Just one more and this will be done, Volcex was thinking. The crystal sphere bounced back up into his hand. Now if I can just figure out how to get to… Crumkindivia? Is that really what it's called? How could anything real be named that? He went back to poring over aetherscrolls, and that's why Meryri ended up kicking him hard enough to send him careening through the air almost into the river. "What in the Nil?"

"Pay attention, I've been talking to you for two minutes now," Meryri said impatiently, tapping her gigantic furred paw on the young elfen's head.

"Well, I am trying to figure out how to do this bloody quest, and the scrolls are not helping. Do you know where a place called Crumkindivia is and how to get there? That can't really be a place's real name, can it?"

Meryri was glaring balefully at him. "Are you still doing that? I finished that two days ago. Now listen, I noticed something, but I can't find out more. You're little, you can probably spy, right?"

"If you finished it, you must know how to get there." Luckily for him, Meryri was not a telekinetic, because her stare looked like it might move daggers into his chest. "Fine, help me with this and I'll help you with that."

"Forget about that. Besides, I can't help. Someone else took me. By touching a cookie." Volucex shook his head; it's bad enough she wouldn't help, but did she have to also tease him with absurdities? "Look, Magnagora and Celest are eternal sworn enemies, right?"

She never did read any of the aetherscrolls. She would probably think of the library as a good place for a fight, or a nap. "Yeah. It goes back to Project Cosmic Hope. Let me tell you about it."

But before he could start, she was shaking her head. "So I saw this hidden spot in the northern mountains that isn't on any of the maps, and the weird thing is, there's a bunch of taintfolk and a bunch of lightfolk there working together, or at least that's what my far-sight shows, but I can't get close enough to see what they're doing. But you're little and besides you can make yourself invisible. So you go in and listen for a few and come back and tell me. It could be important!"

"I don't know. Even one of them could kill me twice in the time it would take me to figure out how to cast a spell. And I am no longer protected by grace. I, ummm, I rejected it because I thought I had to, when I was trying to help some gnomes…" He trailed off in embarrassment.

But Meryri wasn't paying attention; her eyes had the far-away focus that meant she was using some kind of spell of discernment, probably one he hadn't learned yet. "Never mind," she said. "They're leaving. I can go look by myself."

He almost shrugged and left her to go. He still had to gather pixies and do something about songbirds, he wasn't sure what yet. But as she turned, he called out, "Wait, I will go with you," as he fell into line behind her. He didn't want to admit that it sounded interesting. Nor that she did. "You might need someone to dispel illusions or something." She didn't press him on this excuse -- she was in too much of a hurry to run off into the mountains.

Well, lucky for her she was basically a giant fur carpet with arms, because it was winter and the mountains were freezing. I have never been this cold, he thought, shivering. Well, maybe I have, before the Portal. There was so much he didn't remember. He wasn't even sure he'd always been elfen. "Here it is," she said, pointing towards a blank face of impassable stone. But before he could raise an objection, she walked right into it, and vanished. He waited a few moments in trepidation (not to mention refrigeration) before he closed his eyes and followed her… right through the face of solid stone and into a cave whose entrance was apparently covered by some sort of illusion. Though one he could not detect. Little wonder, he thought. I barely started my study of illusory arts. Anyone with half a--

His thoughts ran out and hid somewhere, while he gaped. There, at the end of a twisting tunnel whose curves and dips were littered with the broken bodies of some kind of strange, chitinous monstrosities and a fluid that was entirely the wrong color to be blood but what else could it be, was some sort of ancient stone-and-steel vault door. It was clear it had been buried, but recently exposed by hard work with pick-axes and probably also magic; the floor around it was littered in chunks of the same stone that the tunnel itself was made of. But the vault door was a wholly different kind of stone that was somehow also steel, as if the two substances had been melted, then swirled into one another, only a little so they remained both distinct whorls and striated admixture, then allowed to harden that way. And he did not even have to concentrate with his thirdeye to sense the layers of complicated warding spells and charms that both overlaid and infused the vault door.

