David
A single line of light slid through the thin windows and found the right side of David's face. He groaned.
"Rise and shine!" Alice bellowed into his ear.
David squeezed his eyes, hoping they could be more shut than they already were, and flipped over, burying his face in the pile of robes.
"We have places to be. Things to do!"
Too cheerful. Too early. David wrapped the topmost robe over his head, covering his ears.
Alice gave his shoulder a light shove. David grunted angrily.
"I'll give you another thirty minutes," Alice said, clearly amused. "It shouldn't take me longer than that to find a water source and a bucket."
David didn't respond.
"Don't stay up so late next time." Alice flounced off in a huff.
The echo of footsteps headed away from him allowed David to drop his arms back to his side and let the robe that he'd pulled over his head fall flat.
"Remember to change into your new robes when you wake up," said Alice, right in his ear. David jumped. She'd snuck up on him.
"The village doesn't look too far off, so we'll probably still make it there and back before it gets dark out." There were more footsteps and then, in the distance, the quiet thump of the double doors at the entrance.
She had sounded very excited, and happy to be awake, of which David was neither.
When David woke again, the sun was higher in the sky and the temple was quiet. He considered going back to sleep but felt a little guilty for making Alice wait. The sound of the Song was more constant and omnipresent than he'd ever heard it and the individual beats had slowed further.
He blinked. How much time had gone by? He felt as though he'd been awake for hours. David stared at the window shaped sheets of light that had begun level with his face in the dawn and were barely present now. It was almost noon then. He was still unsure how much time he'd lost listening to the Song.
There was no sign of Alice other than a pair of neatly folded jeans shorts and the tshirt she had been wearing on the ground where her pillow had been. She had wanted to go into the village today and they still might. David unfurled one of the robes and changed into it quickly. They were surprisingly soft and very well made. The way he could feel the currents of air he displaced while moving around, however, left him glad that it wasn't cold outside.
His sleeves were the pinnacle of entertainment. They billowed and made dramatic flapping noises as he folded his clothing and placed it beside Alice's pile.
David imagined himself as a martial artist from a period drama and slid into the first stance of the Scripture, and then the second. The flapping intensified. He smiled and then made his way towards the exit. The robes weren't long enough that they stopped him from walking quickly but the temple was so dusty the hem of the robe rode on a sea of detritus. David wrinkled his nose in disgust.
As he drew closer to the double doors, he heard the muted sound of a flute playing a passingly familiar melody which he thought he recognized.
David pushed the doors open and was greeted with the sight of Alice in her scandalously short, light grey robes which had belonged to the disciples of the temple. She was perched upon one of the large remnants of the pillars which were strewn across the courtyard with her legs crossed. The robe showed her long, pale neck and holding up her hair was that silver pin with that universal symbol of the Dao. Slung over her back was her guqin case.
Between her fingers was the stone flute. She was learning to play it. He assumed that was why Alice had not woken him with the promised bucket of water. When she caught sight of him, Alice gave him a particularly fey look, then stopped playing.
"It has the same register as an oboe," said Alice, as he pushed himself up onto the pillar to take a seat beside her. "So I thought I'd play something for the oboe on it, something I struggled with when I was younger - not as a musician but as a dancer. Do you recognize it?"
"Play it again."
She obliged, starting from a series of arpeggios - chords broken into their individual components to form a melody in quick succession. Alice's fingers danced over improbable configurations on the flute which contrasted with the simplicity of the music. The flute had been designed to play a different scale than the classical oboe that she had chosen.
The moment Alice segued into the main thematic idea of the ballet suite, David recognized it. He gave her a wide smile, which she managed to return with some difficulty between the notes. It wound down to a close after another minute.
"That was Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake." The care Alice put into playing instruments was a joy to see - it was something David appreciated wholeheartedly.
Maybe he appreciated it a little more than Alice did, because an abnormal amount of anticipation shone in her eyes as Alice turned up her nose. "Appropriate, don't you think, given the way you've been looking at this swan."
She tried to maintain the pose with the flute inches from her face but she couldn't hold in her giggling, somewhat ruining that image of a cold, disdainful beauty. Learning to play a new instrument was an incredible amount of effort for a joke - but that was Alice's nature.
