The Songs They Will Sing (Short Story)

Brightik Mortganssen is not strong, or fast, or handsome. But he is smart. He is smarter than anyone else he knows. He is smarter than his father. He is smarter than the King (though of course he is smart enough not to say so). He is smarter even than Brother Craen, head of the Order of the Dark Morning and best winemaker in any kingdom as far as horses can ride. 

Everyone else thinks there are dragons high up in the mountains, hiding deep in the cave systems, scattered on spits of rock in the ocean. The King has called men back into service as slayers, convinced there are survivors, though everyone was equally convinced the Last Dragon died a hundred and fifty years ago. There are countless artistic renditions of the Last Dragon and how Brightik’s great, great grandfather cut off its head. 

There was peace for generations. No smoke on the horizons, no ominous beat of giant wings, no shadows racing over the fields. Then, all of a sudden, they were everywhere again. Baby dragons, specifically. Of course, even a baby dragon can be as big as a horse, so it’s still rather a problem. 

Everyone else is convinced the Last Dragon wasn’t the last dragon at all, and the survivors have been hidden away all this time, begetting and begetting, however dragons beget, that has never been very clear, and thus… baby dragons. 

Brightik alone knows better.

Brightik knows the hatchlings are actually proof all the dragons were slain.

#

As he walks into the foothills, Brightik imagines the songs they will sing about him. He will be as famous as his great, great grandfather. His stupid brute of a father will have to kneel before him and beg his forgiveness, admit that intellect has fully the value of brawn and steel and Brightik is the equal of, or better than, all his brothers.

There will be gold too, no doubt. And women. 

How many, Brightik wonders, would make a man most happy?

It is these thoughts that keep Brightik going through the first week.

In the second, he ponders the problem at hand.

In the third, he despairs.

He goes through this cycle - gold, women, dragons, despair, gold, women, dragons, despair - again and again as the hike through the Wild Mountains drags through the spring and summer. The mountains are so high their peaks are endless ice. Brightik builds himself little burrows in the snow, and eats through his supplies too quickly, and starves. Then he realizes there are mosses still, even so high, and in the caves there are insects that crunch and ooze between one’s teeth, but if one can master oneself, subject the body to the mind, just keep the buggers down… 

By the time the leaves are orange and blood, Brightik is walking in the foothills of the Wild North, looking fully wild enough himself to fit right in. He’s been leaned to the bone, his skin is so dirty it may never return to its natural shade no matter how hard or often he scrubs, and his hair and beard are shorn with the guidance of touch alone. 

There is no name for the lands in the Wild North. Just that. A description, really. Brightik has been reduced to crawling by the time he reaches what might be called ‘civilization’. In Gantak, he would have considered these buildings hardly worthy of the word. Huts, sticks tied together with twine and furs stretched between their branches. There is no word for this in Gantak. Not ‘building’, surely. 

But having crawled through the forest this past week, knowing only the sound of his own voice these past months, going mad, and feral, and he has hallucinated death a hundred times, not sure he really is alive anymore at all, but maybe he is only a crawling corpse, a wraith descending from the mountains to rend these hovels and slake his thirst with blood…

Well, in relative terms, this place looks very civilized indeed.

So do the people, he decides, when two of them find him collapsed by the river. He’s got his face pressed into the mud, his lips bathed in the shallows so he can drink, but he was just wondering how he was going to avoid drowning when he hears the startled noises. Their language is filled with guttural sounds, growls and grunts like animals. But they drag him free of the water. Drag him into one of those huts made of sticks and fur.

There’s a fire inside. It smells of herbs Brightik doesn’t recognize, but it’s a pleasant enough scent. They leave him on a mat made of tightly woven straw. They place furs atop him. If he were being generous, he would call this a ‘building’, and a ‘bed’, and these grunting creatures around him ‘men’. Oh. And one very beautiful ‘woman’.

#

It takes Brightik nearly a year to learn the language. 

The very beautiful woman is very good motivation.

Her name is Kallan and she is the daughter of the Chief, so there are multiple reasons why it is a very good idea to learn to speak her language, and then speak to her as often as possible. Kallan seems amenable to his overtures. He wasn’t considered handsome in Gantak, but he gets the sense his blond hair, his blue eyes, they are virtually unknown here, and his unique coloring is considered a curiosity at least adjacent to beauty.  

