It is dawn, and from the forest that borders the great, dark house rises the sound of singing.
Even in blood-polluted Trench, the birds greet the sun with their chorus. Deep in the woods it's at its thickest, the high forlorn whistles of chickadees overlaid on the chattering of juncos and cardinal trills. Nearer the forest verge, nearest where the maker measures herself against the sky, there are but scattered peeps and chirps uttered in fearful respect of the great devourer.
In that tentative hush, a single song rises--too human to be a bird, too avian to come from anything but a syrinx, in a tenor rusty as a jay's and echoing as a hawk over rocky desert. It meanders along a harmony that's missing its melody, telling a half-wordless story of the hundred million dawns that broke over a world untouched by mortal hands. All these things are passed, are gone, it grieves, all our glories spent, and still the day breaks untroubled; and still we live to greet the dawn.
The singer steps out of the forest at the far end of the Reckoning's sword-strike. He turns his head down to regard a mirror-silver scale, large as a dinner plate, half-buried in the churned soil. A touch of his boot shivers it to shining dust, and he moves on, still singing, to the bright-burning beacon of the boy.
He has not been on these grounds since that scale was shed; it took something this spectacular to lure him back, moth to flame, and remind him his best use was not rebuilding shrines in the far-flung woods. He stops at the boy's right hand, outside the reach of the flames, in the place of an accomplice or fellow-accuser. The reaper-hawk that joins them stands at his right hand in turn, and looks over their shoulders to the sight he cannot see.
"I did not think to meet you again so," he says, at length. "What has happened?"
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Even in blood-polluted Trench, the birds greet the sun with their chorus. Deep in the woods it's at its thickest, the high forlorn whistles of chickadees overlaid on the chattering of juncos and cardinal trills. Nearer the forest verge, nearest where the maker measures herself against the sky, there are but scattered peeps and chirps uttered in fearful respect of the great devourer.
In that tentative hush, a single song rises--too human to be a bird, too avian to come from anything but a syrinx, in a tenor rusty as a jay's and echoing as a hawk over rocky desert. It meanders along a harmony that's missing its melody, telling a half-wordless story of the hundred million dawns that broke over a world untouched by mortal hands. All these things are passed, are gone, it grieves, all our glories spent, and still the day breaks untroubled; and still we live to greet the dawn.
The singer steps out of the forest at the far end of the Reckoning's sword-strike. He turns his head down to regard a mirror-silver scale, large as a dinner plate, half-buried in the churned soil. A touch of his boot shivers it to shining dust, and he moves on, still singing, to the bright-burning beacon of the boy.
He has not been on these grounds since that scale was shed; it took something this spectacular to lure him back, moth to flame, and remind him his best use was not rebuilding shrines in the far-flung woods. He stops at the boy's right hand, outside the reach of the flames, in the place of an accomplice or fellow-accuser. The reaper-hawk that joins them stands at his right hand in turn, and looks over their shoulders to the sight he cannot see.
"I did not think to meet you again so," he says, at length. "What has happened?"