Movement 1: The Dream | Score I: A Ballad Before Iridia
Resonance | Key of Attunement
Dawn thinned the darkness over the ruins, turning the dark walls a stark, freezing grey.
Corvin and Kay cleared a patch of frost‑bitten grass between the caravan carts and the ruined tower. They stood opposite each other. Kay closed his eyes. When he opened them, two prismatic poles crystallized in his hands; he threw one to Corvin.
The weapons were dulled at the edges so no one would leave the practice bleeding.
Kay’s pole caught the rising light in a faint pink sheen. Corvin took his with knuckles still faintly marked from glimmerfern.
Clang.
The first rhythm began.
They moved with the grace of violence that had rules.
Kay advanced first, his stance low, driving toward Corvin’s guard in a sweeping overhead arc that shifted his entire weight.
Corvin pivoted to redirect rather than aim for a block. He let the high end of his pole carry the impact away from his center, stealing Kay’s momentum to drive the rod downward, pinning it until Kay scrambled to reestablish his own footing.
Their footwork cut shallow grooves into the dirt. Each step accounted for the uneven channels that bled in the ground, and for the blind angle cast by the tower’s long shadow across the snow.
Clang.
They fell into a trance of mirrored motion — step back, step in — blows crossing in intersecting lines in sharp X shapes that changed angle with subtle shifts of the wrist.
“Hey,” Kay rasped between breaths, deflecting another heavy strike. His exhale fogged in the cold as he drew the clashing rods downward. “No hard feelings for earlier, right? I just had to get us moving before we got devoured.”
Corvin’s pole snapped upward, tapping Kay’s wrist. The impact knocked the weapon off‑line, and Corvin lunged into the opening, halting his momentum with perfect focus.
The crystal tip hovered a finger’s breadth from Kay’s face. It caught the dawning sun in its prismatic light.
“Feelings are not as hard as this Crystal against your face if you don’t concentrate.”
He let the pole drop back into a resting guard, giving Kay a Beat to breathe.
“It’s just another wasteland conversation buried by the living. I’ve got plenty of those. I don’t pay attention to another as long as we made it out.”
“Ha—” Kay huffed a breathless laugh, shedding the tension over the roll of his shoulder before resetting his stance.
“You’re terrifying even with a dulled rod,” he said. “Can’t imagine facing you on the Heptagram Flail.”
Corvin grunted, a small smile cracked from his posture.
“All weapons are similar once you get accustomed to their rhythm,” he replied.
Clang.
The dance began anew.
Artus was perched on an overturned, rusted bell, watching every shifting shadow and strike.
His hands twitched along the pattern half a Beat behind Kay’s pivots — he mirrored his stance, left foot easing back when Kay surged forward, knees dropping when Corvin lowered his weight to catch one of Kay’s swings.
He mapped their movements in whispered murmurs, all part of a quiet count with the precise Beats where openings bloomed and withered.
Amadea was with him. The first rays dyed the white soil amber, and a shaft of light caught half his profile. Nothing in his fierce focus was different from the way he sang Ballads. It was just another rehearsal, except the actors here were sparring hard enough that one step could send any of them flying on the wrong move.
Artus kept practicing a whispered verse over the sharp ringing of the poles.
Kay noticed and let his pole rest for a moment, tapping the ground in front of Corvin to signal that the children were fully awake.
“Look at the knight,” he said, half amused. “Give him a real blade, a decade, and one of those Ballads will outpace us both.”
Artus straightened, gripping his rusted strip of metal and setting his feet into a wide imitation of Kay’s stance. He was learning how intent turned into motion and motion yielded into opportunity — even when his ‘weapon’ was nothing but scrap and imagination.
“Artus,” Corvin called, his smoky voice cleaving the chill.
“Want to give it a go?”
He tossed the prismatic pole toward Artus’ chest. The thud caught him off‑guard, yet he wrestled the rod upward despite its size, struggling on one foot to keep it from tipping, but steady enough to keep it straight with his open pose.
“Keep that up,” Corvin said, “and you’ll catch up to Kay by the time the Echo of Silence cycles through again.”
Artus grinned.
Kay hurled his own pole into the air. It dissolved into iridescent flickers before it hit the ground. Stepping close, he tapped a finger to the rod Artus held; that prismatic rod, too, vanished into shimmering dust.
