.
Are there even Beats anymore?
She couldn’t answer.
There should have been a seventh, but she couldn’t count anymore. The dissonance was still in her ears, distorting the edges of everything in white noise as she clutched her knees into herself.
The last grip of the warmth of her mother’s hand had gone cold in hers somewhere in the space between the moment she had turned to a cascade of light and the next moons she cannot account for.
She felt only old, cracked wood, until even her fingers became numb from clutching it. The violent flash kept warping all her senses. It consumed everything but a faint, persistent smell.
Sweetness: faint, intoxicating, obscene.
A single, pale ember drifted through the splintered slats of the cart, landing on her numb knuckle. It glowed a faint, sickly amber before dying into chalky dust, leaving behind only that heavy, floral rot.
It was the kind of smell found in wild meadows, evoking the impossible gardens of the amber fields somewhere far beyond home. This scent was linked only to the sound of her mother humming wordlessly, low and tuneless — a fragrance mirrored by the way people hum when they have forgotten they are making any sound at all.
It was never supposed to be the smell of the dying.
Never the smell of corpses that had learned to dance. Never the fragrance of bodies convulsing in a climbing euphoria, until the air itself went rigid with static, until the stillness bloomed into a bright, violent flash.
The smell always came first. Then the coughing. Then the dancing.
Then detonation.
And the smell was here again; it snapped her back to reality, for a moment. That same smell made all of the strangers frantic.
Someone shouted for something to move. Someone else shouted over it, and beneath both a third voice had stopped forming words altogether. Chaos, absolute, and desperate until three more lights broke at once along the ridge, amber, silver, crimson, close enough together that the sound arrived as a single massive burst instead of three — the same unison her mother had gone still in. All at once.
The second burst of light shifted all color to white, only deepening the dissonance plaguing Amadea's senses.
The cart lurched hard enough to throw her against the crate behind her. Somewhere close, a woman was still shouting the same name over and over, as if repetition alone could hold reality in place.
The sudden movement made her realize there were more children with her, or at least seemed to be until their faces blurred. A crying face beside her folded into another crying face, and she could not tell — did not try to tell — whether she was watching a single kid weep twice, or two children grieve as one, whether the sound belonged to a boy or a girl or simply to the cart itself; all the details faded.
The static sound was at its most overwhelming. Amadea let the faces, the fire, and the silhouettes all blend into a single shadow that dissolved into it.
It was a pure, consuming white fog until everything went blank.
The next time Amadea opened her eyes, she was in a different cart now.
That much she knew because the wood beneath her fingers was rougher, splintering against her nails with every rut the wheels made over the crystallized craters of the road. The smell of tallow and wet, freezing iron had replaced the smell of sweetness.
Through the gaps in the floorboards and slit of the windows, the charred, golden dust of the wasteland rushed by in a hypnotic blur, painting dead, gray grasses in a sickly, unnatural sheen over the landscape of black trees.
Yet the static was always underneath, and all of the voices had ceased entirely.
All was a bygone memory, filled with the rattling of light, only anchored to the weight in her hands.
Several moons passed this way, clouded, though she could not have told anyone how many.
Every so often she remembers crying, when the detonations were at their most intense. They never cared for her. They always came regardless, in the wake of the euphoric, dissonant screams of more shadows and the void they left behind.
The cascades of explosions turned bright and soundless in the deafening instant before the sound arrived. It was lightning — always silent until it wasn’t. Such silence bloomed so bright it became the noise that made her ears ring even more.
The shower of explosions was always stuttering bursts of deep yellow, mellow orange, and, at its worst, wounded crimson — always accompanied by the long, pale shimmer trailing each light down to falling, fading cinders.
But at some point even the cascades dissolved into humming static.
Amadea became still and quiet in all the ways it makes a grieving child useful. She ate when food reached her hands. She slept when the cart jolted enough. Until somewhere in all that gray repetition, a voice had started, and unlike everything else, it did not fade back into the noise.
It was a naive voice, a few moons older than her, two lunar cycles at most — a tone old enough to carry a knife, yet young enough to still believe that same rusted blade meant something.
It spoke as though the world might one day owe him an answer.
