Chapter 606: Chapter 590 – A Melody of Life

“To leave your name behind in the history books and the minds of the people, that too is in a way, immortality of a sort.” - Saying attributed to the Silver Maiden.

In the evening of the same day, the entire household of the house of Nasrilemaz gather together in the main hall, the people seated in half-circles around a spread of finger foods and drinks, facing an impromptu stage that was just mostly a pile of comfortable cushions on one side of the hall. Due to the large size of the hall, it easily accommodated the entire household’s hundreds of people with room to spare even with the loose seating arrangement.

 

Patriarch Abdul-Hamid zem Nasril was naturally seated at the frontmost section nearest the stage, together with Mistress Shadi Balezouf, the Glass Artisan. As honored guests of the House, Áine, Rhys, and Eilonwy were seated next to them as well, and they made some small talk as they waited for the performance to start.

 

Just as the sun started to set, Satrapi Hawwa El-Ilauni, Aideen, and Kino walked into the hall and headed for the stage. The Satrapi sat cross-legged in the center of the stage of cushions, adjusting her position until she was satisfied, and tenderly placed the masterpiece instrument made from reinforced glass on her lap. Aideen and Kino sat on the left and right side of the stage respectively, similarly cross-legged, with their respective instruments in hand.

 

The chatter in the hall came to a halt and silence reigned, so quiet that one could likely hear a pin drop to the floor were it not for the plentiful cushioning set up for the performance. 

 

It was the dwarven bard that opened the performance, as was only appropriate, as she used her bare fingers – the sort of instrument she played was usually played using a took the make picking the strings easier and to protect the player’s hand from getting cut by the thin, taut strings, but clearly the dwarven woman disagreed with that practice – to strum across the strings, creating a crystal-clear, melodious sound that filled the hall despite not being particularly loud.

 

With a smile on her face, she then continued strumming the strings with her left hand, creating a continous backdrop of melody that filled the room. Meanwhile, her right hand teased and picked at the strings on the other side of the instrument, creating a symphony of higher notes that clearly sounded through the constant melody that played behind it.

 

The sounds created by the instrument invoked the image of a stream that cut through the barren desert sand in the hearts of its listeners, the crystal-clear notes like dewdrops falling off the leaves of a tree in the morning. It was a melody of hope, of life and growth, one that brought with it a sense of struggle yet remaining upbeat and positive throughout.

 

It was around then that Aideen nodded to Kino, as she had understood what the Satrapi meant by having them decide what they should play as accompaniment. 

 

Kino played a fast melody on her lute, one that prompted one to think of raindrops falling on the roof of a building. The Satrapi smiled at her choice of accompaniment and intensified her playing, the calm river slowly but surely turning into rapid streams as she sped up the tempo of her own melody, the two tunes separate, yet forming one whole.

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Aideen chose that time to start playing her lyre, the tone she played a slow, gentle one, one that gradually went lower and deeper in tone, as it invoked the image of the river running into a basin and accumulating into a lake. Once again, the Satrapi matched her accompaniment by slowing her tune once more, similarly building more depth into the melody until the three tunes formed another symphony together.

 

Then almost as one, the three of them changed the tunes they played into a lively, energetic one, a representation of life sprouting out of the now no longer barren soil, of the greenery that began to claim a part of the desert as its own. It was a melody of life, the triumph of growth over stagnation, even in the most difficult of circumstances.

 

Given the background of the Caliphate, it was also a most fitting tune to play there, and soon many of the audience members were swayed by the melody and began to clap their hands along its beat, adding yet another element to the symphony.

 

The three performers on the stage then changed their tune slowly, but surely into a steadier one, the water shifting to earth and stone, representative of buildings and civilization being built around the oasis that provided life in the barren desert. The loud claps of the audience became the sound of pickaxes striking stone, of hammers breaking rocks, and of people carving themselves a place to live on in the harshest place nature could offer.

 

From that point, the dwarven bard masterfully lengthened the tempo of the melody, as it went lower and slower gradually, the beat similarly lengthened and the interval between the claps of the audience growing longer and longer, until eventually, with a final thrum of the instrument’s string, the melody came to a final stop, and silence once more reigned in the hall.

 

It was a precautionary warning and reminder to not fall into hubris at the end, a mistake that had already seen a glorious civilization brought to its knees in the past. The Dwarves of the world remembered Igunacio’s Wrath all too keenly, brought upon their old capital by the hubris of their once King, whose line of descendants was ended in its entirety on that fateful day so many years ago.

 

The lesson inherent to the warning was one that every dwarf – and most of their descendants, hybrid or otherwise – had learned and listened to in their childhood days, the way how their ancestors had been so drunk on hubris that they infuriated even the Deities themselves, and the fall that followed. 

 

In the silence that followed, the three performers quietly left the stage, and soon they seated themselves by the patriarch’s place.

 

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