“If you ever awake to Crystal,” Kay promised, “I’ll teach you how to conjure your own.”
Click.
Corvin glanced down at his astrolabe.
“Today’s the first day of the Echo of Resonance.”
He raised one scarred arm toward the clearing sky.
“To everyone who made it one more Cycle!”
Kay lifted his fist in silent salute. Amadea scanned the camp — some of the nameless children behind them raised their own too. Artus joined as well.
A strange, buoyant urge latched Amadea too, even if she didn’t understand what the celebration was. She clenched her fingers into a fist and thrust it into the air. The intricate sky knot of her twin braids rested against her collarbone.
Corvin executed a single, decisive motion — a crescent slash downward — and everyone shortly followed in unison, letting the silence rest in the aftermath.
“You two,”
Corvin cleared his throat, nodding at Artus and Amadea.
“I have a task for your birthday, Amadea. There’s an outpost right down the hill, where the river meets land. They trade for scrap. We need supplies for a feast.”
Artus’ face lit in a spark.
“A quest.”
“Auric Peaches,” Corvin specified.
“If you can get one bag, I promise to make it worth the trek. The best ones are golden — their name says as much. Though I doubt we’ll see one.”
Artus’ grin sharpened.
As he saw the light in his eyes, Corvin’s tone turned as raspy as his ledger.
“Don’t try to pay for it in acts and rhymes. That outpost doesn’t take poetry for currency. Tell them we are with the Auric Order, and that we will deliver a dozen crates of incense to the Auric Aria in the sanctuary at the border crossing.”
The words fell flat past Artus; his mind was already somewhere else, soaring in the trance of his own fantasy.
When his attention came back to earth, he spoke with sweeping grandeur.
“The continuation of the Mythical Virtuoso of Resonance! For Amadea!” he declared, striking a heroic pose. “We shall bring back enough fruit for Act II.”
Corvin rubbed the bridge of his nose, the corner of his mouth twitching.
“Props, then,” he said. “For the Ballad you left unfinished.”
It was warmth, until the warmth became the sound of running water.
They walked downhill, following the river's winding path. Some of the snow had begun to recede, revealing stubborn patches of grass with a green that wasn’t fully dead.
They marched with the weight of purpose.
Artus held in one hand a folded paper with Corvin’s promise, in the other a pouch of blue‑veined leaves. Amadea carried a cloth bearing an intricate design of circles and seven‑pointed stars, white with a large golden embossing — the Auric Order’s sigil, cleaned as best as Corvin could manage.
Amadea stared at the shape of the symbol.
It was a clear line that began below and ended above — a line that somewhere in its upper half had found a circle, as though the line had pierced straight through it on its way toward the sky, and carried the shape of it still.
Soon after, the outpost’s gate loomed into view.
It was another tower, mirroring the ruined architecture of the caravan camp, but this structure remained firm and fortified. Grey stone walls extended over a wooden bridge that groaned softly against the edge of a still lake; the air saturated with the smell of running water and wet wood. Beneath a low stone arch, heavy black doors propped open.
A single, broad‑shouldered silhouette leaned against the frame. It held a crossbow at his back, and a spear at his side.
Straight metal. No magic.
Behind him, beneath a striped canvas tarp, an open courtyard held rows of crates and swollen burlap sacks, with soft shapes under the slats.
Golden dust stained the floorboards, gleaming dull rose under the morning light.
Artus stepped forward, rehearsing his lines under his breath.
“We’re here to deliver incense—”
The guard cut him down.
“We don’t take beggars,” he said. His gaze flicked from Artus’ patched coat to Amadea’s frayed sleeves.
“Border incense is worth something at the crossing, kid. Not here.”
Artus swallowed, his posture pivoting for an opening.
“We’re not beggars,” he tried. “We’re performers looking for peaches. We prepare Ballads to comfort people at the border—”
“Comfort doesn’t pay for fruit.”
The guard’s voice possessed the abrasive rasp of a man who had said no to starving people far too many times.
“You want auric peaches, you bring coin or scrap metal. Sanctuaries can burn incense on the other side of the border. We hold no loyalty to the White‑chested Fox or any of the affiliates of Lol‑Ha’.”
“No, wait, we are—” Artus thrust the pouch forward. “With this order, coming with glimmerfern and a sigil for—”
The guard kept one eye on him, and the traces of his lips.
“We are—”
Artus’ sentence thinned under the pressure.