He talked — well, he had talked as she would later understand — since before she noticed him reminiscing about a family that was taken by the Great Plague. Perhaps once he mentioned a neighbor who could not feed him either. Perhaps he spoke of other things, too.
She could never recall the details; none of them had stayed. Only the shape of them remained.
For her, it was all static. The caravan. His voice. The Phases in-between. She had existed in them without thinking, without arriving anywhere. At some point, he had even stopped speaking of his past. She could not have said when.
But he wouldn’t stop talking. His voice was stubborn enough to shift to other things, as though reaching to pull her back from the cascades of the violent flashes.
“You’re thinking too loud,” he yelled at her one night, close to her ear.
It was somewhere in the mouth of an arch pass while the distant lights continued appearing in the valley below.
The basin was a jagged maw of shattered spires and collapsed bridges, standing as a graveyard of architecture swallowed by the pitch black, with only firelight over the rubble in stark, violent contrast.
“I’m not thinking,” she said.
“That’s the problem. You’re never thinking about anything!”
A Beat, for the first time in many moons.
Then another.
“You only ever freeze!” he continued, annoyed.
But she couldn’t answer him. Amadea didn’t know how to explain that thinking required having something to think about, and that her mind had been overrun by dissonance and static.
It, too, had become an ashen, barren place where all memories went to die.
The boy sat alongside her.
He stayed silent for a long time — long enough that she thought he had given up like everyone else. Perhaps he should have.
But he never did. His voice broke the silence and spoke again; it held a familiar, almost dangerous tone. Softer and just as intoxicating as the smell of the amber rot of flowers. It was a voice she had not heard since the weight of her mother’s hand went still: the tender voice of a consoling secret he hadn’t told anyone else.
“There is a place,” he said, “where the trees grow violet.”
It was almost dusk.
His face was half-lit by the faraway fires. She looked at him with the disbelief reserved for the delusion of fools and poets — and at the end of the world, she wasn’t sure which was worse.
“A Ballad,” he insisted. “From a singer who came through my village, eight moons before the Luminant Rot drove everyone insane! At the very least when no one was screaming about the light of the plague yet.”
“He was old, a little bent, walking with a curved back while playing a lute, missing a string. He couldn’t have cared less. He sang for three days straight without ever repeating himself. Most of it I’ve forgotten, but there was one verse, one verse I never could—”
He paused, looked distant, searching within the memory.
She almost said something. She didn’t.
“He sang about a tree with violet bark. A tree with silver-white branches that swayed lightly in the moonlight. A tree beneath which there was a garden where flowers could not die because the roots drank from a silver spring so clear it became liquid glass, until it pooled to a deep blue with golden motes that mirrored the sparkling stars of the cosmos.”
The boy’s voice fell to something almost reverent.
“He sang about the most beautiful place in all the lands.”
“Singers lie,” she finally interrupted him.
“Sometimes. But they also remember,” he replied.
His gaze turned and locked with hers.
Their eyes met for a moment akin to an eternity. A gentle, fleeting exchange, but in that sliver of time she saw something she had no name for — an ephemeral spark she would later learn to recognize as hope. The dangerous kind of hope.
All in a single look, time froze in faith, honesty, and even the warmth that would keep Amadea alive even when she felt she had no right to keep breathing.
“Someone saw it. Then someone else put it into a song. That means it exists,” he said as time resumed anew, grounding her in the present. “Singers remember!”
“Singers remember…”
She stood quiet at those words for a moment.
“Even so,” she said at last. “What does it matter?”
She opened her hand toward the valley below, gesturing at the fading crimson and the shimmers still drifting alone through the pitch black in snowflake patterns. “We’re here. They’re there.”
A Beat.
“Everything I knew or loved was there… too… once.”
The cold reached her jaw at the intonation of those words. Her face was wet.
She did not wipe those tears. She didn’t think to — they had arrived the way the cold always arrived: intrusive, from somewhere outside her. The tears were the weight that lived deep within her chest without ever asking.
“Is there any point in loving anything that can be taken?” she shouted to the void creeping at her chest in desperation.
The boy fell silent.
