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Counterpoint by Danielle Xaviera Stone
It was a world of music, a world of order and certainty and intricate arrangement and manifold beauty... and it had always been her world. It was every kind of music, seamlessly interwoven, smooth and golden-brown around the edges, liquid-pretty and impossibly effortless. It was music that hummed to itself, danced slow and close with itself, a music that listened in rapt attention to itself, every note cognizant of each and every other, and thus each fully aware of their own individual relationships within the endless flux. It was, at times, wild and unrelenting, passionate, fiery and fierce; it was abstract and detached, glowing, unknowing, innocent and rash; it was frivolous, intimate, sullen and intense; joyful, perceptive, uninhibited, formidable and free. No one knew when it had begun, but this was known: It never ended, and it never would. And it had been said, sometime long long before, that it was the essence of its opposite, the smiling substructure of silence, the sound one hears when one is not aware of sound, or hearing, when one is caught up in the intimate caress of velvet undulations of ripple-riddles that would only be spoiled by answers, however clever or kind--though who had said this, and how they could ever know such a thing, was unknown. But it had been said in music... and it sounded right, anyway. Lying motionless in a fold-cloth mesh, Ilyalaia came awake to a sudden cadence of vacuum horns as they sucked the sleep from her in a single long draught, and she opened one long-lashed eye languidly. The sound faded away and was gone, melting into dissonance as she opened two more eyes and rubbed at them until they gleamed. And now strings came in, light and fine as spiders' thread, two and three at first, then joined by others, intricately overlain, and they began to spin a song of praise and preparation for hthe dawning day, and they wound about her and tugged gently and she arose, stretched many limbs and floated softly to the open window that gazed out upon the forever expanse of the sand sea. Her view took in the familiar shapes of the other tiny and distant islands that dotted the sea all around her, each a platform for one small sandstone building, each structure graced with a wide variety of carvings etched upon its outer surface, intricate geometric bas-reliefs that caught the music within their tiny grooves and channels and threw it back with slight changes in pitch or tone, all utterly harmonious within the whole, personalizing the sound in the listener's immediate area--personalizing, for the carvings were cut with care and patience by the inhabitants themselves, guided only by an inner intuition, under the music's constant sanguine supervision. Each ohf these structures was different, some squat and square, some spiral-shaped and tapering, or domed, or columnar, or round or multi-faceted. Some were striped with one long and thin window that wound about the structure in a graceful curve; others had ovoid or triangular apertures, or a wide and elegant arch, like hers, or many, many other designs. And she knew that the occupants of these dwellings would be getting up and going to their windows to look out upon the new day's composition. She knew that they would sit and listen and watch, and after a while they would leave their windows and go to their work, and spend the day happily in the company of the music. She knew all of this, even though she had never met another of her race in the flesh-she never left her island, none of them did, she knew this too, instinctively. They lived, each one, a solitary existence on their tiny islands... but they did not feel alone, for they shared the celebration of the music. Now she sat upon the stone ledge and looked out, and saw the forms of five-pointed arabesques etched evenly in the sand sea shallows, saw the larger symmetrical patterns of the deeps, now a mosaic of diamonds, now crescents, now a tremendous arabesque that mimicked the forms shown in the shallows' prelude a moment before. She sat serenely at the ledge, watching the shifting superimposition of the forms created by the music's changing moods... and she knew that today was somehow different, that within the undercurrents of the music there was the subtle shading of a new and singular sound, one whose like she had never heard before, like some new season come to welcomed grace in a tired land. And she held her breath, felt her flesh go marble-cool and strangely-textured, for she felt that this new sound was speaking to her alone. And so, though it had never been her habit to do Íso, she lingered at the arch of the window, and moments turned into long hours and passed unnoticed, so rapt was her attention to this enchanted serenade and the forms it painted upon the restless landscape. Thoughts, feelings, emotions washed over her in rythmic waves as she swayed in the greater sea, and a wondrous fever stole silently upon her, mantling her brow in a glistening regality. Before her, the endless dance of the sands unfolded in its infinite variegations, a panorama of polytonal motion, moody, shifting and changing, forever returning, forever yearning. She felt with a new awareness the waves of music on the sand sea: now sharp, now flat, now swelling high and sweet and lofty, and gravity, breathless, ceases to be for a timeless moment... now graduating down, down into broad bass hollows and dim tympanic passages; now passage made and reverberation trailing, now surge and sweep and strain, and FLIGHT! refrain, glide softly in slow metered measures back to ground. Above her, the light cascadence of wind flowers, blowing full and sweet-smelling on the tumultuous breeze. Above her, the vibrant summer sky, a rainbow scale of trembling color. Above her, a flight of spinning winged creatures which rode only those air currents that had their origin in echoes. Above her, a need, a purpose... meaning. In her face, the countenance of the dream, the expression of expression long-awaited, now come to final fruition. In her eyes, the theme of the song. She had lived on her island for so many years, keeping her silence patiently, listening and watching and learning, and quieting the harmonics of her own inner being so that they might synchronize more perfectly with that of the music. Now she hovered on the brink of the new, and was washed by wave-forms of sound and feeling... and with each passing moment her body and mind orchestrated themselves toward a more perfect vibrational unity with the moving atmosphere around her. Gentle tensions pressed her; her breath came raw and heated; and with sudden clarity she felt old moorings loosen and let go, felt herself cast adrift, moving out and away... And the music came to her then, it came walking out across the sea to sit beside her, and it smiled and caressed her, touched her with many hands, and whispered fine magicks in her ear, and pulled her to it... And the sea was a surface of shining scales, and figures were reflected in them, marching slowly out across it, so many figures, a procession slow and joyful and orderly and beautiful... And the music kissed her, and the touch was cool liquid heat, and the fire suffused her in its bright aura... And she met and matched its yearning, and there was harmony in her responses... And she held tightly to it, struggled, strained with it, as it/she/they climbed and swelled and ached and spiraled toward crescendo... From the moment of her birth she had known, immediately and completely within her certain nature, of her true purpose, of the music's need, of her own. And the last bit of her self was eroded and carried away, and she merged with the music completely, and they reached as one... A high and mellifluent flight of notes, a unique chord that had never been heard in all the time before, that would never be repeated in all the endless time to come, sprang from her and was engulfed within the intricate beauty of the polyphony, a small note of counterpoint in the eternal symphony. Her body was embraced by a cold crystal fire that corroded and consumed the empty shell. A new form, one that would never again appear in those shifting sands, flickered quickly across the golden surface and was lost again in the quickening permutations. All who heard the sound shared its flight. And petals of rare delicacy danced and settled softly in the bright room. | ||||||||