Triptych of the Final String

by Daniel Ausema

Left panel

The Canyon of Strings is the greatest legacy of the early settlement of the Forgotten South. The legendary seamstress Tima is said to have strung the instrument first, spinning and running the wires from rim to rim of the canyon.

Each string required a story. She gathered every story and folk tale of her people, tying each story's patterns into its wire. The sacred Cycle of Tiespietre gave Tima the bass strings, deep and pulsing. The many stories of the trickster woman Indima each added a string in the midrange, so that her exploits rang out over the canyon floor. The tale of the weaver and the butterfly and others of its kind gave the instrument its high strings that rang loud and pure whenever the wind blew.

She didn't leave the music to the whim of the winds, though, but trained her friends and neighbors to play the strings. Standing in special alcoves tight to the side of the canyon, they struck the wires with a panoply of mallets and hammers, plucking and striking and tapping as they chose, so that music swelled and filled even the land around the canyon. When they ceased playing for the night, the strings continued to quiver and ring, and the people fell asleep to a soothing, melody-less backdrop of stories-made-music.

Right panel

Kormesh was the heir to the strings, a century after Tima passed the instrument to another. What he lacked in the casual brilliance Tima had shown with the wires, he made up for with an ear for music like no other, for the overtones and subtleties that affected other people without their knowing. In the music of the canyon, he heard the gaps. There were too few strings, missing sharps, high and low notes that Tima hadn't thought to string.

When he sought to make new strings, though, they all came out dull. The notes were true but never rang out as they should, and the wires quickly fell out of tune.

Why? Years passed before he realized that he had run out of new stories. Every folk tale he sought to bind in wire was too similar to those Tima had used. He turned away saddened, determined to leave the grand, incomplete instrument behind.

As chance would have it, though, he met a group of new settlers first. Traveling from afar, they wondered at the music, at the sight of sunlight glinting from wires. And they sought out Kormesh to ask him about it.

A new people? He quizzed them on their stories and wove their tales into wire, and these rang true and pure. It was a time of upheaval, and new families came often in the years that followed, so that he filled every gap he could hear with the stories of many lands.

The music grew full, rich, and delicately wild.

Central panel

It was centuries later when Aerhen, the newest keeper of the strings, noticed one final gap, the one note high above the rest that would bring the whole cacophony into harmony. If struck, it would cancel all cacophony, turn every discordant note into a part of a deeper chord. But how might she craft that string?

Tima had gathered every story of her people. Kormesh had gathered the stories of those who came later, peoples that were now the ancestors of the valley as much as Tima's people had been. Other keepers had sought out the remnants of earlier inhabitants, fragments of lost stories, new peoples moving through. Everything young Aerhen tried proved as dull as Kormesh's early strings.

So she left the canyon lands, and the famed instrument that was her charge, to wander. Every story she heard resonated with this story or that, doubled its meanings and shadowed its themes. Warrior tales were many and one. As were baker tales and cleaning maid tales. Stores of suzerains and potentates and queens. Of peasants and beggars. Of merchant women and bankers. Animal tales chased each other around the wells of story without giving her a new line or angle to craft the final string.

None of them were the new story that would give her the highest string. The canyon needed its wild notes brought into harmony. Tamed and trained to follow the keeper of the strings and make perfect melodies. If she had to wander the rest of her life to find that story, it would still be worth it.

Deep in a distant mountain range, surrounded by yellowing grasses and the songs of meadowlarks, Aerhen found her long-sought story. Or claimed she did. She never told the tale to anyone. She returned to the canyon looking dazed, walked straight past the waiting piles of wire, and took up a mallet to play on the strings already in place.

The canyon rang with the slightly discordant sounds, rich and bright and untamed.

In later years Aerhen would only say that the wildness was a necessary part of the music. Sometimes she would hint darkly at a crushing uniformity that threatened the instrument, at a danger in that final string she refused to craft.

At her death, the supplies for the wire were found in her chambers, melted and reborn as a massive gong. When struck with cloth mallets, its note was so deep that people could scarcely hear it, only feel its throbbing rhythm as it built to an all-encompassing roll. Yet when properly played, it set every string in the canyon to ringing, in a cacophony far wilder and more beautiful than the simple strum of the wind when it made the instrument play.

And so the final string found its way into the music after all.