I wake up. It takes me longer to come to terms with that fact than it takes me to actually sleep. Looking around I find myself in the nest instead of out in front of the cave. For all that she is strong, I doubt the beast woman dragged me here with her hands bound and her magic dissipating. Mother… that’s the best guess I have. Mother came and brought me in.

My blood runs cold. I rush towards the human room while trying to run through my mind. She was out of the cave, with me, but out. Mother could have used that as an excuse to kill her. The degree of callousness she showed towards life really points to that being the case and I fear…

I reach the room, panting, and I look inside. I startle them all, but thankfully, they’re all here. I look towards the beast woman and I see her eyes becoming just a bit gentler. She says… something, though neither I nor the others can understand what. Still I move closer and bump my head into her, which she reciprocates. That feels nice, and despite the weird looks I am sure I am getting, I stay like this a bit longer. I do, however, need to leave. Well, less of a “need” need, and more of a “I should try and make the music rune again before I forget how it looked” kind of need.

One more quick run back and I am ready to start gathering crystals. We do have quite a few air ones, but they’re not exactly too abundant so it takes a bit of time just to gather a sizeable pile, but once I do I make quick work of filling up on it. The hard part comes with making the rune. I remember it, clearly, yet I fail to form it in my first try. Unlike the light rune, which is entirely made of round bits and ellipses, this rune had more jagged ends, straight lines, harsh angles… And for some reason the mana did not like being put in that shape.

Why? I managed to make a small tribal orchestra with five of these, while fueling them with outstandingly bad mana for what it should do… Ah, damnit. I see… this rune feels wrong, the magic trying to run through it feels wrong, because I used the wrong type of mana when I made it. Or rather, it manifested by itself into the wrong type of mana because I didn’t have what it needed. I try and tweak it, removing a jagged line, adding in a loop, then removing two, but however much I try to fix it, I can’t get the air mana to listen.

So, I am doing something wrong. Clearly. How do I fix it? I can try and just use all types of mana like I used before, but I shake that thought right off. the problem with that idea is that I have no idea what percentages of mana I had. It’s like throwing plants in a pot and hoping soup comes out. Sometimes it’ll work, but sometimes you’ll just make poison. Instead of trying to guess how the messed up version of the rune functions, I should probably make the not messed up version, but the air mana doesn’t like any form resembling this rune. My foundation is wrong…

I try the rune again. I force the air mana into that shape, and even as it tries to diverge into something else, I don’t let it. I force it to run despite it being wrong, hoping against hope that it will do something other than dissipate.

I run out of mana. Nothing changed. It just wants to blow up and somehow consumes itself just from moving in this wrong pattern. Alright, new guess, try and keep it moving, but follow it if it tries to flow a different way, just don’t let it blow up.

It blows up.

Not literally, but you get the point. I try again, and it dissipates again. I try a third time and just barely manage to make see it turn a zig zag into two right angles, before it goes away again. This time I form the rune with the right angles. Progress is slow, but it is progress.

It takes me five refills before I manage to set up a formation that the mana likes flowing in. New problem, it does nothing. I look at it, and despite air mana flowing eagerly through the complex thing, nothing happens. I wonder if I messed something up, when finally I notice something in the middle of it. It’s not a sound or a song, it’s something different… It looks like a clump of mana, the same semi-transparent fog, but as I take in a deep breath and pull the small bit of mana out of the rune and into my lungs, I can hear chimes. I see black for a moment, but in that darkness I can hear a million different sounds. Skittering of insect legs, drops of water falling into tranquil puddles, a chime, a voice, a rumbling, a log falling.

This is sound mana and it is beautiful.

I am pulled back to reality and see the rune has kept functioning while I was hallucinating. I see that the clump in the middle has grown larger, I was spacing out for a while, but I also see that the mana in the rune proper is running out. Was the air mana consumed to make… sound mana? A more refined form? Wait, was I forcing the air mana to act like sound mana? Is that why it was so costly to just shout louder?