His throat refused to elaborate the next lie. He stood frozen, the paper, the glimmerfern, and Corvin’s instructions suddenly feeling like nothing, drying on the cold of his hands.
His eyes scanned around the entire area, as if a secret would ground him.
No words came.
A Beat.
“We’re refugees.”
Amadea’s voice stepped into the silence.
“From Aberchord.”
The guard’s posture stiffened, his eyes sharpened to her.
Aberchord was the name Elaine had hurled at Corvin over the maps the night before. If a name possessed enough worth to spark a screaming match between the adults, then it had to be worth something here too.
The guard was about to say something, but he kept silent, scanning the shape of both of them.
One of his eyes twitched twice.
She was right; she struck a note. The name was currency.
“Aberchord is dead,” he finally said, dropping his voice as he leaned menacingly into her face.
“What are you doing downriver from the ashes?”
“We were sent ahead,” Amadea continued, letting the line anchor her words against the stench of stale sweat on both his skin and breath.
“For supplies. For the Ballads we’re preparing. The people trapped there won’t get help. The least they can get is a verse to be remembered by.”
The guard’s jaw clenched. He scrutinized her face, searching for the fracture in her story.
“Auric peaches aren’t incense,” he said. “We don’t hand them to ghosts without a reason. Who or what even dragged you out of the—”
“Corvin,”
Amadea interrupted him, snatching the paper from Artus’ hands and thrusting it up like a shield.
“On three carts pulled by Pure Light buffalo.”
The word caught in her throat like dry ash. She swallowed it down violently.
“He pulled us out when the sky ruptured and the static hit, and sent us here to make sure their story doesn’t disappear with the rest of the doomed place.”
She kept forcing the words the adults uttered over that stand‑off. Her memory wasn’t sure of the details, but the picture was close enough.
“He sent us to trade incense for the golden fruit so there’d be enough to keep the caravan alive. If we starve on the way, no one will ever know the names of the rescued children to sing Aberchord’s story at the border.”
Amadea kept pressing the thought of what she remembered on her mind, with just sufficient precision that the information made sense.
Aberchord’s tragedy was real.
The Auric Order and its sigil were real.
Corvin’s desperate rescuing of children, including herself, was real.
Amadea only fabricated the assignment of her own history.
It was the first time she tried to use her memory to sing a half‑made Ballad on her own story. But she’d seen what Artus did for her once; it didn’t matter if it was irrational. If the Violet Grove could pierce the static, then a story could bend reality.
What mattered in this world wasn’t truth — it was people, places, and the sheer audacity of conviction. She found a blade sharp enough to carve survival out through the gap, even if it meant stacking the corpses of Aberchord beneath her footing for elevation.
The guard’s eyes dragged over her, weighing the heavy contour of her details against her rigid posture, her silver braid, the lean white cloth of the sigil, and the glimmerfern Artus clutched with tension instead of currency.
His hand shot out, closing brutally around her wrist.
“We didn’t see any caravans come out of Aberchord,” he snarled.
The metallic stench of rust and old sweat suffocated her. His grip was immense, the heavy iron of his fingers digging into the tender place Elaine had cared for last night.
“You sure you aren’t just rats trying to eat on someone else’s tragedy?”
They weren’t talking anymore; his claws became trial. The pain flared, hot and immediate. A dark bruise began its slow, ugly bloom on her wrist.
The dissonance flared as static in her ears.
A Beat.
Amadea didn’t flinch.
She held only to the thought of her conviction.
And her thought became a gaze, one with the same steady focus she had seen on Corvin as she clung to the ladder, when he refused to miscount a note on his cello even if the world was drowning in fire.
Even if the dissonance rose in her ears as the circulation to her hand cut off, she wouldn’t yield. She would force the world to believe her.
Her icy gaze unblinking, in absolute certainty.
Amadea vocalized the final defiance of the lie, just beneath her lips, with the full weight of the grip and the horrors of the guard’s eyes.
“I swear it,” she shouted. “We’re only getting props for a Ballad!”
For a Ballad.
That cue was all Artus needed.
“Yes! It’s true!”
Artus stepped into the guard’s space, his voice raw but forceful against the dissonance.
“Let her go! I swear it! We’ll sing for everyone scared, for the ones who didn’t make it out!”
His eyes burned vibrant, hopeful enough to make the guard’s attention shift.
