Movement 1: The Dream | Score I: A Ballad Before Iridia
Resonance | Key of Attunement
Tap.
A pause. She inhaled.
Tap. Tap.
“One.”
The sound arrived before the thought did.
One?
She exhaled.
There was a tapping noise, accompanied by the rhythmic hum of a faint, smoky voice. Each breath, every so often, stretched long enough to pierce the silence.
“Two.”
Click.
The sounds carrying the number were low, unhurried, aimed at no one in particular, and they had a ticking quality that wound up every so often.
“Three.”
Tap.
The interior of the wagon was dark, built from black hardwood grown pale with age, showing at the corners. Arched windows were cut into its walls in tall, gothic frames that let the moonlight fall through in narrow, almost cathedral-like slants.
It smelled of tallow, rust, wood, and the sour breath of children too hungry to dream.
In the shadows near the back, there was the main window. Large, imposing, pressing against the light shaft seeping from it. A man sat with his knees drawn up, a silver metal plate strapped over his kneecaps.
He kept another pause long enough to breathe in. Then again, the rhythm.
“Four.”
Tap. Click.
He was keeping a flowing cadence arranged as a count. He did so while signaling at every surface in the wagon, almost pointing at her too, every so often. His large back was cloaked as it rested against a crate of cracked pottery over the sounds of moving wheels.
Amadea had not noticed him before. Well, she had not noticed anything before, but something in her latched onto the count after her last memory with the boy, the seed, and the Ballad. The tapping metal sound latched onto the count as her hand found a set of tattered ropes she didn’t know were reaching for.
“Five.”
Tap.
She then noticed an ornate ring next, because the counting rhythm had led her eyes there. It was the source of the tapping. It sat heavily on the middle finger of that man, accompanied by the movements of his index finger as he was doing the counting.
The ring had a dull green band, veined faintly and interlaced with threads of light. Its center held a bright orange gemstone, drenched at the edges in the color of coal whose embers hadn’t decided whether to die or catch. Each time his ringed finger struck the silver kneepad, the vein-work of the gemstone showed itself.
It was captivating; it pulsed with every tap, like something breathing inside the fading crystal in a soft yellow-cream light. And each pulse landed at the exact same place in her chest — a low, physical anchor of both light and sound, dragging her one breath at a time back into a body she had half-forgotten was hers.
“Six.”
Tap.
Over a brief glance, the man noticed her noticing, alongside the growing fixation of her curious gaze on his finger. He did not stop counting; instead, he raised his other hand — scarred, calloused, the knuckles cracked from cold, with the rest of his arm swallowed by the sleeve of the same long, weathered, jet-black leather coat that cloaked beneath his back.
His hand made a steady motion, preparing his thumb to reach his middle finger.
“Seven.”
Click.
He snapped his fingers.
At that instant, the gem in his middle finger vibrated, once, twice, and a small flame kindled at the tip of his thumb. The spark was no larger than a struck matchhead, but it was undeniably real; its steady flame danced in the air, passing through it and outside the window. He then touched the flame to the stub of a candle in front of him, wedged into a knot of wood and wax.
The wagon’s interior bloomed gold.
Amadea’s eyes followed the sudden light. As it ignited, it gave off a strong scent of herbs and earth that mingled with the rust still hanging in the air.
Amadea sneezed.
The man saw her once, and after a soft chuckle, he lifted a second strange instrument from the inside of his coat — a plated circular device that reflected as if made of brass. It was likely once golden, but now its main part, a circular plate with curved sigils, had rusted, matching the color of everything else in the room.
He wedged it in his arm, swinging it faintly through a chain that lacked even more color than the rest of the device.
Click. Tap.
“One.”
The counting began again, but now to the rhythm of the pendulum. As the numbers progressed, he angled the trinket toward the sliver of moonlight bleeding through the arched shutter slats of the window behind him.
Amadea was disoriented, unsure where the numbers were headed. The man moved backward, as if trying to read something, until the device aligned with three light shafts that pointed directly at the center.