Kallan has a little sister named Noor who follows her around like a pup. Kallan is always patient with her, always kind, so Brightik simply adds himself to her trailing retinue, finding her in the camp each morning and following her until sunset each night, picking up words one by one at first, through context, and later over lessons by firelight when Kallan starts to teach him grammar and simple sentences.

The tribe isn’t happy about Brightik joining their camp, but they’ve never encountered anyone from Gantak before, so they don’t have any reason to be wary. They are a kind people, and they generally choose to trust in the kindness of others, at least until they’re given evidence to the contrary. Brightik gives them no evidence to the contrary.

The men complain that he eats when he doesn’t hunt, that he sleeps in a hut he didn’t build, but he contributes in other ways. He shows them how to divert some of the water from the river into their fields. He shows them how to fish with hooks and lines. He gives them portable light in the form of tallow candles and rush lights. 

The Chief overrules his muttering men and Brightik is allowed to remain. Once he learns the language, he is even granted a position as an advisor of sorts to the tribal council. Most importantly, Brightik is allowed unencumbered access to Kallan. That is the key. 

It’s not only that she’s very beautiful and essentially a princess. The beautiful thing is actually an inconvenience because Brightik finds himself distracted by dreamy thoughts of her. No, the key is that Kallan is widely believed to be the most likely choice of successor to the tribe’s Firebearer. Their shaman. Their witch. Their keeper of all magics, from the old ways to the new.

In Gantak, only dragons wield magic. But in the far reaches of their memories, in their epic tales, in the murky echoes of history, there are whispers about the Wild North. There are stories about the women in the Wild. There are rumors there was a dragon once, a dragon who loved the women in the Wild.

A dragon who taught these women…

Magic.

#

The more Brightik learns the language, the more he uses the language to learn other things. He asks Kallan a hundred questions a day. He asks her about the history of the northern tribes. He asks her about her family. He asks her about their exotic foods and customs. He asks her about magic.

He is very careful not to ask too many questions about this last topic. It is only scattered questions in an ocean of questions, a mountain of questions, one leaf amongst all the leaves in the entire forest that fall together over the long months of autumn the year after he crawled into camp. He has no more or less interest in magic than he does in understanding everything about Kallan’s culture, and everything about her.

Brightik’s people slay dragons. Kallan’s people worship them.

Brightik is smart.

He deliberately does not ask any questions about dragons.

Instead, he focuses on practical uses for magic. He asks how the tribe uses magic to enhance their crops. He asks how the Firebearer used magic to help that woman who was struggling to birth her twins. He asks how magic is woven into the songs they sing when they bake their bread. 

Three questions among three thousand questions.

He is disappointed to learn there are no spells to wither weeds, no spells to stop unwanted babes from growing in the womb, no spells to kill the tribe’s enemies from a distance, or in great numbers. Their magic is all about creation, all about growing things, all about love. 

Brightik despairs that it might be, all of it, useless.

But, then, Kallan isn’t the Firebearer yet. She is training as the witch’s apprentice, and surely the old crone has shared many magics, but there could still be more to learn. The Firebearer has a dozen apprentices until she is very sure of her successor. Some of these girls have served her since they were no higher than the small purple flowers that grow amongst this rolling land, brush against Brightik’s thighs when he and Kallan go for walks very early in the morning, before anyone else is awake. There are probably secrets a wild woman doesn’t learn until she is chosen as the final apprentice. Still others maybe she will not learn until she is the Firebearer.

Brightik isn’t in any hurry to make the long walk back over the Wild Mountains.

He can wait. 

In the meantime, he will help Kallan study the plants and their medicinal properties. He will help her memorize the endless songs he is quite certain are spells in disguise. He will help her read the ancient book she reveals, shy and uncertain one night, clearly unsure if she should share this treasure with him, but it’s been more than a year of friendship between them and she trusts him. Noor is draped over his shoulder, hanging down into his lap like a little possum and she’s laughing as he tickles her, but even she falls silent at the sight of the old book, almost as fascinated as Brightik is.

The Wild North lost reading and writing at some point in their history, but Brightik is smart enough. He knows the sounds of the language, the cadence and rhythms, the way the words are strung together. The alphabet is very similar to old-Gantakken. He and Kallan take to untangling the written words each evening. Their low voices, the crackle of the fire, little Noor snoring… The sounds all come together like another magic song and Brightik thinks maybe it’s a spell for home, or happiness, or belonging.

