Movement 1: The Dream | Score I: A Ballad Before Iridia
Resonance | Key of Attunement
“Act I: The Gold of Silent Stars,” Artus introduced, grabbing a scrap of cloth as a cape and prop beside the stick he called a lute.
The crowd of children watched in awe, wide-eyed, as an ocean of sparkles flickered in a dance against the camp’s firelight.
The oldest formed a crescent at the back, deep as the sea floor, their coats pulled to their chins, dissolving into a foam of thin blankets. The middle children swayed to the tempo of the bare branches at the desolate tree line, caught between the chill beyond the veil and the campfire’s heat. The youngest broke forward, their faces tilted upward in anticipation as their curiosity shifted the faces lit by the popping cinders.
Kay slipped in from beyond the cymatics field, its prismatic sparks swirling thin like smoke around him as he passed. He leaned back against a crate, arms folded, smirking. Corvin kept his eyes shut, holding the baseline steady in the perfect focus of his movements, the ring on his finger pulsing to the rhythm’s count.
As the song took over the camp, the resonant veil translated their phantom notes into acoustic gold. Amadea closed her eyes; she was transported somewhere else.
Tonight, even the dumb stick Artus held was no longer wood; it was a real lute.
The first plucks began to sound, and Artus’ voice rode Corvin’s low line like a second string on another cello, bright over dark, as he began to sing.
“A nameless boy beneath a solemn sky, Was flung to starving wolves and left to die.
Abandoned and alone, the legend starts: No mother’s hand to warm him, and no hearth That he could ever safely call his own;
Just hollow blades of winter at the bone. Yet in that crushing silence, where hope died,
He learned to hear the stars and sing along Far, far away, within the Great Expanse.”
The melody broke as Artus dropped into spoken narration. “Somehow, he made his Resonance come through. And by his own telling, my friends — the wolves had lost that argument badly.”
Artus shifted his pose and covered his nose to speak in a nasal tone.
“They all ran away scared with their tails curled so high up it changed the pitch of their own voice!” he said mockingly.
A ripple of muffled laughter passed around the fire. Even the coughing boy managed a short, cracked sound that might have been a chuckle. As he saw this, Artus smiled and shifted to a softer register, echoing with his lute as percussion to Corvin’s pattern in a higher, fragile counterpoint, and sang again:
“He tracked cloaked pilgrims through the hushed chills, A phantom on the wide, unyielding hills.
So silent was his step upon the ground, The gold of the Aurean Winds begged for a sound.”
“He walked at such a distance with only the company of the wind,” Artus added, holding high his lute to a mock-solemn voice, “that the sky had to complain between storms and thunder for him to leave.”
“Artus,” Kay muttered, mirroring his stance from the rocks, though a smile was buried in his tone, “you are slandering the weather again.”
“Hush,” Elaine whispered, one eye still half-closed as her lips shaped the trace of Artus’ words alongside him. Her fingers sketched another figure in the air as she pointed at Kay. “You’re going to break the field if I don’t focus.”
Artus silenced them both with a sharp tap of his lute and continued the melody:
“He did not seek—”
He paused.
The rhythm of the verse slipped from his grasp.
A Beat.
Corvin noticed. He briefly opened an eye, his bow dragging the low phrase from the cello once more to hold the space. Artus faltered twice, trying to catch the lyric, before he took a full moment to swallow his growing panic.
He breathed in once, twice, and locked back his focus into the tempo of Corvin:
“He did not seek the spoken words or mortal signs But heard the quiet Pulse that pumps through the Leylines.
Where others heard the dark, death in decaying bloom, He heard the symphony of the stars above: The Great Harmonic Loom.”
The veil around the fire thickened with each verse, shifting slightly in its prismatic colors to the hum under Elaine’s breath. For a Beat, Amadea swore the light of the flames dimmed at the edges, as if the legend beyond the circle had taken a step in to join them.
“It was there, in that vast howling nothing,” Artus narrated, “that the boy first learned to listen truly. Not to me, nor to you. To the world, and its sacred geometry.” He tapped the side of his head, two fingers to his ear, then pressed his palm flat over his chest.
“He did not listen with these. To feel the world, it isn’t done with the body. Magic is felt only with whatever’s underneath.”
“His fortune turned,” Artus went on, “on a day that should never have belonged to fortune at all.” The lute dropped to a near-whisper, letting the cello carry.
Corvin’s baseline slid into a minor chord, and as the bow pressed harder, Artus’ voice dropped, and the melody turned grim. Amadea felt her skin prickle at the sudden chromatic shift that echoed in the cinders:
“An architect of claw, and mind too fierce to tame, Was dragged before the whip, defiant to his name.
His master saw a monster, passed the genius by, And dressed up murder as a trial,
All the injustice just to sentence his will to die.”