At the ground beneath it was not only chunks of broken stone, but also the shattered ends of steel pick-axes, rent off by main force.

But the door showed not the slightest dent or scratch. Nor did it show any scorches, despite the obvious burn-marks on stone around it. And as he looked closer, he could see the signs of titanic elemental and physical forces that the cityfolk must have brought to bear, leaving the surroundings smudged, melted, drenched, burnt, cracked, pummeled, fractured, and splintered. But the door, and its engravings and enchantments, might have been made new that very day.

"Well, it's clear they were trying to open this, and it's clear they failed," Meryri was saying, ever the mistress of stating the obvious. "And if they couldn't, then there's little chance we can. I suppose we wait for people more experienced--"

"Lady Trialante!"

Meryri's verbal momentum carried her through three or four more words before she stopped and stared. "Lady who?"

Volcex stepped up and pointed out a series of symbols amongst the engravings, each of them picked out with corresponding shimmers from one of the warding enchantments. "She was a Goddess, then a Voice. It's a long story that I am sure you didn't read." Meryri frowned, but he was continuing before she could object. "And She used words in Her own language for Her magical songs. Some of the things I have learned, or will learn, are in that language. Like the bardoon."

"Bardoon?"

"It is one of our songs. I don't know it yet. Look, here, and here. There is a warding on this door that is…" His mind was racing ahead of his mouth, so he wouldn't remember later what he said at that moment. "I don't know enough to figure it out, but I think the ward has a song in it, or perhaps a song would open it, and it is in Her words." He turned and sat heavily in frustration.

"Oh, is that it? No wonder the cityfolk couldn't get in. They wouldn't know much about Her, including Her words. Only a nerd like you would. Come on, we'll ask Her," Meryri said, undaunted.

"Ask Her?" He was about to regale her with the tale of how Trialante had died, after hiding Her Voice, but damn her if she wasn't running on ahead. He had to scramble, and even use some planar magic, to catch up with her as she darted into the Lyceum.

"Nuts. Well, She was here," Meryri said. "Wait, my mentor told me about this. We have to gather sparrows." Crap, this must be that quest Lekari was telling me about. If Meryri knows more than me about something about Trialante, she will never let me live it down, he thought.

But it wasn't about Lekari's songbirds. They spent the next few hours wandering the forest, climbing into the trees, tossing out breadcrumbs, whistling cheery tunes, and thus finding twenty sparrows and leading them one by one into a glade not far from the stage. Meryri did not deign either to explain this nor tease him for not knowing it, so he decided not to push it. But he was dumbstruck when the twentieth sparrow caused the flock -- no, a host, a group of sparrows is a host -- to burst into song together, and then he wasn't sure what happened, but the song grew loud and filled his soul and then Trialante was there.

Not really. It was a sileni, one of the now-extinct people that had sharded from one of the other Elders, he couldn't remember the name, but he could also tell that Trialante, or Her Voice, or something, somehow inhabited the sileni. And he didn't understand how. She had died, he was sure he had read that! But there was no time to ask. Meryri was thumping him with her huge biceps, no doubt meant to jar him into paying attention, rather than, say, dislocating his shoulder. "Tell Her, the words you saw, the ward!"

