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Dust. Rust-red dust, mingling with gold. Stones cut oddly, worn by wind. Too large for men to have built what few pillars remain - and here, a wall, its carvings long worn away, cutting apart two sections of the sprawling camp-city. Houses, stone-sided, embroideries over the doors. Tents, wide, narrow, most twice the size of the houses, some open-faced, some closed away.
Listen. Goat trip-trap. The drumming of a boy, the flutework of a faltering man, the crash of a stoneblock falling from its pulley, the shrill scream of a spearhead thrust into shallow water. The rustle of ropes (they scared her in the night) and the susurrous nature of cloth. Wind tossing up dust and sand and heat. The whine of insects that feed on sweat and blood and filth, the hoarse breath of the elder.
If you were keen-eared and knew something of how rhythms played themselves out, and you moved within it while not being a part of it - because no part of the whole can see the whole - you would find the beat it becomes. It is irregular and at the same time repetitious, returning ever and again to its theme. It sounds like humans living to itself.
If you pressed yourself against the maiden who, despite scouring, is the most beautiful woman in the world, you would realize that it is her breath, her heartbeat, her footstep. Or perhaps they are in tune with the rhythm of the Olm. Which one begets the other?
Morning becomes midday. The sisters walk, hand in hand. Blood pumps in veins, feet are pricked and roughened by the rock underneath, the air moves as it should. Lalalalalala, this is the song of being and continuing to be when everything says be not. Midday becomes evening. The sisters stand in market, and the people - dancing to this tune - sit by their fires and spread stories about dragons and goddesses and lalalalalalala, the song continues, and the rifts caused by the fall of the sky close themselves up. Have we not been chosen by the goddess? Did she not, like us, stand up after hardship and woe?
Fayruz was alone and yet not so, there in the market. She looked up at the moon, red filling gold. It used to be silver and white and everything was better, and I had not been hurt, and the people never made art but sat in the darkness waiting. She listened, and smiled slightly, and lets her sister say what must be said. Wounds of the heart must be opened to be healed.
The jewel, blue as seas and dragons and skies, now lay in her hand. When she strokes it, it cries out like a harp. "I dedicate..." The words faded away, and she had to muster them back together, step by step. "I dedicate this, the Seiunju, the Sapphire Harp Stone, to our home made here." Her sister raised it high, and so she knelt, beautiful silk on the cobbles. It touched the earth, and where her sister's rain becomes a never-ending evolution of melody, she coaxes from the jewel's heart a thrumming, so vast and deep that it becomes the sea beneath the stars. "May the melodies of mortals become as beautiful as the choruses of the White City, and may they be a comfort in the dusk where there is only struggle, and pain in the struggle, and power in overcoming." Her pale skin was flushed slightly, and it was a perfect flush. And yet, in her can be seen every woman of the Fayheran, and in them all there is something of her. She is perfect because they are imperfect, and yet in their imperfections they become more like her. "May its song bring rest to the bloodied and peace to the lawless. To us here... may whoever watches over us, the lost, have mercy on our trials. Bring us to our rest safely, knowing we have done all we could."
She took up the harp - there was no change-state between harp and stone, it had always been a stone, and now it was a harp, pale wood and sapphire inlays, and strings of silver fixed to pins of white gold - and ran pale fingers (the dirt was an affectation, a cosmetic on her skin, and yet it was right for it to be there) across them.
The beat of the Olm slowed, and her heart became oh-so-very still. She took up her sister's song, and yet it was changed - the glories of the White City became, at the touch of her fingers upon the strings, ruins of a beautiful age. At the center, the theme repeated, was hope. Hope in the midst of the fall, in the ruins, as she knelt in a marketplace of dyed cloth built on the stones of a temple crumbled away into decay, a twice-broken thrice-standing goddess.
And her heart beat, her breath flowed, her fingers danced to the song.