As the rays stood still on its surface, the device began to respond to the light seeping in — its center shifting from a pale, rusted gold to the same color as the spark she had seen earlier at his fingertips. For a brief moment, the hue aligned with the orange of his ring, before blending from a still-golden core to the deepening red of a rich crimson.
The entire color sequence unfolded with a clarity that revealed a deliberate change in a process she could not comprehend. Her curiosity piqued at the captivating artifact.
As the colors faded, the man murmured once.
“Warmth.”
Click.
Warmth. She realized what she was missing.
The thought arrived at the same time as the clicking.
A Beat.
Artus was not here.
Her eyes moved before the rest of her caught up, searching the dark for the shape that was last supposed to be beside her.
He was not near the front, where a table stood beside the blinds of another set of arched windows. He was not curled against the crates of the laterals where she sat, either.
She looked up toward the ceiling. Only a set of wall stairs leading to a metal hatch. The wood of the top contrasted with the light shafts that mixed hues of blue and orange from outside to inside, with the man and the candle. She followed the creaks that extended from their shadows, from the tight window in front of her, to the far back of the large opening where the man held the pendulum over the moonlight.
She was confused; her last memory was certainly with him.
She searched again in the middle layer, slower, certain that she had simply missed him. Instead of finding anyone, she saw the makeshift shelves scattered throughout the space, layered into rows of crates arranged in squares against the walls, like the shelving in a cellar. She saw a pair of weapons shaped as spears of varying lengths against the wood, and a coiled rope over more barrels.
Then, she heard a quiet cough coming from somewhere before an opening to another set of stairs leading downstairs on the opposite side of the room. She finally found someone, but it was not Artus — these were two more faces she had no names for. One small, wrapped in a blanket too thin for the cold, on a shoulder rising and the other falling. He tried to inhale in short pulls that kept catching on something wet in his chest before the air could finish the exhale.
The other face sat in silence beside it, half-awake, still, and offering nothing to the room at all. Not even the small mercy of sound that would prove he was still there.
Artus was not here.
The thought had fully settled now.
She didn’t know where she was either.
She turned back, grounding herself again toward the rhythm, to the man still counting obsessively to seven, looking for answers. She realized that the only way to understand where she was, and where Artus wasn’t, was to ask the only source in the room who didn’t look entirely like a ghost, and who might still know where and why they were moving.
“Twilight,” the man murmured, almost to himself, angling the pendulum one last degree toward the window. “At last.”
“Twilight?”
The word came out of her tongue before she could decide to speak. It was the first sound made in that room longer than either of them could count.
The man’s finger stopped mid-tap.
The sudden silence was enormous — a rhythm that dropped a held note mid-measure — for one strange, dizzying moment, she even wanted to reach out and start the count again herself, just to keep the only grounding tether the wagon had.
He turned his head slowly, as if moving too fast might scatter whatever had just happened.
“Yeah, now for the Prelude—”
He caught himself, the sentence dying in his throat. His eyes widened. “Wait. Repeat that again!?”
“Why are you counting to seven?” she asked, her voice soft yet dry from disuse. “Is that the twilight?”
“Ah!” His whole face cracked open with something between relief and disbelief. “Finally, you’re able to speak! A miracle by the Auric Aria’s grace!”
She only stared at him. She did not know what an Auric Aria was, and her face said so plainly enough that he winced and corrected himself.
“No — sorry. That’s the Phase we’re about to enter. I’m tracking time,” he stopped himself to keep the rhythm with his finger again. “Kind of. If this thing will work.”
He then lifted the pendulum, which was beginning to lose its red hues at the center, and angled it again toward the moonlight. He fixated on looking outside, upwards, to the skies that Amadea couldn’t see.
As he shifted positions, the metal caught the glow. It began to shine softly, gradually increasing to a pale yellow-cream light until it flashed white all at once. It was much brighter than the mellow orange of the candle he had lit, leaving faint, shimmering threads of gold in the air as an afterimage.