So he described it as well as he could, wishing he'd had time to take notes. The spirit, or the sileni, or the Elder Goddess, or whatever it was, considered him gravely and for so long in silence that he thought perhaps She was not even really there listening, but just an illusion, perhaps projected from the nearby stage. But then She spoke, and it was as if Her voice came from a chorus of spirits in a world very near to this one, but not quite overlapping with it. "I do not remember creating such a Ward, but there are many things I do not remember. However, the words you have told me are words of one of My songs, and they are words that might be a ward. And if they are, you need only recite them back in a particular melody, harmony, and cadence. Attend." Her form shimmered, and for a moment it seemed like there were two of Her, ten of Her, twenty of Her, standing in the same spot but moving slightly out of synch with one another; and in the hands of each one a different instrument appeared, a harp here, a flute, a lyre, a viol, a guitar, a hand-drum, and a dozen more of types he had never seen, forms that had been lost to the artisans of this time and this world. A melody began to arise, from all these ghostly instruments and all these ghostly voices, complex and yet at its heart breathtakingly simple; his mind blossomed with understanding as he saw how the melodies and rhythms interlocked, how they were just a few phrases and modulations, repeated, reversed, reflected, and intertwined. Multiplicity and simultaneity from repeated combination of simple forms.

Then the song was done and so was the spirit; he could still feel the cadence in his heartbeat, hear it in the movement of leaves, taste it in the tang of the air, even as She finished fading. He could picture the melody as if it were shifting swirls of leaves in the wind, in every color of the rainbow.

"What did She mean about preserving it?" Meryri was saying as he became dimly aware of her, her hulking form seeming to step through the maelstrom of colorful music-leaves.

He blinked, and shook his head, and the words of the song came to him -- how had he missed them? Murmuring them back to himself in the right melodies, he made sure he had the song affixed in his mind, while holding up one finger to indicate to Meryri to wait. Perhaps not even Estarra could have silenced Meryri, but for some reason, something about the beatific look on his face, for once, she was quiet and waited until he spoke.

"The song will open the door. But the door protects an ancient power that must be preserved until the Final Battle." He could hear the capital letters in his own voice. "This is not just a final battle, this is the Final Battle. The one that will end all the fights and fulfill all the prophecies. That day is not today." He opened eyes he had not realized he'd closed. "We have to stop the cityfolk from getting to it!"

For once, Meryri was the one holding up a hand, urging caution. "They will never know the way in if it depends on the lore of Trialante," she said, but the words sounded thin even to her own ears. Had she not just been suggesting they, a pair of novices who had barely gotten the scent of Newton Caverns out of their clothes, should spy on this convocation of demigods? Surely they could, and would, spy on the forest-folk. (He was already worrying that perhaps they were doing so right now.) "Anyway, we should wait and tell the Regent, or the… the… well, anyway, someone bigger than us."

He felt sure it could not wait, but he wasn't sure how to persuade her. With a clarity he could not explain, he knew that the cityfolk would be back, soon, and they would have figured out a way in. Perhaps he had sensed someone spying on them without noticing it consciously, so caught up was he in the song. Perhaps he was touched by a moment of the seer-sight. Perhaps the song itself contained a memory of the Last Seed. But he was sure. Rather than trying to convince her, he decided, what's good for the goose is good for the gander; he turned and started a run for the northern mountains, leaving her to scramble to catch up.

What the Nil is a gander, anyway?

"Crap, crap, crap," she was saying as he was tuning up his guitar before the Vault. "They're heading this way. They're going to squash us like weevils." Even he was impressed by her bravery; she stood in the tunnel, her claymore held upright before her considerable bulk, as if her size and the size of her sword would make the slightest difference when ten cityfolk demigods came tumbling into the tunnel. He put this out of his mind; she would buy him a few seconds, or she wouldn't. He could do nothing about it either way. There was only the song now.

As the notes and melodies poured out of his throat and were coaxed from gentle, loving caresses over the six strings of his guitar, the shimmering lights of the ward began to light up in all the colors of the rainbow, one word, one symbol, one glyph at a time seeming almost to leap forward and twist in perfect time with the underlying heartbeat of the song. Meryri was saying something, but he could hear nothing but the swelling of the music as the vault door itself sang back to him in counterpoint, and the colors became bright and swallowed all other perceptions.

