The evening began to pulse glyphed and fractal light. The Sibling took over as night fell, as bright as a lazy twilight. Kova supped on the thousand flavor soup and barkpuffs with a rich and heady jam and preserved and sweetened meats and roasted threshfruit. The adults smoked pipes and long smokesacks connected with pipes, k’juma. The gathering begun. The henge was completely packed with tables, at the very center a ring of tables for the elders, Ryfkharnu among them. Everyone else sat on the periphery.

The ripe elders communing with Ryfkha on matters he couldn’t possibly care about. Soon enough the bard set aside his bowl and took up his lute. Kovaleska was sitting at the far side of the henge next to Rakatl.

Ryfkha plucked a few strings. He opened his mouth, about to launch into a tale, but didn’t. He shrugged. “My words were too dark. I am sorry, truly. What can be said? Change is afoot in Sen’tael.”

He raised his voice into a challenge to them. Wild-eyed.

“Tell me truly—what tale should we hear, ye Setra?”

He quieted and waited for the suggestions.

“Tell us of the lost ages!” came a call from the corner. The shaman, Lethos.

“Well sure,” said Ryfkha. “Many of the tales that can be told are what fragments remain of the times beyond time.”

“Tell us of Kuras!” Elder Pataro shouted.

“Ah…” Ryfkha wagged a finger. “Kuras is of the Fourth Age, but he was born in the Third. There is a tale to be told of this. What else? What else?”

Looking back out over them.

“Tell us of the war!” the warrior Deveros bellowed.

“Yuhilo!” Kova shouted.

Ryfkha strained and squinted. Looking for her.

“Aye!” he agreed. “Aye and aye, littleling. Well. Perhaps later.” The bard slapped his hands together like thunder. “Very well! I have decided.”

He strode from the area and returned with an eldmetal orb a little bigger than his fist. He pressed something on it and it zipped to life around him.

“A tuner,” Elder Pataro marveled.

“Aye. Last I was in Kurasanto I performed on the Isle of Light. They gave me this after—from the Hall of Wonders. This tale I will tell, I told then as well. It is called the Turning of the Ages.”

With that, he proceeded, more speaking than singing. The tuner levitating around him, sending out smoky nebulous colored light and humming harmonics, in a sort of cadence with the bard.

“Before the ages turned, the great city of Vensar grew at the edges of the jungles of the moonforest. These vensari peoples multiplied and spread over the Serane, from the moonforest to the Mossfangs. Of their cities, seven ascended to form Iccletia. Vensar foremost and first among them. Their Seekers had found a font of power they could tap into, and spent their time harnessing and bending these energies. Such were the first Artificers born.

“Down into the bone of time, many hyralas from its founding, a certain Iccletian was born. Kuras. It is said it was during an eclipse of the sun and the Sibling. The boy born into an artificer family. Pax, though he eschewed that name when he became a Seeker. He drew further from the Iccletian mythals than anyone else had, and, drawing upon those energies, he looked into the veil. Past the veil.

“In that moment, a strangeling leapt into Sen’tael. A demon. What was riven beyond the veil, the old gods surely had their reasons. The Iccletian weyr was tainted forever by this demon’s entry, and when the magicka withered the cities plummeted. The Fall.

“Save one. Kuras was able to guide Vensar, mostly intact, to a landing by the aelsea. This new root of civilization came to be called Kurasanto in the years that followed, as the demon supped of the world, of the old gods themselves, who were destroyed or driven mad. The remaining Iccletians of Vensar, as well as earthbound and aedra, banded together channeling the old magics to seal the demon Nokot forever.”

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Ryfkha closed his eyes. The tuner sending violet misty light around him.

“Thus the third age ended. And as the fourth began, Kuras ascended to godhood.”

At that, he opened his eyes, and strummed the lute once, and then produced a flourished bow. He played the lute further without singing, twanging through chords rapidly with the tuner spreading multicolored haze. They all cheered him. Kova clapped and whooped raucously with the other kids. Finally ending. People bade him tell more tales.

“Later I will tell one for the children. Perhaps.”

The talk returned to the news of the day. Kova had finished eating, her belly heavy with soup and melon and spark-dusted melon seeds, the rich and spicy smell of the communal meal suffusing everything.

The earthbound children ran into sporegrass glades, dracari and taroe darting above them through the trees and cloudthresh. Kova ran from the lorgen, it was often a game they played, lorgen and dracari, and she tonight was one of the dracari who must hide and elude her friend Rakatl. As they played, everbloom began to glow green in the depths of the deepening night. They had strayed far from the village.