These ethereal threads were short-lived, but the device began to tick in unison as the room dimmed back to dark blue and the one source of flame. But one thing was different now: the crimson on the middle plating of the device had become the same yellow-cream as the vein-work in his ring.
“Finally, Luminance!” he exclaimed in relief.
Amadea flinched at the sudden light, then scurried hastily toward the window behind her. She snuck her head outside the blinds. She looked up, and the slight threads that lingered in the air looked exactly like the constellations painted against the dark sky.
She then looked back at him, knowing both of them were watching the same sliver of the moon, and asked in a perplexed stutter.
“D-Did you capture the stars?”
He let a slight grin at her.
“Yes. No. Well, not exactly — half yes, half no. It’s something like that.”
He kept his finger tapping under his breath even as he answered, now with the rest of his fingers tapping against his knee in the gaps between words.
“This thing is a Celestial Astrolabe. It’s an old departure gift meant to track the symphony of the skies.”
He continued in a ragged voice while pointing directly at her with his colorful ring. His eyes were restless. “It has a rhythm of its own, and it’s what I use to count children like you. And the Auric Heptacode.”
“What is an Auric Heptacode?” she quickly replied, confused. She couldn’t quite grasp half of the terms he kept saying as he continued to explain.
He paused. His counting stopped entirely.
“It’s…”
A Beat.
“A-ah… Well.” He exhaled. “It’s a long story. But you can think of it as the seven golden threads that keep whatever still remains of this world together.”
She kept staring at him, unconvinced, unsatisfied.
“Yeah, I know. It’s complicated.” He almost smiled in a tired, crooked way.
“So, how about we make a promise instead. If you’re still alive to see the end of this Echo, I’ll make sure to explain to you everything about where these numbers—”
Thump.
A loud hit against the wooden wall interrupted him.
“Corvin.”
A warm yet piercing woman’s voice cut sharply from the front of the main window, behind him. “You shouldn’t be so cruel and heartless with a child. ‘If you’re still alive,’ for the Aria’s sake.”
“Ignore him, kid.” A second velvety voice, another man — lower, amused, mocked. “He’s just our grim, and slightly paranoid, Threat Cartographer that can’t help but deflect his terrible abilities as a teacher. Don’t take him seriously.”
Amadea couldn’t see either of them, but she heard both clearly.
Corvin — she had a name for him now — opened his mouth to argue the point further, but a violent sound interrupted the three of them.
The coughing of one of the two nameless children in front of her rose into something harsh and prolonged, wet and tearing, cutting through the moment like the blade that cut through his thin blanket.
Everyone stilled. The boy had coughed blood on the dark floor.
It was barely visible, but the metallic smell was undeniable. The second velvety voice interrupted the silence before it was unbearable.
“What Corvin means is we’ll set up camp, and once we’re out of immediate danger, there’ll be time for stories.”
Crack.
A whip echoed in the front, followed by the low guttural sound of an animal. Amadea felt the vibration in her chest, and soon the wheels of the caravan stopped moving.
Corvin was the first to stand up, his imposing figure against the shadow of the candle that showed the rest of his clothing. His black coat was long, with stuffed fur inside, but it was as weathered and ragged as his stained hands.
He had a full beard and long hair as tangled and messy as hers, but it didn’t share the same silver color. His expression was vacant and focused, still restless in weary eyes. His hands weren’t twitching to the rhythm of the count to seven anymore, but his middle finger and the ring continued to move in small spasms.
The most distinct feature, however, was the lower half of the coat. It wasn’t visible in the dark when he rested against the crates, but it quickly became the signature visual of Corvin.
From his hip downwards, the black leather was interrupted by a colorful mosaic of patches from several types of clothing. On every seam, the coat had been knit with the same weight the man had in his unreadable eyes.
The coat screamed of layer upon layer of rotting history.
Amadea was visibly curious about his patchwork coat, but she was scared of him and of his grim remarks. She would rather keep silent; he was terrible at explaining anyway.