“You can’t stop the truth. The Ballads are real! I’ve been rehearsing a lot of the legend of Aurelian,” he declared, pressing his conviction at the guard.
Artus didn’t look like a grifter gaming a trade. He looked exactly like a broken boy who would stand at a border and bleed his throat dry for strangers if it involved the fantasy of singing his story.
The guard released Amadea’s wrist with a disgusted shove.
His certainty broke before hers.
“Fine. Take a crate. Only a single one!” he spat, jerking his chin toward the tarp. “But you have to choose it yourself.”
He waved vaguely at the rows on the right side of the door, in the open courtyard that held all of the crates.
“From those five, three are filled with garbage. Border incense doesn’t buy guaranteed gold here.”
He paused, relaxing his posture as he leaned against the wall again.
“Only if the Aria’s grace favors you,” his words echoed through the silence. “Will you walk away with anything pink.”
Amadea’s wrist throbbed with a sickening heat that crept up her neck. Her body screamed at her to cuddle inward and cradle her bruises. But the Amadea who hid in the dark would never live to see Act II of the orphaned boy who built an empire from dust.
She didn’t look at the bruise; she looked at the corner of the guard’s eyes.
As Artus moved eagerly toward the center crates, a muscle in the guard’s cheek twitched. His piercing gaze relaxed, almost looking relieved.
Almost.
“We’ll take the one in the corner,” she commanded.
Amadea raised her injured hand, pointing definitively at a single, isolated box sitting in the far left corner.
The guard let out a sharp hiss of breath. His expression of satisfaction vanished.
“The deal has changed,” he said, his eyes hardening with contempt. “I will need something in exchange if you want that one.”
His words felt like betrayal, but before Amadea could react, he lunged toward the cloth that she was carrying.
“This stays with me,” he ordered.
Amadea stumbled backward in retaliation, her instinct flashing into anger.
“What? Why? We already picked! You didn’t say we had—”
Her words were useless. The guard seized the fabric. Amadea dug her heels in, throwing her weight backward to clutch it, but the guard pressed into the exact spot where her injured arm wouldn’t let her hold it without pain.
She tugged it twice, until the searing sting at her arm became unbearable.
She was forced to let go. Her fingers gave out.
“Release her, monster!”
Artus shouted from across the yard, readying his own weapon against him, though the guard kept little interest in either of them.
“Don’t bother me anymore. Keep to your own garbage!” the guard barked.
The man's silhouette turned his back on both, moving to the door to blur into the shadows of the keep.
Amadea glared at him in disbelief. He had stolen Corvin’s signal of peace.
But as she saw him leaving, something else caught her attention. A pendant, the same symbol of the line and the circle, was on the ground, just four steps ahead. He had dropped it during the struggle.
A single thought echoed through her mind.
“The world always takes,” Amadea whispered under the heat of her hands. “The answer is to take back.”
Amadea locked eyes with Artus; her gaze flicked to the crates, then down to the glittering pendant.
He understood that he had to act.
Clang.
He dropped his sword.
The sharp, metallic hit echoed against the stone, ripping the guard’s attention away.
Amadea bolted in a single movement as Artus created a distraction. She snatched the golden pendant from the dirt, burying it deep within the lining of her coat sleeves before the man could turn.
The guard let out one final bark.
“Get out of my sight! No more noise, move and get lost!”
The breath Amadea had been holding surrendered in a jagged exhale of relief. The fight was over.
She joined Artus to claim the prize. However, as they hoisted the heavy crate, pain flared again, and Artus shifted his grip, absorbing the brunt of the weight. Amadea rested one hand on the corner, letting him take most of the weight.
It was another version of the same choice at Act I of Aurelian’s Ballad — his hand reaching into risk so hers could stay steady.
The world was brutal.
It bruised wrists and burned hands.
But it was legible.
They crossed the stream over half‑submerged stones, the crate bumping Artus’ knees. The soft weight inside struck the wood with each step, producing a dull, steady percussion.
At the far bank, Amadea let her arms drop. Kay and Elaine waited by the water, and as the grass creaked, both saw them approach. Elaine rushed forward, lifting the crate’s other end to spare Artus the final stretch.
“You really found them!” Elaine said, in a voice of a rare, unfiltered brightness.
“Only because Amadea convinced the guard,” he answered.
Kay leaned over, scanning the piled fruit.