“Daedalus,” Artus narrated, letting the name sit heavy. “Half-man, half-beast. A Demi-Human slave with claws enough to gut anyone able to rival his intellect. He stood for no master, no prince, and no monster.”
“And no judges,” Kay added under his breath. “Don’t forget judges.”
Artus pointed the neck of his lute at him without breaking rhythm, and the song rose again, louder now:
“But from the dark, fate itself changed The storm of the winds had led him there.
The orphan stepped, whom death had failed to break, And shattered the tribunal with just one vow he’d make.
Their cruel chains, courts, and laws were monsters to hunt. And from the wreck, it rose an indomitable trust.”
He snapped his fingers once. “The whole trial shook at their own disgrace, and through Aurelian the chains forgot how to exist,” Artus said, punctuating the remark by snapping his prop lute in half and tossing it into the campfire.
“Together, they ran. And in the open air, the golden winds caught up to them once again, and on a desolate clearing, Daedalus gave the nameless boy the one identity that would outlive them both—”
“Aurelian,” some of the children said in chorus.
“The first voice of the Auric Order,” Artus harmonized.
After letting their air settle for a brief moment at the legend’s title, he continued. “It was there,” this time gentler, almost reverent for four full Beats, “that Aurelian looked inward and found Resonance waiting for him.”
Corvin’s bow slid into a new progression. The baseline climbed, a careful ascent, testing the weight of every step to reach enough tension for a resolution. Artus sang:
“He struck a chord where nothing dared to sing, The first to teach a dying world to ring.
For Resonance was never just wind and might, It was the shaping of the golden Auric Aria’s light!
Attuned, the heavens bent around a singular whole; Aurelian had discovered that all of Spellweaving, Is merely the cymatics of the soul.”
At the word cymatics, Elaine’s hum shifted. Her hands changed their figures, tracing smaller shapes nearer the fire’s skin. The veil answered, taking on a faint, rippling texture alongside the seams of its delicate topology.
“Motif Awakening,” Artus explained, glancing at Amadea as if the term were a secret he wanted her to remember. “The first of its kind. The moment an orphaned boy became the very first of the legends of all time as a Mythical Virtuoso.”
The children closest to the fire leaned forward, the blankets slipping from their narrow shoulders. Even the boy with the wet cough had gone completely still, anchored by the weight of the story.
“Finally, you got that part right!” Kay called out, a proud grin breaking through his usual smirk. “You actually listened to me.”
Artus flashed Kay a brilliant, fleeting smile, but the bard’s focus had already shifted. He lowered his gaze from the smoke of the fire, looking down to where Amadea stood underneath the shadows of the rocky stage.
“And so,” Artus declared, his voice dropping its theatrical boom for something startlingly intimate. He lifted his free hand and pressed it flat over his heart. “The two of them swore something older than any promise ever made.”
He extended that same hand down toward her. His palm was open in fingers gently curved. He waited, letting the invitation to join the stage hang in the cold space between them.
Amadea stared at his outstretched hand. As she realized what it meant, a sudden rush of white noise flared in her ears — the familiar, defensive static of her own survival instincts.
Perhaps it was the heat, or that the hand looked identical to the one underneath the stone arch of the river, or something else entirely, but every reflex screamed at her to step back into the dark. She tightened her jaw, fully prepared to shake her head and let the moment wither.
But Artus severed the distance with a single word.
“Consonance,” he said softly, as he closed his eyes.
He left his hand suspended in the air, offering her a terrifying, naive span of completely blind trust. It became clear he wasn’t going to grab her. He was leaving the choice entirely up to her. It felt like the second secret of the night, laid bare as the climax, mirroring Corvin’s moving bow.
“A bond, the Strand,” Artus whispered, eyes still closed against the dark, “that holds even when the world doesn’t make sense, when Coherence doesn’t exist.”
The campfire popped. The cello breathed a low, waiting hum. The static in Amadea’s chest fought against the profound, terrifying light of his offer. She could stay as a shadow in the ruins, or she could step into the song.
A Beat.
Her fingers found his.
Amadea uncurled her fist and reached up. She gripped Artus’ palm firmly, actively anchoring herself as she climbed up beside him.
At the contact, a soft smile broke across Artus’ face. He opened his eyes, his grip steady as he helped her onto the stone. Still holding her hand, he raised it upward. He let his voice fall into a triumphant, melodic whisper to deliver the final lyric:
“Two outcasts in a ruined land, rejected and alone.”
“If the world will not be kind,” he quoted, his gaze locked intensely with hers, “we will have to build our own.”
Corvin’s cello answered the vow with the last chord that swelled — deep, resonant, and almost hopeful. Almost.
Artus released her hand and looked at the campfire.
“That was the daybreak of Laureated Marble, for the Age of Renewal had begun for the Golden March, with a great empire built on the slabs of golden dust.”