Corvin then helped the other children get up and went farther down the stairs. He came back and offered a hand to Amadea, but she got up by herself. She felt the hardwood move alongside each step, making a cracking noise that secured her footing.
As she descended the stairs, the lower floor swallowed the light whole.
Where the upper level had been all moonlight through hollow gothic arches across the blinds of windows and shelves upon shelves, this other space pressed close and low. It had a large table in the center, and ceiling beams strung with drying herbs that had long since given up trying to smell like anything but charred smoke, yet still glimmering with soft azure sparks against a silver stem.
On the left side, beneath the stairs, she found three more nameless faces; there were more children here that Corvin was tending to, but she didn’t know any of these people.
“Where was Artus?” The thought invaded her mind.
As she continued scanning the environment, she noticed a pot hung over a small, banked fire built into an iron cradle bolted to the floor. It seemed as though the makeshift parts of the caravan’s survival instincts intersected with someone’s careful concession to a wagon that was never meant to hold flame, and still insisted on carrying food.
But before she could survey the entire place, Corvin and the rest kept moving. Amadea decided to follow the others toward the entrance at the back of the room.
“The answer had to be outside,” she thought to herself.
As she braced, the heavy door swung open onto a wooden ramp lowered against the dark.
A chilling breeze rushed in immediately, sharper than the tallow-and-rust warmth she’d grown used to, but carrying with the wind the amber, mineral smell of a night with no roof over it.
A slender figure stood at the base of the ramp, waiting.
He was tall in the way that made the doorway look smaller than it was, a hand already extended before she’d taken her first step down. It had another gem attached to the back of the forearm in its gauntlet. It was a clear, prismatic pink, unlike Corvin’s ring, and it had no patterns, only the same vibrant running color.
The figure also had a coat, though it was shorter than Corvin’s, cut for movement rather than presence. It was devoid of any colorful patches, yet it had a distinct dark teal hue, and even in the dark, she could see the faint crystalline sheen along his knuckles, like frost that had decided to stay.
A sliver of hair was almost permanently caught in the middle of his face.
“Easy there,” his voice breathless, on the same low, velvety tone she had heard from the front of the caravan. It was the man who had mocked Corvin without showing himself. “That wood’s slicker than it looks. Even for someone who clearly doesn’t need help.”
A small, easy grin, aimed at the fact that she hadn’t taken Corvin’s hand either.
She hesitated at the top of the ramp, one hand pressed flat against the doorframe.
“Kay,” he offered, when she didn’t move and didn’t ask. “That’s me. Figured you’d want a name to go with the face, since apparently you’re handing those out to people now.”
A glance back toward the wagon’s interior, where Corvin’s silhouette was still crouched over the other children.
“The man’s earned quite the reputation in there already, hasn’t he?”
She took the ramp on her own, her boots finding the grooves worn into the wood by however many children had gone down this same path before her. When she reached the bottom, Kay’s hand didn’t close around her arm the way she’d braced for it — it hovered near her shoulder instead, close enough to catch her if the ground decided to be unkind, and still far enough that she never had to feel caught.
As she stepped outside, she finally felt the real change of temperature on her nose.
The air was cold, immediate, slightly dry, but oddly purifying. It was devoid of the dust that had been accumulating in the upper level of the wagon, and the first scent that caught her attention was the immediate tinge of the fading grasses. There were rings of golden dust that fought to a standstill the wasteland in patches of half-lush, half-barren regions.
She gazed at the immediate clearing, a crescent of large trees whose empty branches swung at the rhythm of the chilly waves that grazed her cheeks.
Amadea recognized this scene; it was eerily similar to the one on the outskirts of the third river crossing.
That was when Kay noticed the shaking.
It ran through her in small, tight pulses, her shoulders drawn up toward her ears, her breath coming shallow and quick in the cold. He crouched slightly, bringing himself down to her eye level, his expression losing its easy humor.
“Hey. Look at me for a moment.” He waited until their eyes met. “That’s just cold, right? Not—”
He didn’t finish the sentence the way Corvin might have; he was slightly more theatrical than blunt and unflinching. He left room in it for her to answer either way.