She let out a sharp gasp and turned to a low, defeatist voice anew.
“It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters…”
“No," he reclaimed his breath, defiant, “That’s where you’re wrong.”
Looking directly at her eyes, he caught her gaze that was turning inward again before she could curl into her knees. He held both of her shoulders firmly, and with a strong grip, he declared:
"It does matter because we’re going to find it!”
She almost laughed.
She was starving, orphaned twice over, and the boy beside her had lost his mind before she could make sense of her own. He had been taken by a singer’s delusions, a broken poem, and their fairytale Ballads.
But he wasn’t laughing.
“We’re going to find it,” he repeated. “And when we do, we’re going to build something there. A city. A home. A place where no one who ever had to run will have to run again.”
“That’s so stupid,” she said. Her voice came out flat.
Her tears kept flowing, quiet and uninvited, and she let them. There was no point in stopping what she hadn’t started.
“Probably,” he agreed, finally releasing her. “But it’s better than sitting here waiting to die.”
From a burnt, oversized coat, he drew a weathered leather pouch and tipped a seed into his palm. It was a hard, almost crystalline fragment that caught the ambient dying fires of the wasteland in sharp refractions of pale rose against his skin.
He held it up between them.
“I found this the night the singer came through,” he said. “Next to him.”
“I don’t know what tree it’s from. But I’m going to plant it.” He turned it over in his fingers. “When I find the Violet Grove.”
“I promise! Even if it means going to the end of the world!”
He held the colored seed as though it were the last treasure in a broken land. When he finished, he put it back in the pouch and returned the pouch to his coat.
A ridiculous performance, she thought.
And yet, from that single, delusional act of defiance, something moved in her. Something had pierced the static, and it was the first night Amadea felt anything other than the hollow cold clawing at where her heart should have been.
She had no name for it. She only knew it was undeniably hers.
It was a novel desire, a minuscule thing barely enough to hold. But the cold shifted slightly to make room for it, and that was enough.
She noticed, distantly, that her face had dried. Just as those tears had flowed on their own, they now left only the shadows of fading rivers beneath her crystalline eyes.
The light in the valley below had dimmed. Neither of them moved.
“What is your name?” he finally asked.
That question pierced her, entering clean and deep, like a blade finding a wound that had never fully closed.
For many moons, she had lived as if she had none. Just “girl,” “orphan,” “child,” “you there,” but never a question beyond that. No one had asked. So her name had remained the only word she had kept for herself — silent, held in the dusk, as a distant memory for when she needed it most.
Amid the quiet after he asked, her memory stirred.
Not clearly, not all at once. Only a voice in the fever-dark — her mother’s voice, still alive, saying her name as though it stood as both prayer and command, before the weight holding her hand at the river crossing became absence.
She considered it now, the weight of it — and found the word already at the edge of her mouth before she had finished deciding.
She was willing to change the fate of the story.
“Amadea,” she said, and the word felt older than every ruin around them.
The boy went still.
A Beat.
“I — I know that name,” he mumbled, fiddling with his fingers.
“Was it…? Yes, it must have been one of the Old Ballads…”
“Yes! I remember!” The brightness came back at once. “A queen, or an empress — the titles change depending on who’s telling it. But it’s always the same legend. A regal woman who kept a kingdom alive and breathing long enough for it to become something real—”
“That’s not me,” she frowned, interrupting him.
“Not yet,” he replied, shifting to a reverent tone.
“Ah. At last, Empress Amadea.”
“I am Sir Artus.”
“And I promise you! One day, I will be the greatest knight you have ever known.”
She stared at him: at his proud grin, at the heroic pose he had struck as if he were the king of his own invented delusion, kneeling on a Ballad before a queen.
She didn’t know whether to be baffled, moved, or something in between, nameless.
Why had her name affected him so deeply? She couldn’t understand it. It was irrational. How could this boy — Artus — look at her pitiful state in the tattered clothes, a dying mind, and act as if she had emerged from a madman’s poem and forgotten it all?
But his absurd sincerity made her smile, for the first time in longer than she could measure.
She pulled her knees to her chest and looked back at the distant valley.
Artus turned, mirroring her movements on the tail of the caravan, settling next to her.