He took a bow before the crowd.
Amadea felt a strange, profound quiet, as though the music pressed itself to the seams between her heart and a second pulse she hadn’t known she possessed.
She looked around. Everyone was watching them on the makeshift stage. Elaine had stopped her gestures; instead, both of her hands covered her mouth, her eyes vibrant and sparkling just over the white fur of her collar.
Artus paused there, perched on the rock, holding the silence just long enough for Corvin to slide into a final, lingering note, the bow hovering just above the strings.
The entire caravan watched raptly as Artus’ throat moved with a heavy swallow as he regained his upward stance. His chest rose and fell with the effort of returning from wherever the story had taken him.
“That,” he said, his voice dropping to a single rasp, “is where this Ballad ends tonight.”
A low murmur of disappointment hummed around the fire. One of the older girls in the crescent ocean of blankets pouted outright. “But you said there was more! What about the rest of the Virtuoso!?”
“Act I is enough for starving bellies,” Corvin cut in, finally opening his eyes. His tone was dry but not unkind. “You start promising Act II, they’ll expect desserts.”
“We don’t have flour for Act II,” Elaine added pragmatically, finally letting her hum and her hands rest. “Yet.”
The veil around the campfire thinned as her voice quieted, becoming faint gossamer filaments of silk rather than an array of visible prisms. Amadea felt the outside sounds creep a fraction closer, though they still seemed muffled, like footsteps heard through snow.
Elaine, noticing the faint curl of smoke from the small scorched bundle of herbs she had left too near the flame, clicked her tongue as she picked it up.
“That’s enough theater,” she playfully replied. “If I burn our entire stock of grass for the sake of ambiance, Corvin will put me on the ration board.”
Artus and Amadea stepped down from the stage. The stone was cold and rough beneath her boots, stark in contrast to the warmth that still hummed through her from the performance. She still feels the ghost of Artus’ grip on her hand.
“Thank you,” he whispered once to the air.
A Beat.
He then immediately went to the coughing boy, dropping to one knee to ask about his performance. Amadea overheard the start of it.
“Did you hear the part where he sensed the Leylines pulse?” Artus asked in a conspiratorial voice. “I’m certain I botched the cadence there. Please be true — did it ruin the performance?”
Amadea stared at the dirt, letting the quiet wash over her. The soil was packed hard, worn smooth by the patches of dry grasses. She found herself tracing the patterns of the tiny pebbles that rocked against her feet.
Her mind was still echoing with the Ballad’s final phrase.
She looked toward Elaine, who was now recovering the heavy pot over the iron cradle of the campfire.
It hung over the mound, having cooked throughout the entire Ballad. Elaine was pouring in more water from a dented canteen and tipping a careful handful of earth-beans into it. The thin smell of something like food edged into the air, fighting with rust and tallow.
“Kay,” she called without looking up, “stop looming, the Ballad’s over, and bring the stores. If we’re going to pretend this is a feast afterward, I at least want everyone to have the same lie in their bowl.”
“On it,” Kay replied, swiftly disappearing toward the second cart of the caravan. He came back from the ramp with a sack that clinked and rustled, his expression caught between weariness and its quiet humor.
Amadea watched them move with the wordless economy of people who had repeated this page of their lives too many times.
Elaine’s hands were precise as she stirred the mixture together, almost dance-like, though she would have denied it if asked. Kay was nearby as he set the sack down and began to distribute small portions of hard bread, or at least what passed for bread, each piece as dark and dense that it might have just been river stone.
As they continued serving the rations of food over stale water, Corvin took another task.
He had a ledger of parchment and a stub of charcoal, beginning the arithmetic that went with the tapping rhythm of his frantic counting against the metal of the kneepads again.
Corvin was writing on a makeshift page, mumbling to himself how many beans, how many mouths, how many days between this moon and the next settlement.
His lips were moving constantly, and, between numbers, he kept repeating his time-tracking measures. “Well, as the Phase of Twilight ends, the Phase of Prelude follows by the next moon. The death of winter in the Echo of Silence is almost done, and the land will finally bloom in the three Phases of the Echo of Resonance. We’ll hopefully be in a better position if, of course, the stars aren’t lying again.”
He kept sighing to himself, drawing maps, entirely absorbed in the ticking of his celestial astrolabe.
Elaine then began handing the bowls to the children, a soup that smelled just good enough to be edible. The first were to the children nearest to the campfire.
And after the desperate satiated themselves, Elaine reached for Amadea.
The bowl was sturdy, unlike the caravan’s hardwood, yet still looked repurposed, as if it had once belonged to another object.
Amadea gave it a sip.
The liquid was warm against her lips, but the taste was entirely horrendous. It was bitter and earthy, and it felt hard to pass down because the aftertaste was the absolute worst part.