A Beat.
“Nothing out here’s going to get you. Not with all three of us standing between it and you. That’s not me being dramatic, either — you can ask Corvin how bad I am at acting out emotions; he’ll have a whole speech about it.”
She breathed in again, then grabbed his coat from behind until she found her foot solid on the patches of dry grass where she stopped, idling.
A few paces off, past the ring of crates being unloaded, the last adult, a woman wearing a leather cap with wings on its sides, was already building the fire.
She was kneeling in the dirt with quick, economical movements, stacking kindling into a careful lattice before striking flint against the steel of a knife. The first sparks caught, small and orange, and she cupped her hands around them, coaxing the flame like Corvin, but without the ornate ring. She was patient until it steadied into something that she could hold.
“See that?” Kay tilted his head toward it. “Her name is Elaine, and she’s got a fire going faster than most people settle down to boil water. Another minute, tops, and you won’t remember what cold felt like.”
He straightened, offering his hand again — not to help her walk this time, just an offer, easy to refuse. “C’mon. Nothing to be afraid of here. Just heat, and stories, and a few terrible jokes, in that order.”
He let out a deep breath.
“We’re all truly grateful to see that you’re finally responding to us.”
This time, she took it.
The fire had grown by the time they reached it.
Tall enough to throw long shadows against the side of the wagon, and Elaine glanced up as they approached, her eyes flicking, vacant but hopeful. She exchanged a gaze with Kay, as if that was enough to communicate everything.
From up close, Amadea could see that she also carried her own gem. It was on one of the sides of the winged leather hat. It was the soft yellow-cream light of Corvin’s vein-work ring, but it also had a distinct vein-work of its own, flowing across teal and green in patterns that looked like a snowflake.
Elaine was the only one who wore that gem in her head, and Kay was the only one who didn’t have any geometrical pattern in it.
As she saw Amadea looking at her hat, Elaine briefly posed with both of her arms upward before she helped the girl with her still-trembling hands.
She also wore a coat like Kay’s, but it was light brown and asymmetrical at the ends of its tail from her hips downwards. She was the only adult wearing it open, with the edges showing white; she had a red shirt and large sets of more snowy fluff inside that coiled all the way up to her neck.
Her attire was more fur than it was leather.
She let her hands down, softening as Amadea was inspecting her with something unhurried and kind.
“You like my hat? I’m glad! These wings are of the singers that always scout the path ahead,” Elaine remarked proudly, patting a flattened patch of the white fur that looked like the scarf of her coat.
She invited Amadea to a spot beside her, close enough to the flames to matter. “Sit. Cold makes liars of all of us — makes you think you’re more scared than you are.”
Amadea paused, her gaze drawn to the half-ground where the tall grass gave way to the barren earth, a stark division between the patches that remained and those who had died in the wasteland under their own uncertainty and sense of loss.
She decided to sit as she found a spot between the logs and rested against two rocks the size of her, as if the stability they provided was the threshold the landscape embodied.
As she poised in a cozy spot between them, Elaine moved to set up a makeshift field kitchen.
Amadea was mesmerized by the dancing fire as Elaine prepared strips of dried grass on the mound near the ground, mixing them with a pouch of fronds that glimmered silver and blue — the same colors as the burnt ones by the iron cradle of the caravan.
Behind the campfire, Corvin came down the ramp last again. He had a few more remaining children ahead of him with the tired patience of a man who had done this every night for longer than he would admit. In between tasks, he caught Kay’s eye over the fire and gave a short nod — some private accounting between them, tallying who was accounted for and who wasn’t.
He then carried out a large crate and lowered himself near the flames with a groan that belonged to someone twice his apparent age.
After them, the last silhouette appeared in the shadow of the ramp.
Finally, it was Artus.
He had been in a different cart than hers. He instantly noticed that Amadea blinked at the sight of him. He struck his naive, signature, defiant pose before crossing the firelight toward her.
He crouched in front of her, close enough that the fire caught the eagerness and anxiety in his face before he vocalized a single word.