#

By the time he enters his third year with the tribe, Brightik has seen magic do many things. He has seen green spreading across whole hillsides of stone and dead dirt. He has seen men filled with energy from a single loaf of bread. He has seen little Noor, called back from an endless sleep by nothing more than words whispered over and over and over again.

He is quite certain he will never go home. 

He is quite certain he doesn’t care.

Kallan has been named the Firebearer’s successor, but there were no great secrets bestowed with the title. The ancient book Kallan inherited through her matriline turned out to be a treatise on magic, yes, but medicinal magic, mostly. Cures for small ills, ways to bolster strength and energy, help for household tasks. Their lives are bursting with magic in the Wild North, but it’s so mundane it almost isn’t magical at all. 

Brightik asks Kallan to marry him on one of their walks at dawn. For maybe the first time in his life, he has no plan, no deeper motivation. He just wants to marry her. He thinks maybe this is the magic he was meant to find here.

She says yes.

There have been dozens of marriages since Brightik came, but he hadn’t paid them any attention. He didn’t care that the Firebearer performed the bonding ceremony. He didn’t wonder that the ceremony took place with only the couple and the Firebearer, hidden in a hut, or deep in the woodlands. He hadn’t wondered about it at all really. How could a ceremony about love possibly be useful to him?

He is not expecting what happens. Not at all.

Kallan is so beautiful Brightik feels his heart clenching in a way he can’t quite explain. It’s something close to pain, something like the sensation of falling from a great height, something like sunlight sinking into one’s skin and feeling warm on the inside, deep down in one’s bones. She walks across the interior of the hut and it’s like every flame in the shadows leaps twice as high, like the darkness is entirely burned away.

The Firebearer is old and hunched, but even she has a kind of beauty in this moment, her smiling lips painted as red as her robes, her heavy golden diadem glowing. She ties Brightik and Kallan’s wrists together with a rope and she slides into song so gradually that Brightik almost doesn’t notice until the rhythm starts to lure him to sleep. His vision grows hazy until all he can see and feel is the glow from the fires, the heat from the flames, and he and Kallan are both no more than eternal light and heat themselves, steady though, perfect flames that never flicker but will burn forever and ever.

The Firebearer is singing louder and louder, and the rope around Brightik’s wrist is getting tighter and tighter, and he and Kallen are standing closer and closer, arms tangled now, chests pressed together, so tight their bones are grating against one another, joints and angles pressing into flesh, foreheads bruising, nose slotted alongside nose, lips sharing their breaths between them…

There’s a sharp, perfect moment of pain, and then Brightik really can’t tell where he ends and where Kallan begins. No more arms, no chests, no bones, no noses… They are two flames become one and the conflagration strips away any awareness he has of himself. When Brightik returns to his body, the rope has fallen to the floor. 

He can’t hear Kallan’s thoughts, not in words, but he can feel her.

#

For the first time in his life, Brightik wishes he wasn’t so smart.

In the first few months of marriage, he has been experimenting. Not on purpose, not at first. Just a curious mind and a curious new bond and he wanted to know its nature and limitations. If he focused, could he hear Kallan’s thoughts? No. If he can sense her moods, can he influence them? Yes. Can he control her through the bond? Yes, to an extent.

It’s the last question that’s frightening. For its answer, and its implications.

Kallan’s not stupid, so Brightik is subtle at first. But he discovers he can choose to send emotions through the bond. Because she cares about him, Kallan will often react to those emotions in predictable ways. So, if he sends an intense desire to spend time with her? She appears before him. If he spends the afternoon deliberately imagining soup for dinner? They have soup for dinner. 

It takes him six months to work up to the critical test, because he’s not sure he wants to know the answer: Can he get Kallan to act against her nature? In Kallan’s case, it’s violence. She’s the most gentle, most patient, kindest person he has ever met and though he’s certainly seen flashes of anger, her reaction to rage is generally to withdraw, to punish with silence, to hide from her own emotions. 

So Brightik spends three whole days, ruminating on rage.

Kallan slaps him.

In the profound silence that follows she seems to realize what must be happening, and she asks him, hesitantly, if he’s been very angry lately? Is there anything she can do?

Brightik plays dumb.

He asks a hundred questions about their bonding ceremony, just so he can understand, of course. How are his emotions influencing hers? What, exactly, happened in that hut? How much can he control their bond purposefully, through strength of will?

Kallan answers all his questions. At first because she feels guilty for the little red handprint on his face. Then because she feels guilty he didn’t understand what he was agreeing to when he bonded to her. She hadn’t considered that marriage in Gantak is merely a social convention. She couldn’t possibly imagine how it could mean so little there.