“Yeah, it’s an acquired taste,” Elaine smirked as she noticed Amadea with her tongue out. “I promise we’ll soon get something better, but we don’t have much to get by for now.”
She then adjusted her winged hat, moved slightly, postured, looked twice around them, and moved to an angle where the rocks would mask their shared silhouette.
“Okay, here,” Elaine whispered, tilting her head. “The performers of today’s show get an extra. But only today!”
Elaine then grabbed a small vial of a clean, silvery metallic liquid from the inside of her coat. She gently poured a bit into the mix, its texture like water but slightly viscous, oddly sparkling as it touched the soup’s surface, spreading in a slow, hypnotic pattern until it dissolved.
“Don’t tell anyone,” she winked. “It’s our little secret. I have very few of these.”
She then quickly left Amadea with the chipped bowl in both hands and moved elsewhere in the caravan, blending into the shadows of the firelight.
Amadea stared at the soup, the warmth seeping into her fingers, slightly unsure whether to take another sip. She was hungry, but the aftertaste was terrible — though as time passed, its smoke started to gain a faint sweet scent.
She gave Elaine’s strange liquid the benefit of the doubt and gave it another sip.
A Beat.
Her eyes opened. It was not the same flavor. The bitterness washed away entirely, or at least enough to make it truly edible. The gritty texture remained the same, but each chew was now oddly comforting, and the taste brought back slivers of memories of a gentler past.
The sensation passed as quickly as it had come, leaving her blinking with damp eyes; she quickly wiped them away.
Amadea stood alone on the rocks, watching the rest of the kids attempt to eat, and fail, until they gulped the broth anyway before the cold could take more of them.
Everyone ate in silence that was not quite empty — it remained filled with the memory of Artus’ Ballad of Aurelian, the Mythical Virtuoso of Resonance, and the low, steady ghost of Corvin’s baseline.
She kept trying to overhear the conversation between Artus and his attempt to cheer up the coughing boy, but she couldn’t quite make out the words. As it dragged on, Amadea didn’t hear the rest of it — another smell reached her before.
Something gone from a herb-sharp aroma to acrid, curling up from the fire’s edge. Elaine had left another pouch too close to the flame while her attention drifted elsewhere.
The sack was smoking with a grey thread rising from its scorched surface, and Corvin was still too absorbed by his own Beat-count focus to realize. She picked it up, and once her own plate was empty, she scurried past the children, making her way to the caravans beyond the campfire to follow after Elaine.
It didn’t take long; she found the glow of her hat a short distance off.
Elaine was not tending any of the herbs in the sacks by the caravan’s ramp at all, either. The little scorched bundles sat, forgotten and faintly smoking, on a flat stone.
The walls of the cart loomed above them; they were larger than Amadea had realized from the campfire. She had seen it from a distance, of course, but up close it was something else. They were not carts, but behemoths disguised as a fortress on hardwood wheels.
The main body was imposing above the ground. Its dark planks, scarred by a hundred repairs and stitched with iron bands and stretched leather, rose two full stories into a stage-like upper deck, its beams raked just enough to catch a performer in torchlight from below. The wheels alone stood taller than Kay or Corvin, iron-banded and vast enough to cradle a water barrel that Amadea could have hidden inside, with chain-rings bolted along their rims.
It wasn’t a wagon. It was a moving city divided into twin carts, each a fortress prepared for war.
But the caravan wasn’t what stole her breath.
In front of the great wheels, between the giant wooden spokes, Amadea finally saw what was pulling the carts.
It was dozens of enormous beasts, bigger than the wheels and each roughly twice the size of Corvin. Their soft, white fur gleamed with an azure glimmer, swirling across their hides like the ripples of a slow river.
They possessed broad, calm faces and long, tufted ears that flickered at the sounds of the night. Their horns, though seemingly small at first glance, curled across the clouds of their fur into the patterns of the stars above, faintly emitting the seeping moonlight, almost like the brass artifact of Corvin.
As Amadea stepped closer, one turned its massive head. Its eye — huge, glossy, and dark — blinked deliberately before returning to its hay.
This animal had certainly seen stranger things than a girl staring at it in wonder, Amadea thought to herself.
As she approached the front, she finally caught a clear look at Elaine. The white fluff on her coat suddenly made sense; it was woven from the shed fur of these very beasts. Kay stood beside her; the pelt on his coat was much darker, but it shared the same thick texture.
Elaine removed her hat. She rested a bare hand against a buffalo’s flank, her fingers moving in slow, rhythmic circles against the white pelt as she fed it herbs.
“Do you remember?” Elaine asked softly, her gaze fixed on the animal’s fur. “How we even got the original two out of that Domestication Enclave?”
The animal leaned into her touch.
“I remember you almost losing an arm,” Kay replied, his velvety voice dry.
“I remember you almost losing your dignity.” Elaine conjured a faint smile. “Strange, thinking of those Cycles as distant now. Before the second wave of the Luminant Rot — what were we?”