“That’s more peaches than I expected from two kids and half an outpost.”
Amadea kept quiet.
Her wrist hurt.
The pendant pressed too sharply against the bruise, so she slipped it deeper into her coat. It travelled all the way throughout her arm, until she reached with the other hand one of the pockets inside the lining of her coat.
Amadea kept it close to her chest.
Then Corvin arrived last.
His weary eyes went over the crate, performing a silent arithmetic. He brushed aside the top row. Most of the auric peaches were pink — plump fruit with rose skins and faint golden seams.
But in one corner, half‑hidden beneath a fold of coarse cloth and three more ordinary peaches, one held a different color.
Gold.
Soft, immaculate gold.
Corvin went completely still. His eyes opened wide.
“By the heavens,” he whispered, the smoke in his voice giving way to reverence.
“It has been so long since I saw a true auric peach. The Aria must have blessed us.”
The guard had only seen the pink skins. The gold had remained buried.
Elaine’s face eased into a profound relief; Kay released a long, low breath. The nameless children gathering behind them fell silent.
Corvin looked at Amadea; she didn’t have the cloth he’d handed them anymore. Something in his unreadable eyes deciphered the brutal silence lingering between the two children.
“It belongs to you,” he declared.
She blinked.
“Your birthday gift for your second Cycle,” Corvin added. “Earned the hard way.”
Amadea glanced at the crate, then down at the throbbing bruise hidden beneath her sleeve, then at the faint pressure of the pendant against her chest.
“Everyone eats,” she said, her voice dull. “Because Aberchord doesn’t.”
No one answered.
Silence stretched. Kay’s jaw tightened. Elaine looked toward the tree line.
It was Corvin’s hand that settled on Amadea’s shoulder, a grounding weight heavier than the fruit.
“Exactly,” he whispered into her ear.
“Everyone eats because you lied well, my sharp note.”
He placed the golden peach into her uninjured hand.
It was warm.
That evening, they transformed survival into a feast.
The fire they built beside the repaired cart roared higher than prudence normally allowed. No cymatics veil this time, only the ruins of dark stone.
Corvin knelt at the makeshift hearth at the center of the terraces, his ring catching the dancing embers as he coaxed the flame into dry wood. He did not call the cello from the ring this time. He let the music sit in his hands against the sound of the running river instead.
This time, Elaine conjured her instrument and began playing the first jolly tune Amadea had ever heard.
It was not complicated; the melody rose on four notes and landed on a fall gentle enough that its happiness made the campfire a sanctuary. Soon after, Kay joined in, his hands clapping in a percussion.
They sang for Amadea’s birthday while Corvin focused on the peaches.
From the cart, he pulled a dented pan; from his patchwork coat, he retrieved a knife and two thin spice packets.
He sliced the pink auric peaches in half, carved out their pits, and laid the hollow halves across flat stones ringing the fire. Their skins served as crude bowls, and he poured into them a thick stew of foraged roots, salted meats, and broken bread that simmered in steam.
Amadea’s curiosity drew her to his side.
For a while she only watched. There were even rules to the way he cooked, down to the same grammar as the morning spar.
Even when he wasn’t playing his cello, each portion still answered another portion.
“You aren’t playing tonight,” she said.
“Tonight has enough music in it already.” He tipped his chin toward Elaine’s tune without looking up. “Perhaps I will join later, when Artus continues his story.”
He continued working each half, until they were all laid in rows. He then opened one of the spice packets and held the small sack up to the firelight for a moment, eyeing its contents the way he eyed the strings of his music.
Until he gave it a single, strong punch.
Clap.
Dark powder tipped into the stew, and the air filled with the smell of herbs.
Amadea sneezed.
Corvin painted a slight smile.
This was the same thing she had kicked in the cart.
“Intense, aren’t they? Pulverized pieces of something called shame moss.”
He tipped in more powder, at a carefree pace.
“It’s a sort of plant that reacts to emotion, hence the name.”
Amadea stared at him in silence.
“The stronger the emotion, the stronger the spice. You can probably imagine the rest.”
“Plant that reacts to emotion?”
“Yes, we’re likely to find many more once the snow recedes.”
Clap.
Corvin continued pummeling the bag, letting slivers of the paste drool into the broth as they settled at the top of the stew in dark-red spirals.
“They’re like Elaine’s buffalo — pure light, glowing most of the time — except that light isn’t enough for them. They need feeling to shine.”