“Hey, do you still remember my name?” he asked, fidgeting his fingers in preparation, like he already half-expected the static to have taken it back from her.
“Artus,” she said. “The keeper of the seed of the Violet Grove.”
His whole face broke open, delight overtaking every other feature at once.
“You remembered!” He yelled, almost too loud for the quiet camp.
Drawing even a brief, tired glance from Corvin that he didn’t notice or didn’t care about.
“You actually — that’s, that’s the whole thing, beaten finally, right here! I knew you were the real Empress. And the static doesn’t get to keep a single thing it took. Not while me, or you, got something to say about it!”
He straightened, suddenly trying to be serious, though the grin refused to leave fully. “Remember this one, okay? Not the words — the shape of it. Because someday you’re going to hear this Ballad again, and I want you to know it was for you first. And I was the singer who performed it!”
Amadea was unsure what to say; her tongue was about to mumble something, but Artus didn’t wait for her to answer.
He dashed, jumping to the other side of the camp, and crossed to where the two nameless children from the room before sat wrapped in a thin blanket. He stood by the side of the one who had been coughing, now lying quieter but no less wet. He gave him something from his pouch.
He then came back to Amadea, climbed onto the top of a flat rock that lay beside her just beneath the fire’s touch, cradling a stick, and claiming it was a lute against his chest, eyes alight.
He cleared his throat, glanced once at the coughing boy, once at Amadea, and began.
“This one,” he declared grandly, “is the silent chord before any of the Mythical Virtuoso. The very first, and the origin of the legend of Resonance, bathed in the gilded white of Laureated Marble, in the far west of the Great Expanse.”
A Beat.
“And for this special occasion, this Ballad, and its entire performance, is in honor of Amadea, the Violet Empress!”
Artus was pointing at her, presenting the co-star of his show.
She felt everyone’s gaze in the circle.
At first, it felt like warmth. It was the first time anyone had said her name out loud, yet the warmth quickly turned to heat, and the heat was flooding her face, up her neck, and down her hands. It became suffocating.
She dropped her eyes, trying to curl inward. As Artus announced the Ballad, he also revealed her name to the entire caravan.
“Hmm, so ‘Amadea.’” Elaine said before anyone, winking from afar. “That’s a beautiful name. Why would you keep it a secret?”
“‘Violet Empress,’ huh. First time I’ve heard that royalty.” Kay uttered.
Her eyes glistened; she was surprised. Hearing her be named more than once made her feel conflicted. It was undeniably joy, but it also had to be something else, and perhaps that was the whole point: that incredibly weird mix of emotions rose as tension in her skin.
But if she’s feeling embarrassed, that means she can truly feel again. And against the intrusive static of grief, that’s all that matters. For her, the world truly began in that moment onwards.
However, before she could burrow deeper into the ground to escape the feeling and the conversation, Artus yelled another command again.
“Corvin! Get up, old man. Use those arts of yours and give me Resonance! I’m sure you know this one; it's pretty famous!”
Corvin tried to stay welded to the crate, jaw set against the firelight, but a defiant voice rose against him at once.
“Yes! Corvin!” Elaine laughed, clapping, sharp as a conductor’s cue. “Show us you still remember in that repertoire where your spark is buried.”
He groaned as though someone had asked him to drag the whole caravan uphill by his teeth.
“Corvin! Corvin! Corvin!” Kay called from near the wagons; he was not in the campfire, but undeniably present on the stage, half-daring him, half-laughing.
As one voice became two, two became many, and as some of the children joined Kay’s chorus, they were all chanting ‘Corvin!’ until he couldn’t ignore them anymore.
“Fine,” he muttered, levering himself upright with the help of the crate and a reluctant knee that reflected the dancing gale of the fire. “But I am only setting the baseline. No spectacles of Spellweaving tonight. We’re conserving any fuel.”
The ring on his middle finger was already lit with the same ember color as the campfire cinders, the vein work pulsing slowly in his skin.