“Hopeful, still kind perhaps,” Kay said.
“Heyy! I’m nowhere near Corvin-level yet. What are you going on about?”
She drew her hat between them, its yellow-cream gem veined with teal green hues. “Look — First Ornament only! You haven’t even earned your second element.”
“So you’re still immature at heart,” Kay agreed.
She dropped the hat to her lap, her fist rising, ready to hit him.
“But!” Kay defended himself, raising an index finger to halt her.
“That’s the same light I saw in you that made any of this possible. They told us not even those decrepit elders could tame the Mist Buffalo. That they’d rather die than pull a cart.”
He paused, his brow furrowing as he chased a memory.
“What was his name? Sir something? No, it was Ber— something. Ah, it’s on the tip of my tongue.”
“Beryl, the legendary hunter of the Boreal Reach,” Elaine said, her gaze lowering to the grass.
Kay offered the smooth flourish of his hand to catch her eyes. His prismatic pink gem pulsed faintly in time with his breathing.
“Exactly! See, that’s the Elaine of the singers that scout ahead. She always remembers.”
A faint, reminiscent smile touched her lips.
Kay leaned in, his velvety voice softening. “And yet here they are. I wouldn’t have believed you or those childhood dreams either, but you truly did make these Pure Light creatures docile. Sixteen of them now, and every single one chooses to stay.”
Elaine’s raised fist relaxed. “One of them chose to kick you in the ribs, if I recall correctly,” she murmured, the fight leaving her.
“That one was just establishing boundaries. I respect it.”
Kay caught her descending hand, lacing his fingers through hers, his smile widening for the length of a Beat.
“Now that the Prelude’s coming again, we can stabilize,” Elaine whispered. “Feed them properly. Rest them.”
“If Corvin doesn’t work us all into the ground counting stars first,” Kay joked.
She huffed something close to a laugh — as close and real as either of them had strength left for.
Amadea stood at the edge of their intimacy.
The burnt herbs in one hand, Artus’ unfinished Ballad a ghost behind her. She was caught between two things she didn’t fully understand: a boy performing defiance against a cruel world for her and a nameless coughing boy, and two adults who had clearly already paid that price themselves.
The smell of the herbs — now thoroughly scorched and giving off a charred bitterness — caught the attention of Elaine, who turned sharply.
She spotted Amadea standing in the shadows. Surprise crossed her face, then recognition, then something close to what Amadea had felt when Artus named her before the Ballad.
Elaine squeezed Kay’s hand hard enough to make him wince, and instantly put her feathered cap back on.
“Ah.” She crossed the distance, boots silent on packed earth. “Haha, I wondered where that went,” she said with an awkward laugh, taking the ruined pouch with a rueful shake of her head. “Well, that’s a loss. Thankfully, we have more.”
Her eyes met Amadea’s.
“So, you were watching the Azure Mist Buffalo.”
It wasn’t a question. Amadea nodded anyway.
“They’re beautiful. Stubborn. And the reason we’re still alive.” Elaine’s voice softened, its practical edge gone. “Pure Light creatures — you’ll have noticed the magical glow in their horns, the spirals in their fur.”
She stroked the flank of the nearest, right between its ear and its neck. The animal made guttural sounds, low, almost a song.
“This one’s Starlight. One of the first we had.”
Amadea only stared, heavy-eyed.
A Beat.
“Yeah, I know,” Elaine said before she could answer, her gaze dropping to the patches of dead grass. “Not the most impressive name. But it’s mine and one of the first I thought of.”
Amadea looked at her, which prompted Elaine to continue patting the animal until it made the sound again.
“And it’s the one she chose too, so that’s all that matters!” Elaine declared, half-proudly, in a wavering tone.
She paused, a strange expression crossing her face — half memory, half something else. “Remember the Ballad? About Aurelian building his empire from golden dust?”
Amadea nodded, only watching her silently.
“Well, that’s what we’re doing.” Elaine’s hand rose without thinking, brushing a stray strand from Amadea’s face. “Building something from nothing. Cold, and hard — We’ve got nothing to spare except hope and buffalo fur.”
Her smile thinned with use.
Yet a fierce, distant light caught in her eyes on a gaze drifting past the distant silhouettes of the dead trees, over into the pitch-black horizon.
“We are going north,” Elaine whispered, carrying a prayer. “To the place where the soil meets the moon.”
The gem on her cap flickered twice.
“The Avaloch basin,” Kay added softly from the shadows. He stepped closer, his velvety voice dropping raw, wrapping the air in quiet warmth.
“Hidden somewhere behind a mountain that dreams in fractals, sheltered by twin waterfalls, cloaked in silver sand.”
He glanced down at the prismatic pink gem on his gauntlet.
