Every so often as I looked up at the Skytusk, a flash of lightning in the upper mists would light it from behind, allowing me to see its massive silhouette even through the third layer—see the mountain in full for just a brief moment. This mountain, which we’d found within a hundred kilometers of our landing site, was taller than any that had existed back on Aranar.

In the week before Hassina’s concert, I found myself looking up at it often. Its shape would loom above me, dark and challenging, and I would fear that after the work we’d done, we’d scale the peak only to meet with the storm lord’s wrath.

Fewer than 200 of us ascended to the mountaintop on the night of the concert, arriving in small groups that were carried up the slope by the windcallers. The aerial journey took us up the majority of the peak, but ended at the base of the tusk: from there we took a route that we’d carved into the mountaintop itself.

Earth elementals are less likely to live and move through the peaks of mountains, which essentially function as large enclosures to them, cages hemmed in by air in all directions but downward. As such the frozen peak of the Skytusk was likely free of any elementals that might pose a serious danger, and so our earthshapers had tunneled deep, happy to make use of the vast capabilities which they’d been forbidden to use at the site of the settlement, where the elementals were more of a worry and the tunnels had to be shallow and small.

It was a hasty construction, one we’d only undertaken once we’d gotten the shapers into the air and found ourselves with as many [Earth] skill keys as we had essence to create. But once we’d had the keys in abundance, it was merely a question of how many other skill keys we were ready to furnish our earthshapers with—[Surge], [Mana], and [Weave] keys were the most useful in bolstering [Earth Magick], and every one that we could plunder had been an extra hybrid skill to increase the rate at which our people could excavate.

Hence, what they’d done in only a few weeks was astonishing when one considered that they’d come to this world at level 0. The tunnel’s lower entrance was at the base of the mountain’s eponymous tusk—the several hundred meters of sheer cliffs that ended in a slanted plateau which just barely pierced the fourth mist layer. From there the tunnel had been bored forward several hundred meters, then straight upward to emerge in the middle of the plateau.

The central shaft was shaped like an octagon, with steps carved out of the stone walls around it. Four of the faces of the octagon were continuous walls with the stairway passing behind them, and these walls had been carved with runes to guide the spells that the mages had prepared in case of the worst.

I took to the peak earlier than most of the elves, with Zirilla and Valir by my side. We’d decided that everyone would ascend through the chasm rather than carry them all straight to the top—it would be tiring for some of us, but it would also give the hole we’d bored in the mountain some seeming significance in the eyes of any elementals who wondered what it was.

We talked over what we’d already talked over dozens of times—security. It was our job to prepare for the worst.

“Akkakesh saying ‘no’ by way of destroying a whole mountaintop’s worth of elves because they feel our offer is too presumptuous isn’t out of the question,” I said as we made a brisk pace up the steps. “There’s a possibility that they don’t even have much respect for the lives of their own elementals, let alone surfacers. And we are asking them for the [Air] keys that function as both their lifeblood and their means to acquire power.”

“Even if they doesn’t see our music as being equal in value to his [Air], it’s not like he can hear our music anywhere else,” said Zirilla. “He’s old. He won’t throw away the chance at hearing more just because he hates our offer.”

“Unless he’s impulsive,” I said.

Zirilla made a disappointed sound, one that suggested she saw my point.

“If things go south, someone will likely be sending a bolt of lightning at Hassina, in which case I’ll be diverting it and then providing as much distraction as possible. You and Valir will be responsible for seeing Mirio and Hassina safely off the peak. Hassina first.”

“We know the job,” said Valir, the faintest hint of a smile in his voice. “We’ve been over it, Lux Irovex.”

“Yeah, but she’s nervous,” said Zirilla. “Gotta give her minions orders to alleviate that tension. We’ll always be here for you, Aziriel.”

“I’m touched,” I said flatly. “Remind the musicians as they arrive to channel their mana into the stone below them as they play. It’ll be easier to evacuate if they’re not all natural lightning rods.”

“Like us,” Valir added.

“Yes, Valir. Like us.”

Of course, the three of us knew how to defend against lightning, were well-practiced in the art of cutting a bolt as it was forming. Whether it would matter against a storm lord who undoubtedly had much higher [Channel] than we did was a question that we hopefully wouldn’t be answering.

We passed the chambers where the mages had situated themselves before we emerged onto the peak to take our positions. Seriana and Luthiel weren’t going to be on the surface. Instead, they’d be below us, coordinating a huge store of mana meant to fuel a binding spell that had been carved in the channels along the mountain’s inner chamber.

I stood perched at the edge of the tusk, occasionally changing position between looking at the elves gathering behind me and the infinite sea of red clouds ahead of me. I saw elementals with my magical gaze—but only the unintelligent variety, flitting about with undirected movements and paying the elves below them little heed.