From the distance, a loud sound arrived.
He followed her stare as she was caught in something like wonder. If not for the destruction that every detonation meant, it could almost be called beautiful.
The cascades of light that had taken everything began again.
One by one they all ignited with a whistle.
A whistle that used to be someone.
Boom
The first detonation opened at the low center of the valley in a deep amber crown. Wide, rhythmic, slow. Its petals unfurled in outward twinkles of light in a perfect ring before the whole shape shuddered and shed itself downward in long, pale threads that dangled in the dark like the memory it represented.
Away from the ground turned to cinders, the lights were comforting in their low, resonant thud, reaching her chest before her ears. A sound that came late and soft, almost gentle.
Almost.
Boom
Then another. Pale gold, with a tighter crown — a sudden, sharp star of light which blossomed in geometric patterns until it became a sphere. It held its shape longer than the first, every filament distinct, ordered, radiating clean and bright before the edges drifted into slow, glittering arcs.
The shockwaves moved through the bedrock, shivering up the iron wheels of the caravan and the coat draped over her knees.
The sound resonated throughout her whole body.
She looked at Artus. His face was lit in amber, then gold, then rose — cycling with the valley. For a moment, looking at him, she saw the color of candle flame.
She felt something she had no better word for than warmth.
Boom
More lights rose from the ground all at once. Gold, cream, climbing together on their fire upward, their bursts colliding at the peak, gold threaded through pale white, the trails of each falling through the light of the others in crescent paths whistling in soft pops as they vanished.
The valley caught it all. What remained on the rooftops. The low line of the ridge. The road that led inward. All of it amber, then rose, then cold pale gold fading to crimson.
Artus drew a quiet breath.
“Static Criticality,” he said.
Then, low and almost to himself, he murmured a line — words she didn’t recognize, half-sung, half-said, the cadence of something elder than either of them, perhaps older than the refuges below that had become embers, whispers, and light.
It was certainly the fragment of another Ballad, its words worn flat from being remembered as many times as there were sparks on the ground below.
She didn’t ask which one.
The sounds of his voice came late, woven into the valley’s sounds. A soft percussion. A low thud. A dry crack. A long, resonant roll that faded before it finished.
They watched until the valley was almost quiet.
The caravan rocked gently on the road. Her shoulder knocked against his on a deep rut. Neither of them adjusted. His silhouette passed through the dark of another archway. A tight silver burst scattered into a hundred individual sparks, each trailing its own brief comet-tail halfway through the air.
Before the end of the tunnel, one light became wide amber again, its crown so broad it tilted against the dark above, long pale threads drifting down through the silver still falling beneath. Both lights landed together on the ruins below, overlapping what once had been walls.
“Do you think anyone is still down there?” she finally broke the silence.
“No,” Artus declared. Then, lower in watery eyes: “I don’t think so.”
She nodded once. Said nothing. Watched a new pale thread dissolve before it reached the ground.
She pulled his coat over her knees and held it there.
Artus reached into his coat. She heard the small sound of the leather pouch — there, then gone — just the feel of it, his hand closing around it for a moment before he let it go.
The caravan wheel struck a stone, a single shudder through the wood, through her palms, up into her wrists.
She looked at Artus.
She thought about her mother saying her name in the fever-dark. The way it had sounded — both prayer and command, as if the syllables themselves were worth her last breath.
She had tried not to think about that memory for a long time.
Perhaps it was him. The seed. The half-remembered Ballad spoken in the air of a burning valley, offered as a prayer. The way he had called her Empress without laughing, and meant it — or meant something close enough that the difference hadn’t mattered.
Perhaps it was only that someone had asked in a voice full of Consonance.
She watched the last colors in the valley. Pale, vivid red embers still drifted through it, whispering before they reached the ground in their soft popping sound.
Then that too folded inward.
The last of the crimson lights was going out. The valley below had settled into the same dark as every place reduced to a wasteland, where the static had once been deafeningly loud.
The wheel’s rut, the coat over her knees, Artus’ shoulder against hers, all dissolving into the same formless dark that swallowed everything eventually.
“Amadea…” she mumbled.