“It’s Elaine’s dream — and our purpose, kid. A sacred basin in the shape of a chalice. The one place where the symphonic veins of the world converge to keep the static criticality out, forever.”
Elaine stroked Starlight’s massive flank, her fingers trembling slightly against the white fur.
“To the rest of the world, it’s just a myth, Amadea,” Elaine replied, trying to lock her gaze with hers.
“But for me, for Kay, for the buffalo... and perhaps for Corvin too, this is a boundary built by the Aria herself. That is what we called the last procession.”
Amadea only blinked, the heavy, unreadable weight enough to crush Elaine's smile.
“I— I know how it sounds,” Elaine’s breath hitched, her voice withering like the popping cinders nearby.
“Yes, it could all be just a dream. But we’re here, building it anyway...”
Amadea tried to hold her gaze, wanting to understand Elaine's voice, but her eyes were losing the fight to stay open. The fire, the soup, and the warmth of the animals had settled into her bones at last. Her eyelids kept drooping despite her best efforts.
“Ah,” Elaine exhaled, the sound catching on a sudden wave of relief. “So that was it.”
Her shoulders slumped, letting out a soft chuckle over the weight of the breath she had been holding.
She then exchanged a look with Kay, who helped carry Amadea up into the coach box of the fortress-cart before slipping back toward the fire’s silhouettes.
Amadea curled against Elaine’s side near the buffalo pack, the animals’ slow breathing a kind of lullaby neither of them needed to ask for.
The warmth reached her in slow layers; first her hands, then her face, and finally something deeper. Corvin, Kay, Elaine — the adults who now carried names as much as Artus. Half-dreaming, she thought that somewhere far beyond the campfire, a nameless boy in a cruel Expanse had made a promise on a night like this to his Demi-Human friend, to build an empire from dust.
She wondered, as sleep finally claimed her, if that empire had looked anything like this. That dream — its consonance — was the key that attuned the song of her soul.
It was beautiful, and ephemeral.
The feeling didn’t last long; a coughing noise woke her before the light did.
It came from close by, shallow and wet, each breath sounding like it had to be excavated rather than drawn. Elaine slept on, exhausted past the reach of the sound. But Amadea’s eyes opened, and she saw silhouettes at a distance.
Across the dying coals of the campfire, she saw Corvin again. He was sitting with the coughing boy, his voice pitched too low for her to catch the words.
The boy’s shadow grew smaller against Corvin’s arm. It wasn’t shrinking in physical size, but consumed from within, much in the way the wax of the candle Corvin had lit in the caravan interior grew smaller as it burned.
Corvin murmured something to the little brass pendulum in his palm — a sound that might have been a prayer dressed as a habit — and then he wrapped his arms fully around the boy.
Amadea recognized the hold. It was the same wrongness. Too tight. Too brief.
When Corvin stood up, he carried the boy into the dark beyond the firelight.
He did not come back with him.
Amadea lay still at the edge of the fire, in between the carts of the caravan. She watched the space where their silhouettes had blended into the dark, feeling something in her chest tighten around the shape of a familiar absence. It felt like a profound void.
She never asked his name, and she hadn’t overheard it from Artus.
It was a name she could never recover.
When Corvin returned, alone, his figure moved more slowly than before, as though the walk back weighed more than the walk out.
He knelt by the shirt he’d left folded near the fire.
He drew a knife from his own coat and cut a small, careful square from the fabric. He worked with the exact precision he used to play his cello. Once it was severed, he took a single needle and sewed the linen patch into the lower half of his jet-black coat, with his fingers trembling only slightly against the firelight.
He looked up to the skies. Amadea looked up with him.
When she returned her gaze to the earth, Corvin lifted his ringed hand.
Where there had been nothing a moment before, the oak-worn cello now rested against his shoulder, condensing from a cloud of light.
Chimes echoed from nowhere once again, but this time, the sound didn’t disappear. The chimes deepened into soft, keyed notes, almost as if the skies themselves were singing as well.
Almost.
He drew the bow across the cello, accompanying the sound of the stars, and a low, mourning note rolled out into the dark of the night. It was a sound much different from the Ballad he had played — much darker.
Amadea stood mesmerized at the edge of the campfire. Corvin shifted his posture, keeping his eyes closed. There was no veil forming around the fire this time. The melody was the world’s resonance, mourning with him.
A Beat.
Then another.
And another.
As Corvin neared the bridge of the song, Amadea moved closer, drawn by the resonance of the cello vibrating through the entire caravan. As the performance continued, she sat by the cart’s wheel.
She stayed until the last note faded into obscurity, when the final breath of his song went silent.
In the aftermath, as the keyed notes finally faded, she stepped into the light and asked:
“Why the cloth?”
Corvin didn’t startle this time. He had felt her approach; a man like him always felt an approach.
“This linen,” he said, his gaze fixed on the strings, “is because someone should remember.”