Alice's hand found the crook between his shoulder and the back of his neck. Her fingers ran through his hair idly. "You should grow out your hair a little bit and tie it up into that period drama top knot. Then you can stomp around in public and refuse to answer anyone who doesn't call you Young Master. You know, the sort that would walk with a hand behind his back and an open fan with bad art in it."
Her smile grew almost impish as she looked him up and down. "You're cute," she decided, in a moment of incisive honesty. But before he could come up with a response or at least comment on the faint pink blush coloring her dimples, she grabbed him by the sleeve and pushed herself off the pillar, dragging him along with her.
They started making their way towards the archway at the far end of the courtyard. Alice was already on the next topic in her agenda. "When we get to the village, we're going to eat so much. I don't care what type of food they make, I don't care if I'm allergic and I'll need a shot to restart my heart, I don't care if it's literally all raw. We're going to eat everything," Alice decided.
"And then they're going to discover that we don't have any money and we'll be washing dishes for the next thirty years."
Alice scoffed, then drew her breath into her stomach to deepen her voice as best she could. "Money does not aid this one in the contemplation of the Dao." She stroked an imaginary beard and nodded wisely at David.
"Side by side, as plates of food disappear, the itemized list of charges grow. Food is not paper and paper is not food but they are one and the same. That is the Dao. We have neither food nor paper yet we need both. That is also the Dao. Duality in all things." David replied. "Uh, yin and yang. Life and death. Or something like that."
Alice laughed with him but her regret over not having real food was all too real. David firmly pulled her towards the mulberry trees for a late breakfast despite complaints. When they arrived, Alice began to pick mulberries off of the many trees cheerfully. For someone who claimed to hate eating them, she seemed to really like the mulberry grove.
She gathered a handful of fruit in one hand and sat in the grass, chewing thoughtfully. David grabbed them off the branches as he ate them, one after another. There was only fruit to eat and it would be that way for the foreseeable future but David found that he didn’t really mind. He had expected to be starving by this point but in all honesty, he was rarely even hungry.
Alice was eating more daintily on this trip to the mulberry grove. There were no mentions of silkworms and no droplets of dark red juice flying from her as though she were an open blender.
When David sat beside her, he realized that only one of these assumptions were correct.
"Look at her, isn't she cute?"
The silkworm that was crawling on Alice's sleeve happened to be bulbous and milk white and squirming and curling and two inches long and most certainly not cute.
Alice sighed when she saw David's expression. "They're harmless really. I quite like them." She gently slid it onto her palm, reached up into the low hanging branches above her and kept her arm upright until the silkworm was fully on the branch. David heard the sizzling, the mushing, the minute crunching of hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of silkworms of all sizes chewing on mulberry leaves above him.
He shivered.
"I don't think that I'm too different from a silkworm, in many ways." That look on her face when she was trying to figure out how to play the stone flute came back. "Silkworms are born in droves of thousands. When they're young, they're tiny, barely the length of an eyelash. Most of them don't survive. The ones who do eat and eat and eat. They eat leaves. They eat fruit. They eat each other."
"Not too different, eh?" David folded his arms, expecting some sort of explanation, but Alice didn't stop.
"When they reach the size of the silkworm that I kidnapped off the tree, they discover that they're able to spin silk, that they've always been able to spin silk. Their hunger goes away and they spin and create and weave a cocoon around themselves, hoping that it would be enough. And one day, they discover that they've done all they could and they take a long rest from the world."
Alice stared at a cloud of moths that had landed on the blossoming mulberry flowers. "Most of them never emerge and die in the caskets they’d spent their entire lives painstakingly weaving. But those who do discover that they have wings."
David, who always preferred to act in good grace, wished he hadn't interrupted her. It was a nice story and one that, for whatever reason, meant a lot to Alice. She had gone thoughtful and quiet rather than thoughtful and fidgety afterwards. Even the sound of her Song seemed more calm than usual, even as every beat echoed in a contemplative syncopation, a delicately crafted clockwork of many ideas which danced in tandem.