Huh, good to know for the future, mana is diverse and I might be able to make something do what it’s not supposed to, at a cost. More information for my back pocket.

Right now though, I look at this rune and think. The mana I put in is much more than the mana that resides at its center right now, meaning that the conversion isn’t that good… Well, if I think of it like refining something more basic into something specialized, then it makes sense to lose some of it. A good part of air mana is, well, air. Wind, storm, atmospheric pressure. Sound mana would lose all that in order to focus on the finer detail of sound.

Now, what happens if I take all this converted mana and move it through the rune? I do just that, pulling out the air mana while pushing in sound and the results are mixed. I hear a rough screech, thankfully not a loud one, and I can feel the mana not being exactly thrilled. I start listening to its will as it tries to change the flow ever so slightly and end up with a shape pretty close to the rune I started with, but also different. The sound has also changed, now more like somebody is holding down a key on a piano.

I start shifting the rune’s shape slightly and it acts similar to the light rune, but different. Now speed is, literally, speed, the size of the rune itself influences how loud it is, the angle of the rune changes where the sound comes from and so on and so forth. I try to play around with it a bit, going through different sounds, but I end up out of sound mana quickly.

I have to memorize these… and I do. Turns out, if instead of memorizing my entire experience, I just memorize a shape, I can use my library without having the mother of all headaches. It is still an annoyance, and I can feel my brain getting hot just from copying down two shapes, but I manage to do it and I can look at the 3d reenactment of the runes inside my own mind with perfect clarity. I do need to take a break after this though, because I do feel a headache creeping in and I don’t want to deal with that quite yet.

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So, let’s recap while my brain cools down. I need sound mana to make actual music, makes sense, air was literally just making my voice louder. I need a rune in order to shift air into sound, since we do not have sound mana crystals around, then I need a different rune to manipulate it. Theoretically I could combine the two, if I had a bit better control. Make the air to sound rune, then send the flow into the music rune.

Wait, do I not have enough control for that? I mean, I used five of them at once, accidentally. I should be able to at least make two at once. I try just that, but fail almost instantly. It’s like patting your head and rubbing your belly, all while jumping on one leg. It’s a kind of multi-tasking I am just not used to yet… I try to make two air to sound runes, and I am pleasantly surprised at being able to do it. I try a third and I falter slightly. Huh, so 3 of a kind is my limit. Understandable, I can work with that. At least this speeds up the process greatly. Putting the runes on top of the pile of air crystals also helps with fueling it without taking all the mana from me. Soon enough I have a big enough cloud that I need to breathe it in, or risk losing it. The gold around not only draws in mana from outside, it also draws in mana from around, meaning that if I am not careful, my carefully crafted mana supply will be mixed with everything else and become unrecognizable.

Thankfully my lungs are big and I manage to pull in most of the mana, with what’s left being used to kickstart the music rune. I did say I wanted to figure out how to use magic for fun, not just for fighting, and this is my first project: figure out how to make every sound possible in order to make the songs in my head real. I am not going to be able to play a piano or a violin with my draconic body, so I might as well use magic to bring Earth music to this world.

Alright, this will probably take a while…

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Did I ever tell you I am an absolute moron?

Because I am.

Oh, just try and make every single sound in the world, what could possibly go wrong???? Well, I’ll tell you what. EVERYTHING. Does anyone even know how many sounds exist in the world? How many notes? Because it isn’t just DO RE MI, that’s for sure. I played every note that a grand piano can do, then a violin, then a guitar… simple stuff, really. Once I figured out how to get the correct lingering sound for when you play the note longer, I was good. I even managed to figure out 8-bit sounds and the like, from analog to digital, I managed, after about 12 hours, to make every single sound and repeat them until I managed to memorize the patterns.

And then I remembered about cords, taking another day just to learn how to use a single rune to make multiple sounds at once.

And then came in voice.

It has been days.