She didn’t understand it fully, but the gravity of his words was enough. The nameless boy she would never see again had been given a shape — invisible, but real enough to keep.
“His soul now rests in the Eternal Symphony.”
Corvin let out a deep sigh, his back expanding on a deep inhale, offering another silent prayer as he looked at the stars.
“His is the note that echoes the melody of my instrument. If the keys of the Aria remember enough to play through this shared Resonance, we should too. It’s the last tether humanity has to the heavens.”
As the words settled between them, Corvin resumed his playing. It was another song, dancing with the cinders that moved to the tempo of the wind, accompanied by the voice of the Eternal Symphony echoing from nowhere.
Amadea kept quiet. She saw a mirror of the faces she remembered from when her mother ran with her. It was different, but the feeling was identical; Corvin played the same way her mother had carried her through the static criticality cascades.
When the memory blurred, or when the weight became too tangible, she left him to it and went to wake Artus.
She moved toward the third cart below, intuition guiding her through the dark to the last cart she hadn’t seen. Dawn was barely rising, faint sunlight seeping in rays through the branches of the tallest trees.
Amadea was halfway down the hillside steps when she heard dissonance.
It was a low, wrong sound threading through the encroaching quiet. It filled the air like the chimes from before, but thin and rattling — like something dragged over broken glass.
A growl of pure hunger.
She turned.
It came out of the tree line, slow and stiff-legged. Another creature that looked like an animal. Nothing like the white buffalo. Wrong.
Amadea’s pulse climbed to her throat before her mind could catch up to why.
It had a long snout, its ribs showing through matted, patchy fur that almost melted away from its bones. Its ravenous eyes fixed on her with the flat, singular focus of a thing that had not eaten in longer than it could remember.
With the last fragments of its reasoning, it decided she would do.
She felt her mouth go dry as her hands turned to ice.
It crept closer to the light. It was almost alive, but deeply disturbing in both flesh and sound. The core of its dissonance was a black sphere violently encrusted in the exposed ribs at the center of its chest.
She couldn’t move.
Her eyes were transfixed in a tunnel vision that narrowed out the sight of everything but the fangs of the horror closing the distance.
A second screech began underneath the rattle — faint at first, then rising. That old, familiar sound bled back in: the static. The buzzing nothing that had swallowed her whole after the river. The white noise that distorted the edges of her vision. It flooded her ears just as the creature’s muscles coiled to lunge.
She couldn’t hear anything over the roar of her own unraveling mind.
The static clouded all her senses, as if it had never truly left, not even through warmth of the Ballad from last night.
She braced herself for the worst. Tears began to flow.
She closed her eyes.
A Beat.
Thump.
A loud sound shattered the trance.
The creeping static broke open, but not into a violent, deafening flash.
Something crashed down from above her — a shape falling from the upper layer of the hill by the campfire, dropping with the devastating thud of a stone loosed from a sling.
It was Corvin.
Anchoring all of his weight on the cello’s endpin as it met the creature’s black ribs mid-leap with a sound like a heavy door slamming shut on a storm.
The two of them went down together in a tangle of claw and coat. In the same fluid motion, Corvin drove the lower spike of his cello — the very endpin that had grounded the Ballad earlier, sharpened like a weapon built as much for killing as for making music — straight through the beast’s chest and its black core.
As the cello pierced the sphere, the creature didn’t bleed. It let out a single, chilling scream.
Then it dissolved, unraveling into luminous motes that shifted between black and white, scattering on the wind like ash from an unlit fire.
And with it, the dissonance in Amadea’s head went silent.
The white noise dissolved as the creature vanished.
The world rushed back into her all at once, and it did not rush in as static this time — it rushed in as feeling. An overjoyed sensation, more vivid to her senses than anything she could remember up to that point.
She felt the still-alive grass first, soft yet firm beneath the sole of her shoe. She then saw the path ahead, the leaves bunched in golden dust upon the strong wooden trees. She felt the nearby bark splinter gently under her fingertips as she reached out without meaning to. The path onward dragged on for more distance than she could picture, deep green grass lining its edges, even though most of it was brown and black. As she walked a few unsteady steps along it, she let the tender, cool winds ease the tension in her muscles — she hadn’t known, until that moment, that she was holding.
Above her, gaps in the branches let pale, gentle light fall in patches as the shafts of an amber dawn began to appear. She breathed a heavy sigh that bled through her chest like spilled blood.
Amadea was finally free of dissonance.
Corvin rose from the dissolving ash, brushing dirt from his knees. He bent to pick up something small and glinting from where the creature had fallen. A seed, similar to the one Artus held but slightly different — crystalline, catching the early light like a drop of frozen dew, cast in a golden-rose hue with a geometric pattern etched across its face.