He finished with the pouch and stopped to look at her.
“If you are happy, the plant is happy.” His smoky voice rolled over his calculating eyes. “At least most of the time. If they grow near sadness long enough, they grow strange.”
He sighed — he realized Amadea was looking at him, wide-eyed, as if he were Artus telling fantasy ballads, but his explanation wasn’t a fantasy.
“A-ah… Well.” He exhaled. “It's more complicated stuff, I know. You should rejoin the group.”
He put a hand over her shoulder to guide her away to the campfire.
“I still need some time before all of these are done.”
A Beat.
She didn’t move.
Amadea leaned back against a nearby crate and folded her arms, careful of the bruised one, and studied him the way he studied everything else.
She wasn’t letting him off the hook this time — this was not something as weird as whatever the Auric Heptacode was. Thus, she held her certainty of demanding an explanation of what he had just named.
“Corvin. You know how many we are,” she said. “Without looking.”
“Sixty-six peach bowls for each to have three rounds,” he answered immediately, eyes never leaving her shoulder. “As of this morning’s count.”
“So you do know everything you look at.”
“That’s just survival.”
“Then survive my question.” Her voice stayed even; her eyes didn’t.
He released her.
“What are the plants called? The ones that eat feelings?”
Another Beat.
Scrap. Scrap.
The pan answered first.
“Eleos Blooms,” he said finally, giving in the way cut peaches gave in for the stew. “Eleos means something between compassion and mercy. It’s a word from the Great Expanse.”
He let the words dim into a mellow whisper.
“You truly are a sharp note, Amadea.”
He went back to cooking, his hands threading each peach and its seasoning, but slower, measuring his words as if they were powder.
“That’s the common name for the whole family of them. They are flora, usually with a receptive sort of stem or petals, that drink feeling the way roots drink rain. They do so out of the air, off resonance, off whatever people breathe onto them.”
The aroma shifted. The herbs dissolved into the stew.
“Every feeling has a color, if you know where to look.”
“So then the moss in our dinner drinks—”
“Humiliation.”
The word fell flat and honest between them.
“Mostly, at least. Crushed and dried it turns sweet with auric peaches. Fills out thin meat, and steadies a shaking stomach.”
He tipped his chin at her sleeve, masterfully weaving his words with the strikes of the knife.
“It can read your feelings too, if you were ever around this plant while it was growing. That’s how they change from green to silver instead.”
He paused to pour some of the herbs into his hand so Amadea could see them before throwing them into the pot. The parts that weren’t powder were almost like a soft, wine-red paste, with some bubbled edges caught between each circular bundle.
It looked like glimmerfern but without all of the leafy edges.
“And when someone standing near them means an apology, they turn dark blue or dark red. Like the ones we are eating.”
Amadea blinked at the plan, watching the acrid steam climb.
“That's the real lesson about these blooms,” the rasp of his voice became chalky.
“Take back what you must — and then make something from what remains.”
A Beat.
“How do you know all this…?”
“That we can eat shame moss?” He laughed, “I didn’t try to give the humiliation in the ground a bite. I learned they had a good taste from watching Elaine and her buffalo eating them with other dry grasses.”
For the first time all evening, he glanced across the fire — to where the rest of the caravan sat. Starlight and Ostinato were there, free of their reins.
“She doesn’t harvest a plant without asking something of it first, or leaving something behind. Most folk think that’s sentiment.”
His mouth tilted.
“But no, it’s the earliest form of agromancy. And here we can’t afford to waste anything — not roots, not meat, not grief. And especially for emotions, it’s better to turn them to food than to Atonalis.”
He sprinkled in the last pinch.
“The peach-bowls and the stew itself, though—” Corvin’s smoky voice went somewhere to faint popping cinders “—I got it from an eccentric astrologer that could read dreams through the stars.”
He began reminiscing about something, looking only partly to the flames.
“Lenore. From before the rot took the luxury of flavor.”
Fruit sweetness rose into the air, mixing with the bitterness of the dark ruins and the metallic edge of the bygone history of a world before the caravan.
The smoky trail of cooked peaches danced rhythmically to the wind.
“Magic,” she said to herself.
Corvin glanced at her.
“You think magic is only the light in rings and gems?”
He handed her one of the half peaches.
“Taste it.”
The stew was warm, earthy, and rough against her tongue. The auric peach cut through the bitterness with a sweetness that did not belong in such a place.