There was a faint creaking sound, but he could not hear it. Instead, he could feel nothing but a sense of youth. He was newly minted, just beginning to figure out his way around. Everything he saw, every sound, it was new to him, and though he was sometimes frustrated by figuring it all out, the newness of everything was delight incarnate. Some part of his mind, holding itself rooted in his own life, thought he was just thinking of what it is to be a novice, struggling to complete a planar quest. But the sensations, though eerily familiar, were not his own; it was more like they rhymed with his own life, than that they were the song of his life.

He was holding in his hand some primal power, as yet untapped by the entire world, something he had been the first to discover. Something he knew had greater power than anything any of his brothers and sisters had ever touched. No, not simply greater; more fundamental. This thing was what reality itself was made of. To be able to direct it, to compose it into forms and structures of his liking, that would be a power to remake everything. Everything.

In his other hand, a crude construction. A knobby, twisted branch of some kind of shimmering wood, fallen from a tree, or perhaps not a tree but some ancient forebearer of trees. A string, a twisted cable made of -- made of what? Aether itself? Steel? The gut of some creature? It seemed somehow to be all of these at once, but which one first? He was bringing these hands together, pulling the string taut and imbuing it with the power.

He strummed the string.

Something for which there were no words came out of it. Reality itself shimmered with its vibrations. It was the most beautiful thing that had ever existed. Yes, also the most powerful, but what was that compared to Beauty?

Somewhere in his mind, Volcex thought that this crude, primitive instrument's sound was actually kind of creaky, scratchy, and off-key. Not like his finely-crafted guitar and its fine, slender strings of steel. But he could forgive it. It was, after all, the first.

The very first.

The invention of Music.

His eyes came into focus at the shouting of Meryri. "They are almost here. What is that thing? A badly made bow or something? What is the plan?" He looked at his hands. That primal instrument, the first ever, was in them. He had lifted it from a sort of plinth, apparently.

"Plan?" he asked.

"Yeah, the cityfolk, they are almost here. They're going to kill us and take… is that the thing they want? That stick?"

"This is the first instrument ever made. The moment Trialante invented Music itself. Or discovered it. I'm not sure which. This is the most powerful artifact ever. In the hands of someone who understands Music, this could change… everything."

His wonderstruck words were brought harshly to earth by Meryri's answer. "That must be why they want it. Why they're even willing to work together to get it. And we're about to hand it right to them unless you have an idea of how to stop that."

And he did have an idea. It was a terrible, horrible idea. But it was the only one. "Run," he said. "Run back and tell people when you can. The forest must know about this. Must be ready for the Final Battle." She balked, so he negligently touched the string. He knew very little about Music -- only the first few intervals -- but with this instrument in his hands, with the raw, undiluted power of primal Music that was bound up in it, even that was enough to cast her flying through the tunnel and out. To loft her through leagues of sky and drop her safely on a pillow of song, far from the reach of the cityfolk who were even now starting to cluster into the tunnel.

He waited a few moments for them to all be present, before he squeezed the string, forming a simple interval -- two notes, one on each half of the string, separated by a minor second. As he reached to pluck the string on both sides of the pinch-point with his other hand, he knew that, alongside the enemies that were piling into tactical positions, he, too, would be trapped.

Well, at least I won't ever have to find Crumkindivia, he thought, and plucked the string.

Cartographers would later have to change the maps of the Northern Mountains to account for the mysterious new appearance of a steep-sided mountain, almost tall enough to challenge Avechna's Peak, that had suddenly appeared. People surmised that the dozen or so demigods who had gone missing that day, never to be seen again, might have been responsible, but no one could be sure. It was as if they had been erased from the world.

There was only one young igasho who knew about one more person who had disappeared that day, otherwise unremarked save by a forgotten note in a soon-erased log. But that was enough. Decades later, Regent Meryri would hold back a tear in her eye as she told young novices about how they should avoid the area around Mount Volcex for now. "It's always very cold there," she would say, "though there is nowhere in the Basin where music sounds sweeter."