“The worst part about having to bid farewell,” Corvin finally spoke, turning it over once in his fingers before folding it into her palm, “is not even the death itself.”
“It’s making sure we aren’t hunted shortly after.”
He breathed in once, laying a steadying hand on the shaking Amadea.
“That was not an animal. It’s what happens when pain, or the weight of it, gets too dense. It starts wearing the face of hunger. Atonalis, they’re called. Born from the Dissonance you heard.”
He collapsed the cello back into his ring with a flick of his wrist and looked at her with an expression that wasn’t quite gentleness, but wasn’t unkind either.
“The world always takes,” he said. “The answer is to take back, Amadea.”
A Beat.
“Never forget that.”
His words lingered in the cool air. As he noticed her breathing begin to calm, he lifted the crystalline object in his hands.
“This is a Rose Seed. It’s the mourning the world itself makes for departures. I’m sorry you had to see this part of the world too, but it’s as true as the music I played yesterday.”
He pulled her into a hug, and this embrace was finally right.
“I need to sleep for at least a few Bars. Don’t go far. I don’t sense any more monsters, but you should still be careful. Go back to Elaine, or get inside one of the caravans.”
As Corvin left, Amadea turned back toward the path to find Artus. The third cart was visible ahead, its ramp already lowered. Kay was awake; he quickly stepped up to intercept Corvin before the man could become just another silhouette on the horizon.
She overheard a fragment, carried primarily by Kay’s frantic voice.
“Was that Luminant Rot!?”
His eyes darted in a frantic calculus, scanning the entire surrounding area, stepping over Corvin’s exhausted gasp for air before he could even reply. The prismatic pink gem in his gauntlet flickered black in time with his voice.
“We have to get out of here.”
“Where’s Elaine?”
“I can pack her up in less than three Pulses if we need to abandon the cart.”
“No, wait. What about exits? Any sight of—”
Thump.
“Kay,”
Corvin interrupted the spiral, striking his fist against the trunk of a hollow tree.
“If that boy were infected, the entire caravan would be dead already. We would never be offered the benefit of a warning.”
He drew a breath and let his smoky voice drop to a gentler tone.
“Still, I registered the entire perimeter thoroughly yesterday. Not a sign of lights nor moths nearby. It’s just an unfortunate sigil of the Echo of Silence. Nothing more.”
Corvin quickly exchanged another knowing gaze with him.
“Tend to her. I’m going to sleep.”
Amadea was standing right behind Kay. He turned; he hadn’t noticed her. He immediately dropped to one knee to meet her eyes at her own height.
“I— No. Sorry, Amadea.” He caught his own frantic train of thought. “You must be looking for the knight. Artus is with me, if you want to wait for the sun to settle. He is on the second level, just up the stairs.”
There was something distinctly different in Kay’s eyes. He was completely devoid of the easy humor. However, the gem had ceased flickering; it retained its clear, prismatic pink tone.
“Thanks,” she said.
She left him to his own mind. Instead, she decided to carry the seed back to Artus like a soldier returning from a campaign. She waited by the table on the first floor. When Artus came down the wooden steps, he looked surprised, but before he could ask any questions, Amadea held out the rose seed to him.
He went instantly silent. He knew exactly what it was. His eyes went wide with sheer delight.
“You’re definitely the undefeatable Violet Empress,” he declared. “These are rare and impossibly hard to get! I’ve only ever gotten to hold one. If you got one of these yourself, that’s absolute proof of your legend.”
He turned it in the morning light, already composing something behind his eyes.
“Actually, I’ve got an idea for today’s Ballad because of this!”
But that idea didn’t survive contact with memory. As they both rejoined the gathering by the campfire, several children were already crying.
Artus’ face fell a moment later as the fuller shape of the morning finally caught up to him. The boy from last night’s song — the boy he had been trying to cheer up — was not in the caravan anymore, and never would be again.
Artus kept repeating one solemn statement, his eyes watery with the first tears she had ever seen him shed.
“It was my fault. I forgot the lyrics, on one of the most important phrases. I— I—”
As Artus paused on the same thought, Amadea reached out and held his hand.
“You are a great singer, Artus. I didn’t know the story of Aurelian, nor about the Mythical Virtuoso; I only do now because of you.”
Amadea placed the rose seed securely in his palm.
“There are more moons to practice. We have this now.”
The words calmed him. They exchanged a brief, understanding glance, shifting their focus to finding more props to remake Act I.
They spent the rest of that day picking through the passages of dead trees and the few remaining patches of living grass in the wasteland. They gathered branches, scraps of limestone, anything the ruined world hadn’t already claimed.
Artus quietly determined that whatever he played next would be flawless. It would not just be good enough, but a Virtuoso’s performance, so that no one else would be taken by the coughing ever again. As though a Ballad, played without a single mistake — executed with perfect consonance — could hold a line against a world that did not forgive.