“Mahra,” I whisper.
The next moment I scramble to my feet and stare out across the darkened landscape, straining after that song, that black soulfire. I know they are out there—the wild licorneir, thevelrhoarbeasts. Those who have lost their riders, lost their way, and run rampant with grief across the lonely stretches of their vanishing world. Gathered to their mother’s side, they sing with her, a great chorus of broken song that shatters my very soul to hear. And yet thelast time I heard it, I wanted to join, wanted to throw my own hearttorn voice into that storm of souls and become one with thevelrhoar. But Taar’s strong arms wrapped around me. He held me fast, and I realized I had something which mattered more to me than my own loss, something worth fighting for.
Only Taar is gone now.
I rise up on my toes, as though this slight increase of height will cast my vision farther. A cold wind blows, and it seems to carry the song away from my perception. I shiver, holding my own body tight, and feel once more abandoned to my own pain. How could I have believed I was meant to save this world? How could I have believed the gods gifted me this voice for some great and noble purpose? I see in my mind’s eye the faces of the Rocaryn people, watching me as Taar and I rode through the Hidden City. They hated me—and they killed Taar for loving what they hated. I don’t want to help them. Even if I had the strength, the power, I don’t want to stand between them and their doom. They deserve whatever is coming to them.
But Taar loved them.
I shudder, shaking my head viciously against the thought that will not leave. He loved them. They did not understand him, did not recognize the sacrifices he made for their sakes. And it never mattered. He loved them anyway. In the end, he was unwilling to abandon them, not even for my sake. So how can I abandon them now?
“It doesn’t matter,” I whisper to the silent, uncaring night. “Ican’t help. I can’t help anyone. I am alone, I am lost, I am useless.”
Tilting back my head, I stare up at the sky, convinced the black lightning will rip through the layers of reality at any moment, and thevardimnarwill fall. But all I see are those millions of dancing, singing stars. They mock me with their beauty, their sense of purpose, the sacred geometry of their dance.
Then I hear it again: the strains of Mahra’s song, the voices of her children. The brokenness reaches me from across vast stretches of dark miles, filling me up from the inside. But it’s different somehow. Different from every other time I’ve heard it. Still huge, vaster than an ocean, wild and frenetic, almost lunatic in its loneliness, and yet . . .
From the very first time I heard that song, from the very first day I entered Cruor and discovered the magnificent horror of this world, I have had but one thought: harmony. That song needs only the right harmony to sing the broken pieces back into wholeness.
Now as I listen to it, however, I cannot help thinking:It isn’t their song which is broken.
Strange. My gods-gift, highly attuned to the slightest fluctuation of melody, rhythm, and the mysterious strains of harmonics beyond human perception, cannot help but discern all the broken shards of melody, the way they fracture against each other. But there’s a rightness to it which I could not hear before. Instead it is my own perspective which suddenly feels far too small, too simple, too lacking in understanding to comprehend what it is these greatbeings sing. These beings who are so far beyond the limitations of my mortality, however divinely endowed. They may wear physical forms, but their true essence is soulfire, the burning hearts of stars.
And that song they sing? That tormented melody which wracks my very being with its pain? It is beautiful. It is a thing beyond mortal description, beyond the limitations of words. Were I a Miphates mage, I would collapse to my knees in despair, recognizing that no written spell in any language could ever hope to capture the power and majesty of such a song.
But if I open my heart, if I open my gift . . . if I open my hearttorn soul . . . I may begin to understand.
My lips move. The sounds emitted by human throat and tongue and breath seem far too small for such a song. But I must give it physical shape, even as my spirit rises to sing in a voice outside the perceivable range. Wordless, simple, a low note born from the guttural pain in my core, I let it out. Let it flow from the soles of my feet, through bones and blood and feeble flesh. A humble offering, but made of the best I have to give. It rises in strength and intensity, from a moan to a wail to a high, keening cry—unlovely, harsh, a haunting specter of sound which echoes away from me on my lonely hilltop, caught on a wind and carried swiftly through the night.
My breath spent, I gasp another lungful of air: a raw, agonized sound which scrapes my vocal chords even as my chest expands. Then I sing again, louder than before, that same low drone risingto a shriek. Ululating and reverberating through every fiber of my frail human frame.
