The once lush grotto was picked clean like a derelict carcass before a flock of ravenous carrion birds, all knowledge of the events that brought on such obliteration now filed away and forgotten by those ill-starred enough to have lived through them. The world in unison, in that moment before the forgetting, tensely held its breath at the thought of the atrocities that would follow.
It was a jaded-green breath, deep and damp and let loose, smelling of turned earth and still water. It was a breath that hushed through the fronds of feathery-ferns taller than shrines, and stirred the silver bells on the creeping vines that clung to the ruins of what had been, long ago, an institution for learning the rhythmic induction of rainfall. Elaborate halls that once held the cheers and orchestration of all manner of fantastically-crafted instruments had fallen dramatically silent and the neighboring vegetation had suffered for it.
Nestled in the heart of this viridescent silence, in a courtyard where archaic flagstones had long since surrendered to moss and persistent, tender roots, a peculiar girl played a somber tune upon her flute of unlacquered brass.
She was typical of Xian females in her physical attributes; short in stature with long ears, small bust, and a slender frame. Compassion for all she gazed upon was locked in her irises and seldom anything less than sweetness rolled off her tongue. Her name was Lian, and she was a survivor of the horrific massacre of the Xian Eldari.
She did not play her melody loudly. The tones emancipated from her mallet flute were sometimes fragile things, like spider-silk threads of rainbow-iridescent sound woven into the thick and humid air surrounding her. Her euphony was a song of becoming. Where the heaviest of notes fell, a closed lotus bud by the murky pond below her perch shivered and unfolded its petals, not unlike a baby bird unfurling and outstreching its wings for the first time. A crack in the great limestone statue of a once revered Xian philosopher—a statue now more lichen than likeness—seamed itself shut with a soft, grinding rumble.
This was the little magick left in her. Not the great, thunderous sorceries of the Celestial Architects, nor the profound, lunar-shaping disciplines of the Mountain Kings. This was the finite magick of mending. The healing at the heart of Mother Nature.
She was the last of the Xian, or so she'd been told by her Master through countless stories until the elder Aughra’s voice had become as thin as rice-paper and had blown away as if carried on the winds two monsoons past. The Xian were purged from the ledgers of the world by the decree of the Nine Dragon-Kings and relegated to a footnote in the imperial archives of world history. A fae of mist and melody who had, as it was officially recorded, politely chosen to fade away when the Glorious Harmonious Dynasty of the Celestial Dragon had ushered in the Age of Correct Measurement.
Lian knew this record to be a lie. She had been all of six years, hiding in the Square's water-clock cabinet, when the soldiers with scales like tarnished coins and musk like wet metal had come. She remembered the silence that followed their departure—a silence more disturbing than any of the many screams that preceded it. The silence of a hundred-thousand flutes, never to be played again.
Now, she was the solitary flute that dare not be heard by more than the flora. She was the shadow that willingly slipped into the veil of an encroaching darkness rather than be pinned down by the revealing rays of either Sun or Moon. She was the whisper the wind dared not carry into the court of the Dragon-Kings.
As she finished her melody, the final note hung above the courtyard like the shimmering wings of dragonflies in the sunlight, before dissolving into the abyss of another sunset as rapidly as honey in hot water. The new lotus bloom nodded, heavy with its own magnificence. The moss imbibed the sweetness of the terminable tones and grew a fraction greener. Everything was, in its small, constrained way, perfect for a moment. That was the problem.
Lian lowered her mallet flute and looked up. The sky, viewed through the lattice of giant fern and crumbling, ornate stonework, was a corrupted colour. It should have been the clear, endless blue of a kingfisher’s wing, or the tumultuous grey of the monsoon. Instead, it was a pale, sickly yellow, like the pages of a parchment scroll left too close to incense smoke. A strained, tired colour had occupied the sky erroneously for three hundred and seventy-four days. It was the colour of a world attempting with all its might to hold a pose until its muscles cried out in pain.
A faint, discordant hum vibrated in the back of Lian's teeth. It was always there now. Unbeknownst to her, it was the sound of the Cosmic Pearl, fractured and straining in the heart of the Dragon’s distant, geometric palace. It was the wail of the great, arrogant axle upon which the universe revolved, groaning under a weight it was never meant to bear. The Dragon-Kings called it the Symphony of Supreme Order. To Lian, it sounded like a metal spike being slowly driven across the surface of polished stone.
In the stillness, the green world around her felt less like a sanctuary and more like a frantically embroidered shroud. She was tending a diminished garden in a decrepit tomb that felt larger than the sky. The essence of all she had known clung dejectedly to this area, and when she could no longer elude the memories that plagued her beyond her night terrors, this courtyard was where she could hope to find respite.
As if encumbered by the act of unfolding, a single, oblong petal detached from the lotus and drifted downward onto the still, darkened water of the pond. Lighter than a feather, it floated there as a perfect pink island, and for a heartbeat, it rested. Then, without a ripple, it was sucked beneath the black surface. Not slowly. Not gently. It was taken.
Lian did not move. She had seen this before. It was the agitation of the world, in miniature. A moment of fragile beauty, then a swift, inaudible consumption by something beneath.
She raised the brass flute again, her fingers tracing the familiar, cool holes. She would play the song of mending once more, for the empty courtyard, for the dead Xian she could no longer weep over, for the memory of her Master, for the stolen petal. She would play because it was the only thing she could find in herself to do in this moment.
When she began to blow through the elaborate wind instrument, the sickly yellow light deepened, just a shade, towards the colour of a jaundiced cornea. Far away, in a palace that defied the curves of the world she inhabited, Urantia, a clockwork star on a great orrery clicked into a new position.
The Great Conjunction had begun.
0 comments