The Star-singer I
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Ash choked the air, blotting out the sun and casting the burned field in a suffocating wave of darkness. The sound of drums beating bellowed from afar, rolling through the landscape like thunderclaps. The field cleared, and the sun shone down like the eye of God. That’s when the sky began to fall.
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Madalynn gasped for breath. The falsetto note she had been humming in union with her bell cut off abruptly. Where there was once a harmony of voice and bell, now only stood the last remnants of a twinkling echo. The soft candlelight was too dim to light the whole room, leaving it in suspended twilight. Madalynn sat crossed-legged on a folded tapestry on the floor in the middle of her room. She played with the strings of yarn that lined the ends of it, moving them between her fingers, chewing on what she had just seen. There she sat for a long while. Time slipped away, and the dismal candle flame petered out with a soft hiss, leaving behind a thin trail of smoke.
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She rose to her feet, her knees cracking from the effort. She reached for the nightstand holding her freshly snuffed-out candle to steady herself. The piece of furniture moved back, making a creaking sound as wood scraped against the stone tile. Her heart thumped hard in her chest, and for a moment, Madalynn thought herself at her life's end. It was not so. Her balance and strength returned, or what little left she still possessed.
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The Star-singer was old—Seventy and two. She knew her time would soon come to an end. She had seen it. Madalynn did not know when or where this would come to pass, but she had deduced that this would be her last festival. ‘I must finish my work before then or-.’ Her mind trailed off once passing through the threshold between her room and the hall outside. It was as if the sudden change in setting set her mind to fail. In her youth, she would have had an iron grip on her mind. The details of her machinations and ideas were as vivid and fully realized as her childhood memories. That was when she was a young woman, a fair maid, supple and unwed. However, every day was a constant battle to retain her wits, to be the same sharp tool she had always been and would always be in the eyes of her family.
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‘I have to go down to get the…the what?’
“Lady Madalynn, may I assist you down the steps?” said a youthful voice.
Madalynn found herself at the precipice of the stairwell, looking off into nothing, lost in her thoughts. How long had she been there? When had she gotten here?
“Ah, yes. Please, my dear.” Madalynn said, outstretching her arm to hook into the young woman's own.
They moved down the steps in a slow, methodical rhythm. “How are your singing lessons coming along, my love? Tell me about the lore you have gleamed.” Madalynn looked up, smiling. The young woman's eyebrows furrowed, her eyes searching for something in the Old-woman’s face.
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“Don’t give me that look, Najara. Tonight is very important. Have you been practicing?”
The young woman ceased briefly, taking a deep breath before answering.
“Lady Madalynn, I am Lucynda, not Najara. Last I saw her, she was down in the dining hall helping her lady mother with the decorations. They bid me to come fetch you.”
They continued to move down, one step at a time. No one spoke for a long while. Madalynn looked up at Lucynda, realizing she and her granddaughter looked nothing alike. Yet she had mistaken them all the same. Finally, the older woman spoke.
“Forgive me, child. I was deep in thought. I did not see-” She trailed off, not wanting to finish her half-baked excuse. They completed the rest of their short journey in silence.
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The hall leading to the foyer was busy with servants and helping hands moving this way and that, most with something important looking in their hands. They either stopped completely when Madalynn and Lucynda made their way down the hall or pressed against the stone wall, giving the noble ladies a wide birth. The commotion was like to send Madalynn’s head spinning. So many men and women doing important things, going to important places to work on important matters. She had something important herself that she needed to do, she recalled.
“Lucynda dear, pray forgive me, but I must tend to the Temple. I would like to pray a moment before seeing my daughters.”
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The young handmaid halted, her skirts rushing forward from the momentum of her movement. Her eyebrows furrowed again, and a pang of annoyance gripped Madalynn once more. Madalynn had neither the time nor the willpower to feign a semblance of needing permission or acknowledgment. The old woman moved deftly on slippered feet across the foyer and down to the east wing. Up two flights of stairs and past another hall, they both found themselves at the double doors that held the Temple just inside. Both doors were made of two large slabs of Ironwood, dark ebony, slick with oil, and beautifully carved. The engravings were primarily ornamentation, vines with budding fruit, fringed with five-fingered leaves. The center icon held the substance of the piece. It was the Yosifien Cross. A cross where the two intersecting lines curved upward in a crescent shape, with the top crescent being smaller. At the base was a circle that looped back in on itself. Ramiel En Yosif sacrificed himself in the name of love for all people some two thousand years ago, and this Icon was his representative power on earth.
“Wait here for me, child. I will not be long.”
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Inside, she found the air to be warm if not a bit stagnate. The east end of the temple was dominated by a tall, slender stained glass window. At the center stood the Yosifien Cross. Above the cross was a depiction of a waxing moon. Below both that and cross, the phases of the waning moon. The east was a good, godly cardinal direction. The moon rose in the east, and it was in the eastern lands that Ramiel En Yosif, The Son of God, The disciple of the Moon and speaker of Stars, hailed from. She had been to his homeland once, touching the tree he was birthed from. That same tree would be his tomb, being hung from its branches by those threatened by his divine message.
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The Stained glass shimmered, colors flowing like a liquid in a bottle from the hoard of candlelight directly below the window. The melted candles had poured past the table's edge, leaving the tiled floor with speckles of wax, looking like stars. Madalynn made for that table, down the runway, passing the pews.
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The heat from the candle flames washed over the old woman’s face as she began to mouth a silent prayer before speaking aloud.
“ Dear lord, lend me your ear and grant me your wisdom. I have seen an event yet to unfold, and I fear-”
‘What is it that I fear?’
“I fear I will leave my family before their time of greatest need. Leave them to be blind against the coming wave of fate. To toil alone in the darkness of causality, shackled like a slave to the unceasing current of the future. I fear they will fall without my sight.”
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The temple was silent for a long while. It would seem that neither God nor man possessed the wisdom to tread her fraying thread of fate with deftness. That's when she heard it. Low at first, a melody of undulating rhythms alien to the ears. The Call of a distant traveler, one not of this realm but beyond the Aether and in the heavens. Madalynn rose swiftly as if she was a woman forty years younger, looking around frantically. The space around her started to dissolve in a haze of blinding light. The song turned into a wail, a wild soundscape of blaring horns and chanting from half a hundred voices. Sweat beaded the crown of her head, making her white, brittle hair cling to her face. Any more of this, and she would surely die.
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There was a sharp sound of shattering that cut through Star-singer and Caller alike in the cacophony of voices. The old woman countered with a chant of her own. Her typical cadence was disturbed by the deafening raucous. Yet her timing was a calvary charge, unyielding to the psychic attack's bizarre, nonsensical time signatures. The louder she chanted, the softer the voices grew. In this home of the divine, under the moon's light, shining through the stained glass, Madalynns power was a battalion onto itself. She chanted until her throat grew dry and scratchy. Her face was red from exertion, and all the strength left her. The Call had ceased, and so had Madalynns chanting.
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A draft of cool air wafted through the temple, sending a chill through her. Her whole body felt cold, come to think of it.
“Lady Madalynn! Oh god-”
A young woman scooped Madalynn up into their arms. When had she fallen? Tears were brimming at the corners of their eyes.
“Oh, Najara, dear child. Why are you crying?” 137Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡKpZ9tgUwc7
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