He touched it once, lightly, twice, almost as if asking permission in a pose with his elbow upward.
The Pulse answered.
His hand movement was followed by the sound of chimes echoing from nowhere, rhythmic, almost too harmonized with the sound of wind, which almost began to howl until it became a single clear note, and then light.
A clean ray burst from the ring in a contained flare, and from that flare, something else condensed in mid-air. It was a cloud of gold-amber Luminance, with threads folding inward to white until they found a spine, a body, and a wooden throat.
It was the same spectacle as the celestial astrolabe had done earlier when catching the stars in moonlight, but this time it wasn’t shimmering with slight threads. Instead, these strings settled in light and became an oak-worn cello that stood where there had only been air.
Amadea forgot to breathe.
The thing was almost her size, dark and scarred, its curves keeping a memory of all the hands that had held it before tonight. The instrument appeared as if it had seen the blazes of war because Corvin most certainly had.
Amadea glanced at Artus and found that his eyes were already fixed on the apparition. They were twin stars bright with the same intensity that the ring and the crimson plate in the celestial astrolabe had held. It had caught Artus in the moonlight.
Corvin lowered himself back onto the crate, anchoring the cello’s endpin into the dirt with a noisy stubbornness characteristic of his antics.
As it was anchored in the earth, he raised the bow, took in a breath that seemed to come from deeper than his lungs, and glanced toward Elaine.
“Set a cymatics field,” he said quietly. “Just in case. The last thing we need are starving eyes closing in on us.”
Elaine had already been laying out strips of dried grass around the fire in careful arcs, dusting them from the pouch that glittered when it caught the flame.
At his words, she shifted from preparation to performance.
“On it,” she confirmed.
“Artus,” Corvin gasped, bow hovering just above the strings. “Get ready.”
He raised his hand. The gem in his finger pulsed in sync as it signaled the time.
“Three Beats.”
He drew the bow.
“Two Beats.”
Artus held high the lute-stick.
“One Beat.”
Click.
The note that emerged was low enough that Amadea felt it in her chest, as it moved through her ribs before she heard it.
It rose slowly, a hum thickening into a line, steady, and then leaning into a progression that gathered weight like the caravan itself taking on speed. It shifted, twice, into two blending notes as it began strengthening to the pace of the bow.
The baseline walked from mellow to melancholic, then into something brighter pressed against grief, each chord resolving but never quite settling into a clean break or a home tone. Amadea could feel the music resonating in her body, and perhaps even deeper, the vibration reached from her chest into her soul.
“So the music,” Amadea thought to herself, with her fingers tightening into one another. “That is Resonance.”
Artus waited for the baseline to complete its first slow cycle, then lifted his chin, his lips set on the slow hum of his voice catching the firelight before his words did.
Amadea searched for Elaine; she saw her settled opposite the fire, her eyes halfway closed, as she hummed like Artus. It wasn’t a song at first so much as a held tone, a single note threaded through her throat and the air between the fire.
Then the gem on the left side of her winged hat began to glow, pulsing in its white signature color.
Her fingers lifted, drawing an invisible figure over the flames to the rhythm of the cello — slow circles, crossing, and patient sigils traced on nothing. But where her hand moved, the air itself seemed to thicken, as if she were the conductor of the melody about to unfold.
Amadea blinked, thinking it was smoke, until she realized smoke did not usually form a veil.
A soft, shimmering skin settled around the campfire, thin as blown glass and visible in prismatic ripples only when the flames leaned against it. The light broke across it in muted waves, the sound of the crackling wood dulling by degrees.
She felt it before she understood it — the way the outside sounds went quiet, as if someone had wrapped the camp in wool. And as the world went silent, Elaine’s gem shifted to showcase its teal glow of the vein-work within.
Only the cello’s breath and Artus’ soft practice with the lute-stick remained sharp.
She thought this was what Corvin had called a cymatics field earlier, a barrier as thin as a veil, only of listening to the Resonance of the instrument, not of stone.
But before she could make more sense of it, Artus began.