This is the song of the hearttorn. A song I have sung in my soul but never tried to give physical voice. The song of the bereft, the soul of pain rendered into a music no living creature can bear to hear and yet which all must know someday if they are brave enough to face the ordeal of living.
The third time I draw breath, the third time I let my voice ring out, I shape the sound anew, using tongue and lips to structure the keening into a single word, which I fling from me with all the force I can muster:“Mahra!”
Far away, across the valley, the mother of all licorneir turns her head. Though she is too far off for my mortal gaze to perceive, I feel the moment when eyes which leap with black flames find me. The intensity of that gaze strikes me to the quick, and I stagger, nearly lose my breath.
Then Mahra sings again. There is command in her song: the great herd of her children changes course, thundering hooves, burning flanks, streaming comet tails and manes flying in the wind of their tremendous speed. They sing as they come, and the song is so great, so terrible, it takes shape before my gods-gifted vision: a massive front of writhing fire and pulsing energy, rushing across that landscape like a pyroclastic flow.
I should be afraid. Maybe I am afraid. But fear simply does not matter anymore.
They seem to cover the space between us in moments. Time means nothing in the midst of that song. It descends on me, covering the valley and swarming the hillside where I stand, waiting. I feel the truth of my own incredible smallness—the limitations of time and mortality and death. Some part of me recalls, as though from a dream, what it was to be unbound by such petty chains, to be a limitless essence of stardust, stretched out over eons, and I know that if I were to hear this song while in that state, I would more fully comprehend it. As it is, it will likely kill me.
I stand firm, even as the thundering hooves quake the ground beneath me, threatening to rend open stone and let the heat at the core of the world escape to blend with their own black fire. Closing my eyes, I hold out my arms, breathe in the unfathomable power of song and soul and flame as it washes over me. Only yesterday, to stand in the midst of this song would have ripped me into little tattered shreds of being. Now it catches me up in its tempest gale and bears me away. I am not prey to the storm, but a part of it, drawn to its very heart.
The licorneir flow over the hill, their flaming bodies passing so close to me. My outflung fingertips brush fiery manes and flanks as they surge past. And yet I remain uncrushed, so nimble are their footfalls, so perfect the flow and control of their powerful bodies. Here, in the center of their song, I hear harmonies I could not before. What had been pure chaos and brokenness from a distance is, in fact, far deeper, far more complex than I everimagined. I hear the pain of their loss, I hear the loneliness of their souls—but I hear more as well. In this song is the very essence of love. A love which can only come into being in conjunction with loss. It is the great balance, the great mystery, that one cannot exist in this world without the other. The great sorrow that must and will devastate all mortal souls.
But it is not the end.
I hear it now—echoes of eternity. The vastness of existence beyond stone, beyond air, beyond flesh, beyond words, beyond time. The great truth of immortal song. The song of love itself. And I know: only love remains.
I felt it sometimes, frail flesh-creature though I am. In those moments of deepest connection with Taar, when our breaths synced, and our hearts beat in tandem, and our songs joined. I had felt the unendingness of those far-too-brief gasps of utter joy. Those moments exist even now and will continue to exist when I am dead, when I am gone, when all that I know is rendered dust and forgotten. Though I pass beyond time’s bounds, and time itself is made naught, what I knew with Taar will go on. Beyond death, beyond time.
Suddenly the song of the hearttorn licorneir is clear in my ears. It is not a song of brokenness at all, but the song of heaven itself. I am moved to open up my heart and sing with them, the song my gods-gifted voice was always meant to sing. As the melody flows from inside me, I see Diira galloping across endless plains, fasterthan thought, her soulfire blazing bright as a shooting star. She is real—not imagined, but true in a way I myself, wrapped in this fleshly body, cannot be.
But where is Taar? As I sing, I search for him as well, and yet I do not see him. Though the song ripples along thevelracord, which still anchors my broken heart, he does not appear to my vision. Tears fill and spill over my eyes, for I had thought perhaps, in this moment of revelation, I would glimpse him again, one last time.
I become aware of a presence. Standing directly in front of me, a burning sun of power only just contained in physical form. My throat tightens. The song which had poured so freely from me catches, falters, turns to silence. Slowly I open my eyes, face the being before me.