Apparently the pain Brightik felt was his soul being split and then, like perfect puzzle pieces, half of Kallan’s soul was slotted into his empty space, and half of Brightik’s soul was tied to hers. Each of them now carries in their core a whole soul, composed of two different halves, from two different people. 

Marriage is not a social convention here, not even a physical cleaving. It is a truly eternal bond. They will be each half of each other always.

Kallan apologizes for weeks and Brightik wants to forgive her. He’d wanted to marry her, hadn’t he? He’d wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. He remembers feeling that way. He should be glad to be tied to such a woman.

He is not glad.

Every day Kallan grows dimmer in his sight. Every day it’s like a little piece of his memory returns, a little piece of himself. He may only have half his own soul, but it is full with the Brightik of old. Like, maybe Kallan got all the pieces of his soul that grew after he got here. Maybe he’s got all the pieces from Gantak. From before.

He remembers how angry he was with his father, how he longed for his respect, how he dreamed of humiliating his father, his King, everyone who ever mocked him for being quiet and contemplative and hopeless with a sword. He remembers that his people are being killed in droves by dragons and he wonders how many have died since he left. He remembers that he dreamed of having several wives. 

Brightik starts following the Firebearer to bonding ceremonies in secret.

He memorizes the song she sings.

#

As he walks into the foothills, Brightik imagines the songs they will sing about him. Except, of course, he knows now that songs can be more than melodies and words. He knows songs are different in every nation, amongst every peoples, evolving across the eras. In Gantak, they will sing about him as the hero of their age... 

Will they sing songs about him in the Wild North, too?

Will they wish they knew a song to curse him?

This is what occupies Brightik’s mind as he hikes back through the Wild Mountains - hero, villain, praise and curses, hero, villain, praise and curses - and he focuses intently on these larger, philosophical questions in order to ignore the more poignant ones: Is Brightik a terrible husband, or a very good son? When Kallan woke up alone that first morning after he left, what did she think had happened? What did she think when Brightik didn’t come home that night? After the first week? After the second?

How long did she cry?

He can still feel her, but the further he walks, the fainter her emotions resound in him. There was a flare in her presence maybe a week into his hike - suddenly he could feel her close enough to touch, close enough to kiss and for a brilliant, shining, sharp moment he’d wanted nothing more in the world than to do that, to be her Brightik again because maybe her Brightik was the better man, maybe it was better to live a happy life in the Wild North than a heroic one in Gantak - but just as suddenly as her soul flared in him, it snuffed out. He imagines distance must dull the bond. He carries her soul in him, but the other half of it is now a hundred miles away, two hundred, countless…

The hike is easier this time.

The tribe taught him well.

His father isn’t particularly pleased to see him, but the King is intrigued by his claims, and, more importantly, Brother Craen demands to see Brightik’s theory put to the test. Brightik explains everything very carefully as a retinue a mile long trails him to a mountain meadow filled with towering mushroom caps. Brother Craen seems skeptical, the King seems incredulous, and Brightik’s father clearly thinks Brightik has gone mad until he cuts open a toadstool and pulls out…

A dragon’s egg.

Brightik had spent quite a bit of time in this meadow before he left. He knows there are a dozen more locations just like it. He knows from his research that these are all places dragons were slain. He knows the colors of the mushroom caps give hints as to the maturity of the eggs. He believes these dragons are, well, not what dragons were before. They are growing from the decay of their dead brethren. He’s not sure exactly what that makes them. He hasn’t had too long to ponder it. Too busy pondering other things. He has pondered at quite some length, for example, whether dragons who grow from death still have souls. He’s gambling, a rather large gamble, actually, that they do. 

One of the knights from the Order of the Dark Morning is put forth as a volunteer. 

Everyone thinks Brightik is mad when he starts singing.

Brightik can see that it’s working though.

The knight holding the egg, the egg starting to glow within, the knight looking dazed, staring at the flickering illumination, falling physically closer, pressing his face to the shell, clutching the egg closer, closer…

The crowd falls silent. No more jeering, no more japes, hardly anyone even breathing.

Brightik sings loudly, confidently. He knows these words. He knows this will bind the soul of the knight to the soul of the dragon. This will give the knight some control over the dragon. If the beasts are so hard to kill, if they rise up even from death…

Then perhaps death is not the solution. Perhaps instead of slaying these terrible beasts, they should make them beasts of their burdens.