The mountaintop had also been reshaped, and the carcass of the behemoth wyvern had been magically decayed and then stashed in a chamber below us, carried away in fragments. As I watched, the musicians arranged themselves in a small pit ringed with tiered steps that we’d cut into the mountain. Runes lay carved into the stone all about it—runes attended by mages who managed the spells that kept the air the right temperature and pressure for the performance.

Most of the instruments they were using were those that we’d brought with us. Shapers could form our steel into the precise dimensions needed for acoustic quality, and creationists could make them the alloys they required, but even these two things only took us so far. Sixty days was never going to be enough to find the perfect quality materials like wood and hair that we’d need to make some instruments of the quality we were used to, let alone test them to determine how those instruments should be made. The result was that we had a few new pipes and horns that were excellent, a few new drums that were passable, and a whole host of instruments that had come from home.

At length, the last of the arriving elves emerged through the chasm we’d cut into the tusk and, if they needed it, were cured of their exhaustion by one of our healers.

Soon I heard the discordant insanity of sixty elves suddenly tuning their instruments all at once, then a full-bodied silence as everyone’s eyes fell toward where Hassina stood on a raised hunk of stone. Then at last she raised her arms and gave the signal to begin—to one elf.

A great crash sounded across the mountaintop as the elf she’d signalled struck a gong that was little more than a rectangular metal sheet hanging from two chains. Its sound rang out, then tapered off to silence as its musician stilled the vibrations of the gong.

Hassina signaled again, and again the gong sounded. It happened five times in total, a clear signal that our concert was beginning, then was answered by a rapid series of notes played out on a piccolo. This exchange went on for some time: the mighty, crashing footsteps of the gong and the irreverent dancing of the piccolo, one thriving in the other’s silence. They built tension, coming to no conclusion or resolution between one another—until, at the tenth sounding of the gong, the entire orchestra burst into sudden life.

The first piece they played was a strange assortment: part of it was quoted directly from two of Vitha Holde’s most famous symphonies, and several other parts of it were more rigidly inspired by several other famous works. The rest was Hassina’s own composition.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Overall, the whole thing had a distinctly contentious tone. Every movement, every melody was set against another, the whole thing an overexcited affair. It reminded me of an argument which both participants are enjoying, where every last detail is fought over.

Soon enough I had settled in to listen to the sound of the music, watching more elementals appear in the air around us, their more controlled movements hinting at their intelligence. Air elementals were held back from interfering by their storm elemental cousins, until soon a veritable whirlwind of elementals circled the place of the concert.

As all this went on, I had to watch Hassina, who stood and conducted both with her hands and with a psychic bond, her stark white hair blowing in the breeze around her and rustled by the frenetic motions of her arms.

I basked in the sight of her. We had such hopes for Hassina—Luthiel, Alcuon, and I. We foresaw—had long foreseen—that she could be a great leader of elves. And what had she done, since we’d come here, but reinforce that vision?

When her duty had asked that she warn the elves against the danger of following me with singular hearts, she’d done it. Even if it had made her unpopular, had undermined her power, she’d done it. She hadn’t convinced herself that she could do her duty any other way: she’d seen what she’d seen, and taken the risk of seeming arrogant and brash, unnecessarily contentious, to do her job. And she’d told the tale of Narana at Ithmel Bel, of one of my greatest accomplishments—giving up.

And she’d done as much again when I’d delayed Luthiel’s judgement—insisted that I was doing wrong, argued against me to a council of elves who were almost all in support of me, and almost all her seniors.

Lately I’d been admiring her courage—I’d admired anyone who stood against me. But there, on the mountaintop, I found something else to admire.

She was just so fiercely talented. It was no small thing, selecting from a catalogue of more than a thousand years of music from multiple different cultures all those pieces that you will mingle together, reformat into music for another kind of being that you’ve never played for in your life.

But as the concert progressed, she began to do something I did not expect. The orchestra switched: they went from music that she’d written for the elementals to music that was only written for elves, but grieving elves.

Our melodies might suit elemental ears in some cases, but not the ones that were sorrowful. Hassina had, in the middle of her perfectly functional concert, decided to play a lament for our first lost world, for Maia. The elementals above us seemed to falter in their motions, drifting in confusion, some of them still trying to play with the wind while others fluttered away and out of my sight.

When the lament was finished, the music changed again, becoming the more chaotic and contentious sound that she’d written for her audience. Again the elementals kicked up their aerial dance, more of them joining us.

But soon after, she had them play another lament, something more fit for an elvish funeral than a storm lord’s court. The contrast between the two sounds was as obvious as she could make it. It wasn’t just music that would suit our ears and not theirs—she wanted Akkakesh to know exactly why they preferred one composition over another. She was telling them, clear as she could through her music, that our ears and his were different.