“It’s good,” she said with her eyes open.
Corvin’s mouth almost became a smile.
“That’s the taste of Eleos Blooms for you.”
Last, he reached for the only golden peach, rolling the round shape in his hands.
“Light keeps the bloom alive. Feeling tells it what life is for.”
Then he stopped, and his eyes met hers.
“Your gift,” he said. “Your choice.”
Amadea glanced at the children gathering toward the fire; the smoke of cooked shame moss had reached all the way there. Elaine wiped her eyes, halting the violin’s melody, blaming the acrid smell.
“Half for the Ballad,” she said. “Half for tomorrow.”
Corvin studied her for a long moment. Then he nodded once.
“A sovereign’s choice,” he assured her, and drew the knife through in one slow stroke. He set the halves apart on a clean flat stone beside the coals — one facing the flames, one facing the sky.
“Help me with the first serving, Amadea. Bring these to Elaine.”
She grabbed some of the cups — or at least attempted to. She held one hand steady, but her other could not. Still, half a grip was enough to try for the rest of the way.
The lingering pain dug into her wrist each time she flexed her fingers, but for the warmth of her birthday, it was worth it.
Elaine caught her struggling mid-note — she let it resolve, and set the violin down on the grass without ceremony, and crossed the distance to take the wobbling row of magical peach-bowls from her hands.
“No,” she said softly, steering Amadea toward the crates. “Birthday girls serve by sitting. I will take care of this; you find a spot to enjoy Artus’ story.”
Amadea nodded once, and Elaine signaled two of the nameless children to accompany her to the middle of the hearth.
While she wasn’t carrying fruit anymore, she decided to follow with her eyes instead, from a place by a crate and a ruined wall that could serve as a cradle.
Elaine moved down the crescent with the ladle, quick and precise, and trailing behind her came the two nameless voices — a trailing one that belonged to a girl with a charcoal stub clutching cloth, and a second melodic one of an older figure walking pressed close to her shoulder. Their heads bent together over some private negotiation conducted entirely in whispers and finger-points.
At every round of serving the peaches, the younger one paused every so often to offer up the cloth. At every wobble of her bottom lip, the older girl leaned in and examined whatever shape was on it, delivering a judgment barely audible.
Amadea heard the verdict once.
“That’s only the first meaning,” the taller voice said.
Whatever the ruling, it worked faster than the ladle did.
A few rounds back and forth of serving peaches, and they all finally settled. Elaine grabbed her violin again, and the melody continued anew with Corvin’s cello this time.
Amadea cradled one of her three pink peach-bowls, letting the fragrant steam thaw her bruised wrist before taking a careful bite. Inside the delicate, roasted walls of the rose-tinted skin pooled a mellow, almost-yellow broth, accompanied by the swirling dark-red spirals of pulverized shame moss.
The warmth of the meal lingered on her tongue. They were immensely flavorful, from their rich texture of earthy spices to the sweet undertones.
The heavy, salted liquid carried the sharp, herbaceous bite of a complex bitterness that melted seamlessly into the honeyed flesh of the auric peach and the caramelized crisp that formed at the edges of its syrupy nectar.
Even magic was in the fruit, in dark spice anchored by vibrant golden sweetness.
As she savored the final tender cuts of meat, she stepped into that rich stew; the depth of the magical fruit left a lingering warmth on her tongue until the savory feeling receded.
Artus climbed back onto his overturned bell and gathered a spectacle out of pure posture.
“In honor of the Violet Empress, Amadea.” He announced, “I will sign it without a single mistake from Act I: The Gold of Silent Stars.”
The words he spoke lingered in her mind; it was the warmth of consonance. And between the second bowl and the third, Artus finished Act I of his Ballad.
This time the legend of the Mythical Virtuoso of Resonance found its final verse at the edge of the peach fire. The lyric he had stumbled over beside the coughing boy now came out clean, as if the missing words about the Pulse had been hiding in the day’s war for fruit.
His voice rang over the crackling logs, riding Elaine’s violin while Corvin and Kay drove the march beneath it.
Then the real prize came.
“Act II,” Artus announced, sweeping the branches low. “From the Extended Daedalus Ballads!: The Thief, the Beast, and the Blind Man.”
The fire leaned toward him. The fire had two heartbeats.
And the story left the courthouse behind.