I even had to go back to fighting mutant animals by the lake. I have been able to make it easier on myself by running whatever voice I wanted to mimic in my head, but even then I had to stop each half a second, each half a sound, because anything more complex would make the rune falter and collapse, but I managed to slowly play entire songs… 3 minutes of music, played over 30 hours. Greaaaat progress.

I decide, rightfully so, that my plan is stupid and stop sometime along the fifth continuous day. Rather than try and learn every single sound possible, I decide to just mark down all the important sounds and figure it out from there. I have no idea how I managed to do this the first time around…

So, making voices is basically impossible. Every time I try I end up with something akin to a very bad AI rendition of a person. There’s gaps, and no matter how much I strain to imagine, remember or think my way through the shape of the rune, it never changes fast enough to smoothly move in to the next moment. Too many settings need to be tweaked at a millimetric level in order to make it work perfectly, and I do not have the magical dexterity for it.

What I do have, however, is a million other songs that do not have voice. Or I can just try and make the instrumental, ignoring the words of songs entirely. Actually I test that out with one of the simpler songs I remember, at least instrumental-wise. Drum drum clap. Drum drum clap. Drum drum cl- I fall off beat, the change not being fast enough. I decide to instead make two different ones, one for the drum, one for the clap. I try again and this time it works. I stay away from the guitar solo, because I certainly can’t make that work if I can barely time the change between a drum and a clap… Yeah, I can keep this going as long as I have mana.

I change to something just a tad more complex and from a whole different genre. I only try the first 8 seconds of it on loop, but after a minute of figuring out exactly what rune to shift into what and when, I manage the beginning of the one eyed skeleton’s theme.

I smile to myself. Of course this is painfully slow, but it is magic. I can make snippets of music into reality. It’s a small step, but I did it!

I am spent… Also, I think I focused so much on this that I forgot everything else…Oops. I should probably not do that, at least while people are kind of relying on me. I decide to finally visit the humans again, but what I see is kind of worrying. While they are mostly fine, I notice that the beast woman is much thinner than before. Oh damn, she’s been eating only fruits. Those things, while filled with sugars and the like, have basically no protein. And she’s a wall of muscles, and at least half feline… can she even digest fruits as well as everyone else? She ate the bug raw that one time and had no issues… what if she’s an obligate carnivore and was stuck on a sugary diet because she had no other option.

I told myself I would bring them some meat, but after the forest trip and my time focused on music, I just forgot. She looks at me, and I see her expression of pain. I can even hear her guts churning… She’s hungry and there’s no meat around.

I returned recently from a hunt, so it will take at least until tomorrow. I doubt there’s any actual animals close to the cave, but it doesn’t matter. I know that at least some big, juicy bugs dare to approach, to feast on the huge fruits. I rush to try and find at least one of them and I am met by two. Well, they are two big bugs that look roughly like beetles. Though while one of them has the earth affinity I am used to, the other has… chitin? It feels like bone, but not really, so I am guessing it’s chitin. Huh, I should have expected they also come in variations. Oh well, one of them I kill easily as it is scuttling on the ground, but the other is a bit more annoying as it is the chitin one, not nearly as tough, but not nearly as heavy, and it is climbing the vines. I cannot just shake it off since it has a good grip and no huge weight holding it down, so I instead throw rocks at it until it falls. It’s easier to pierce with my teeth than the rock one, so at least there’s that.

I carry both of them back, my mouth just barely fitting them, which lets me run much easier than if I carried them in my tails. Once I reach their room, I am met like before by barely hidden disgust from most people, but at least the feline woman is appreciative as she dives straight into them, eating them from the underside until only the shell remains. She doesn’t look satiated, which makes sense from how big she is, but at least this should help make the wait bearable. She closes her eyes and makes a chuffing sound towards me. I reply by creating the sound rune and somewhat poorly mimicking her. She looks surprised, which is a bit funny, though the most surprising thing is that I see the old woman casting a spell, making runes appear on her face as she looks at me with barely disguised terror. I tilt my head, unsure of why she is so scared.

I look at her a bit, then decide to leave. guess they really did not like the dead bugs… hope they like mutant wolf or boar…