What are you doing, Hassina? I wondered. I didn’t dare interrupt her work to ask her as much, though. Her mind was preoccupied with her job. Besides, I’d told her she had to do this herself—and she was.

And so I didn’t interrupt her—but Akkakesh did.

I saw the mana forming the bolt of lightning only in the moment before it struck—Akkakesh was powerful, and he called the bolt with frightening speed.

I wasn’t the only one who saw it. Every elf I’d set to guard duty gave a start as their attention snapped toward the forming bolt, but I sent them a quick psychic signal to wait when I saw that it was coming down next to Hassina.

The bolt ignited, and the orchestra seemed to fall quiet—but this was only because their music had shifted, moving from the quiet lull of the lamentation into a more feverish succession of notes that was still quiet, but anxious and urgent. Hassina had apparently even prepared them for this.

Akkakesh moved close to her—within six inches, and I fought every instinct I had to keep myself from diving toward her and dragging her into the pit. She knew, as I knew, that he could incinerate her with ease from that distance.

Akkakesh must have gotten a [Wild Bond] skill or something similar, because when they spoke to her their voice was a sizzling hiss in the mind of every elf on the mountaintop.

Tell me, music-maker, they said. Is it your intention to mock me?

Mentally, I began to gather my focus, prepare myself to lunge for Hassina and potentially reach out and interfere with Akkakesh’s lightning….

“No,” said Hassina, speaking both aloud and in the bond.

Music-maker, Akkakesh said. Your sounds divide so cleanly into that which we adore and that which finds no purchase in our minds—it strikes me that you knew it would be thus.

“I did,” Hassina said.

I seethed with frustration, wondering at what she was doing—this was no time to play games. Gods above, Hassina….

Akkakesh spoke. Explain then, why you give us this insult—why you draw our attentions with pleasings sounds only to follow them with unpleasantries.

If hearing she’d insulted him had frightened her as much as it should have, she gave no sign. Instead Hassina’s voice rang clear across the mountaintop.

“I mean no insult, O Lord,” she said. “It is only that to hear the music is to know the musician. We must show you respect as we know it, not as we believe you to know it. To act as if we could frame your every thought, anticipate your every perspective—that would be the disrespect, would be mockery. I am master of the elves here tonight, and I decided that even if you care not for their sound, we must sing you our laments. I decided thus because I wished to add… new dimension to our performance. I wish to furnish the manifold and depthless curiosity of the elementals with considerations borne of comparison: if our music sounds thus, and we think yours sound thus, then what are we?”

You hope that my curiosity at our difference will be more intriguing to my mind than my joy at your most pleasant melodies? Akkakesh asked, his voice still seething. It is not. This music is… unsettling.

Hassina didn’t answer him for a moment—and at length Akkakesh spoke again.

Yet I am curious, he said. There are many things I have not experienced, and your sound is not unpleasant… merely unsettling. It is new. And you speak truly: depthless is my curiosity….

“If it is not what you desire to hear, Lord Akkakesh, we can play other melodies.”

I hadn’t relaxed since the appearance of the storm lord, and their conversation wasn’t helping me.

The cynical view of things was that she was manipulating him, teaching him to treat an unpleasant experience as an indulgence like he was any old Thanaxian noble eating a conman’s cuisine.

Whether Hassina felt this way herself, or genuinely thought he’d prefer to hear some unpleasant lament that helped him contemplate the elven condition, I couldn’t say. In truth, it didn’t matter what her intent was—if he thought she was manipulating him, he’d scatter us like a handful of beach-sand.

I desire to hear it, he said at last. But my wards, I think, do not. Where they might listen with confusion, I listen with fascination. Not pleasure, for my pleasure is begotten by those earlier sounds, and greatly do I wish to hear more of their kind. Yet fascination pulls my mind elsewhere, when I hear your other sound—pulls my mind into contemplation. I ask that you postpone your lamentations, music-maker. I will be audience to them, but only once the greater offer is made.

“I will do as you wish, Lord Akkakesh,” said Hassina, bowing low. “Which for now is to resume our concert.”

Akkakesh drifted a few feet away from Hassina, seeming to regard her with his strange constellation of eyes as she resumed her role as conductor and the orchestra peeled away into a new piece.

I breathed a heavy sigh of relief, but still felt an intense frustration. The whole conversation had been unnecessary: Hassina had engendered our effort here with unneeded controversy. The thing that disturbed me most was that I couldn’t see why: she’d done all of it just to learn that the storm lord wasn’t offended enough to kill her.

I stared out our high priest and whispered, only to myself, so quietly that not even the elves nearest me could hear.

“What are you doing, Hassina?”