"Vespers" - by Xanthium Dyvim.

Xanthium stretched her lithe frame up and over the last of the hurdles, and gazed down for a moment at the dizzying, stomach-bending sight of the cyclopean stone stairs falling to the jagged plains below. The angles swirled together in the thinner air, and combined with the hypnotic miasma of cold grey to black skies, she had to clutch the side of the top step, until her mind and body knew up from down. Besides the rumbling, coursing wind about her, the black shrine crowning the stairwell was still, and quiet, which, in fact, was why she had come to the Broken Lands. Standing before the shrine’s fresco, she was alone. No one came all the way out here, anymore, save for Lord Xorus, and she hoped that by now she knew his aura well enough to duck out should he come to look in on the halls and urns. The chill in the air mimicked her memory, of traveling to the Four Winds archipelago several weeks ago, while in a metaphorical cloud of tumult herself. She had recently been killed; she felt the need to flee the cold of Icemule, the mockery and questions of he who is beauty and vexation in the flesh, and seek warm, humid, heat. Only to find more gods-cursed snow. Fierce Darcena had told her that Mist Harbor was in a crisis, and if she wanted to help find out what was going wrong, to come the island on the next Restday, and so, she had. What followed was a chaotic puzzle of requests, solicitations, stories and faces that swept her into their midst as sure as the steady beat she started here with her lance against the stones of the dark shrine’s outer stone wall. The solid core of elemental magic thumped against the rock, like a marimba being struck with a weighted mallet, the air forming the lance’s outer shell vibrating with a sonic thrum. Her first vocal tones were soft, wordless hums, as she gained entry to the interior of the shrine, following the curved stone to rap out more of the building rhythm, weaving her voice in as the sonorous harmony. She had just started to sound out a scale of notes to match the reel of Mist Harbor faces when the first few denizens of the shrine returned her call. The vruul loped into the vestibule, spied her just below the mammoth-sized statue of the Destroyer, and charged, coloring her song with deep howls. Oh, she hummed; how I love to dance a little sidestep. The rustling of the vruuls’ vestigial wings blended with the rippling of her jade green robes as she dodged their advance, and countered with a sweep of the lance, knocking them both off their clawed feet. Her next notes crested across their misshapen skulls, seconds before the lance crushed them in. Xanthium’s voice rang out, pushing the dust from shredded vruuls away, and the force of the blow vaunted her into the air, landing in a pretty spill of a plié. The swell of music rose and fell with her chain of leaps and twirls across the ebon floor. Here, she could sing all that she felt with no one to hide it from. Juspera, her eyes and grin filled with guile, the defiant plucks of a shamisen’s strings swirling about Xanthium’s melody, with hazy outlines of tiny manacles in her wake. The soulful, plaintive pitch of the shawm surfaced from the storm-hued eyes of Traiva’s ethereal beauty, chased by poetic, secret sapphire chords of Lynaera’s richly-trilled mandolin. A rousing rat-a-tat-tat skittered about her leaping feet, as two ghostly foxes chased one another to the patter of a tambourine’s thrum, followed by a whimsy of fife-piping that coalesced into one of Ordim’s muffins and Mellny’s raven-black pigtails. Faerinn’s honey-hued curls blended into a playful kora’s strumming, as his warm smile over Selbi’s office door became the only truly righteous act she’d ever known. There, in the heat of her dance, amid the glimmer of balefire green, Lylia’s poised, elegant hands and questing eyes keyed into a dulcimer’s hypnotic skirls of sound. Lord Feydark gazed over them all with his ashen serpent winding across the stone, the hissing cymbals rolling along like flickering scales. Xanthium lost her step over the next alabaster face, nearly falling in the stone hall as the giantess’ voice cut through her song with a banshee wail. She stopped, and let the grief-stricken discord take over, becoming part of the wave of sound rushing across the landscape, before adding the next call: a keening lament, for those who sang their last, or became undone in the days of deception and desperation. Selbi, Socius, and even Nehor, his pretty face falling from his amused, triumphant smirk into a well of pain; the mad dash down from a harp’s shoulder to its brace, foreboding and consuming. Xanthium filled the dark corners of the sanctum with their song, a symphony of passion so strong it pulsed across the dark, with her a flash of green, silver and gold in the middle of the night-hued stone. The chorus thundered, and she knew that some day, soon, another brilliant storm would swell and take up this tune again, and all those she sang for would come back to dance, to burn, fight, die, and be reborn on the strange, paradise stage of Mist Harbor. Bringing her sonic lance about as a fulcrum to spin smoothly into an arabesque pose, Xanthium dropped into a final, graceful bow, a farewell and a thank you. An amen.

[Original: Xanthium]