Not even the wind dares to make a noise when Brightik finishes his song.

The silence is profound.

The knight lays stunned beside his egg.

The egg starts hatching.

#

It doesn’t work out quite the way Brightik intended. The knight contorts in agony, pulls out most of his hair, scratches deep, bloody lines into his face and neck, even rips off one of his own ears. Two of his Brothers pin him to the ground while his eyes roll wildly in his head and the newborn dragon lumbers around in a confused circle.

The crowd is screaming at this point.

Most of them are running away, which is probably wise.

A few of the bravest men are bracing themselves, brandishing what pathetic weapons they have, shovels and pitchforks and the occasional scythe. The King’s eldest daughter stands at the head of this motley farmers army. She’s not very beautiful, but she is very brave. It is clear the men at her back respect her, trust her. Brightik wonders how many dragons have been fought off by farmers these past few years. How many have been fought off by the princess?

The knight on the ground gains back enough awareness to demand his release and his Brothers do, reluctantly, release him. Brightik hopes maybe this will still work. Maybe having one’s soul bound to a dead-living dragon is just a little bit different than the traditional marriage ceremony. The knight and the dragon meet in the middle of the field and Brightik watches in awe as they press their foreheads together, yes, yes, this is going to work! They turn together, so fluidly, almost one body, one mind, one soul - 

The dragon burns a dozen townsmen to ashes, and the knight draws his sword to hack another dozen into tiny, bloody pieces.

So, on a positive note, the knight and the dragon do seem to be sharing their souls, and they do seem to be able to influence each other. It’s just that maybe the dragon’s influence is more dominant. 

Brightik hadn’t considered that possibility.

The princess, the farmers, the Brothers of the Order of the Dark Morning…

They slay the dragon, and the mad knight.

They drag Brightik back to the King’s castle, and throw him in the dungeon.

#

Brightik waits. And waits. And ponders his failure while he waits some more.

The tragedy in the field was only the initial experiment though, and there was some measure of success too, wasn’t there? Perhaps the song needs to be rewritten a bit, a word here, or there. Or they need very particular people for the bonding, a way to choose souls strong enough to overpower the souls of the dragons. Or any of a dozen other small adjustments they can make and try again. And again. Until Brightik gets it right. 

This is the solution! He is sure of it!

No one comes to visit him though, so there is no one with whom Brightik can share his thoughts. He sings himself songs for increased vitality, to keep his body going when it’s not getting the things it needs to keep going. He sings a song to keep his mind together when the dark, and the cold, and the starving, and the loneliness might drive him as mad as that mad knight. He remembers one of the songs from Kallan’s silly, old book and that one gives him enough energy to keep breathing. 

He waits some more.

He can’t make any accurate judgment as to the passage of time, but eventually his mouth goes so dry he can’t keep singing. Everything starts to fall apart. Brightik knows he’ll die down here anyway, but the instinct to survive is too strong to ignore. The wall on the eastern edge of his cell is covered in moss. He can’t see anything, but his fingers can still feel. The darkness in the dungeon is a perfect, unbroken, maddening black. But he can hear the sound of water trickling.

He crawls across the floor and nestles his face against the mossy wall. It’s soft. It tastes like dirt and green things. There’s a wide puddle at the base of the wall, and he presses his lips to it, sighs in relief as the water coats his throat. He thinks he might be able to sing again soon. He still can’t see anything, but when he looks down to where the puddle is, where he can feel the water wet against his lips…

There’s a reflection, staring back at him from the dark and the depths. Illuminated from a light in the water, though there is no light here in the dungeon, and that isn’t possible, is it? A reflection with its own light?

It’s not his reflection, Brightik realizes belatedly. 

Even dead dragons have souls, because souls are eternal. Men have souls too. The marriage ceremony is meant to bind souls, not bodies, and in cleaving souls, the song, the Firebearer, was cleaving eternal pieces. Kallan told Brightik they would be half of each other always. Their souls are eternal and their souls are bound.

That flare, when Brightik felt Kallan’s soul so brightly in the mountains…

Oh. Suddenly he understands. 

She must have followed him. She must have died in the mountains.

The reflection in the puddle is Kallan’s face. Broken, and rotting, and twisted with hate. It’s Kallan’s hands. Reaching out and dragging Brightik into the unexpected depths, holding him down, there beneath the dark surface.

There will be no more singing.

There will be no more songs.