Kova crossed through a muddied glade into a strand of giant cloudthresh which has choked the life from some dead trees it now intertwined like a great serpent. She slowed, a little winded. She knelt behind some roots, everbloom twinkling and twisting here, hearing only dim rustles and shouts as her friends must be getting caught, but not close yet to her perhaps.

There was a shriveled little plant. Its three-petaled flowers were closed like a dracari’s mouth. She brushed her fingers against its stalk and the flowers moved and opened up, spiked florets inside. Like a set of eyes they turned toward her.

Root-child.

A garland voice. Her eyes widened. She shushed the plant.

You do not speak in stillness, root-child…the flower-song is not in tongue or ear.

The glade rustled. She was looking at the plant. Incredulous.

Sap of ages…sun of time…so many leaf-petals have fallen since we have hummed the meat-songs.

Someone grabbed her from behind. She screamed and whirled around. It was a brown-skinned vensari boy. He had a couple of stripes.

“Got ya!” Rakatl shouted, and dashed off. The flowers had closed up. She looked south toward Myrr’s Blade and marked the shadow of time. She should be getting back. She touched the flowers again and they again bloomed into life.

The green-drink of life…a sleeper in the dream…we should whisper…remember silence…dream the dreaming of stone.

Then they withered back.

Walking home toward the startree marked darkly against the Sibling’s effusive glow, the jungle hummed, creatures alight and zipping about and calling, and she thought somewhere in the heart of all that noise she heard the flower-song. Had she always? Or was it only Ryfkha’s song? He had begun again around the firepit, he stood upon a long table and paced, looking down a few times as he went, plucking on the lute. The tuner zipped around him, melodic and pulsing.

The story wrapping down into the deepness of time. Shadow-faeries, full of mischief and malice, wreaked havoc through New Iccletia when the Fall was still a fresh thing people remembered. Yuhilo, greatest among Artificers, grew wise in the weyr of the old gods, as many Artificers tried to do.

“She walked—alone—through the earthbound lands of New Iccletia. Wherever she went—the further she went from Kurasanto—she was thought more and more strangeling. As out there, and especially within the moonforest, they—at that time—still worshipped the old gods. She came here, in fact, once, though perhaps Setrana was not even a mote in Kuras’s arcane eye, but she came to see the great moontree, and stood beneath it and communed for a time. It is said.”

He continued to tell the tale of the trial of Yuhilo. Kovaleska relished the tale, though he’d told it before. Perhaps it was her favorite of all. Yuhilo was captured by the Knights of Vensar, a rogue order of knights led by aedra in modern-day Fenurog who followed the old gods. The aedra put her on trial for heresy. She stuck to her beliefs, and when given the chance showed them the truelight of Kuras.

“A formidable display,” Ryfkha said. “It was said it streaked far into the evening sky, and peoples all around saw the truelight that day. Thereafter, Yuhilo was acquitted. The vensari of Fenurog had already fallen in love with her. Not longer after, Fenurog began to venerate Kuras—and, they give Yuhilo a special status there. Mother of Light. Ever since, Fenurog has been a staunch ally to New Iccletia.”

Ryfkha smiled, strummed the lute a bit, bowed.

“What about the shadow-faeries?” Kova called.

“Oh, littleling, they probably slunk back into Tarlanis or whatever other place deep within Sen’tael they emerged from. In truth, I do not know.”

Soon enough, dessert came out. Various mealed breads, spread with jam and roasted. The children supped to fullness, joking and jostling one another, until the night spun and finally Kova scampered home.

They had a whole door made from eldmetal her father had scavenged and she opened it and went in. The home smelled of earth. A light layer of moss on the floor of the hollow. Her father quiet and faraway in his chair by their hearth, his hammer laid upon his lap. Her mother gave her a sup of dreamwine and sent her off to her slumber, stroked her hair and they spoke a little bit.

But she did not dream a dream of stone. Instead she saw flowers, and as she lay upon the bed of flourished moss she dreamed they grew around her in majesty, and the moss as well, and the roof of the house peeled back like petals and Kovaleska was raised toward the night sky. The moons orbiting above her in hypertime. Counting turns and moonfalls. Sen’tael’s shadow flickering across the white disc of Myrr’s Blade as everything swirled on like a great wheel.

Underneath the song of the dream the flower-voice chanted like a drum. If it was speaking to her she could not understand what it was saying.