When they were done eating, Alice was back to normal and her lips were stained that dark red.
The companionable silence continued for roughly fifteen minutes before Alice got bored. She looked at the flute she held in her hand with a private joke on her lips as a bunch of rodents scurried in single file across the road, then thought better of whatever she had in mind.
David thought of the way the silkworm bent its body into soft shapes and decided that whatever Alice was considering was probably going to end in negative emotions. He saw her eye him out of the corner of her eye. She looked back and forth between them like she was comparing produce at a supermarket. She chose David.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
"Are we there yet?"
The village was clearly in sight, roughly the same thirty miles away from when they'd first started walking, so David ignored her. She huffed. They walked another half a minute.
"Are we there yet?"
David stopped moving to stare at Alice as severely as he could. "Don't you dare start."
Alice giggled, then turned her lip upwards in injury. "The village is so far away and my feet hurt," she whined. "Carry me." She sidled up next to him and batted her eyelashes at him.
David wouldn't have believed her even if she didn't begin this charade with the intention of making trouble. "I've actually been thinking about that. Maybe you should carry me instead. I was up really late last night and I can't think of a better time than now to get some sleep."
Alice leaned into him, laughing. "So why were you up so late last night anyway?" She looked up at him through those dark lashes with wide, surprised eyes and lips parted in shock. "Were you watching me sleep?" She covered her mouth, scandalized.
David shook his head in silence. This girl was unbelievable. Unbelievable.
"I was a lost young man, full of life and energy but no purpose. And God came down and wrote his commands to me on the wall."
Alice slapped her brow, disgusted. "That's Daniel, not David," she moaned in distress. "You've ruined it."
"I was up at night reading the wall carvings," David said plainly.
"Oh." Alice was genuinely excited now - her flirting had been forgotten along with her complaints about his bible story mixup. She clutched onto his sleeve, not quite shaking him as though it'd dislodge the story from him quicker.
David settled on a simple explanation first - one that couldn't be misinterpreted. "There was something special about the order they had to be read in."
"They weren't ordered from left to right or right to left, were they?" Alice sighed again. She seemed a little disappointed that she hadn't figured it out herself.
"No, no. It wasn't nearly that easy. Not even close." David recalled that singular strand of thought which had pounded itself into his skull. He might as well have tattooed it behind his eyelids.
It was time to start again.
The Song roared, almost inadvertently. He quickly threw his focus back on the conversation because that moment of repose he'd felt from the sound of the Song had the opposite reaction on her. Alice's muscles were tense and her steps had become lighter. She looked ready to fight.
"They weren't in the right order on the wall. They needed to be performed in order - in the order they were carved in."
Alice got over that gut reaction as quickly as he did. "The order they were carved in?" David could see her parsing over the logical explanations for him to know the order that the figures had been carved in and then watched her face fall.
"Right," she concluded, steeling herself for an explanation that defied logic - most things defied logic for the two of them these days.
"So how did you go about determining the order?"
David decided that having someone consider your absurdity without mockery or disbelief was something special - he would never have to defend his sanity or swear to truth when he was explaining anything to her. But it still didn't make it sound less incredulous to his own ears. "I traced them. I traced them over." It didn't just sound stupid - it also sounded lame.
Alice leaned from side to side, a sure indication that she was deep in thought. Her fingers closed over some of the holes in the stone flute. Alice developed and shed nervous habits in minutes.
"That's why you left this beside my guqin, right? We hadn't removed it from the room when we were exploring, we just dumped it back onto the three inches of dust on the bed. But you went and got it in the middle of the night because you wanted to trace over the marks with something." Alice suddenly narrowed her eyes. "Waking me up by the way."
"Only that one time," David protested. "I stood up and you were awake, I didn't even make any noise."
She ignored that - there were things far more worthy of discussion. Alice was staring at the flute now, in wonder. David was sure she had the wrong idea.
"Was it carved with the flute?" She did sound incredulous now as she poked and jabbed at the air with it, trying to imagine someone using it as a writing utensil.
David winced. "No, of course not. It was carved with a sword. I don't know who they were or what they did or when they carved it, even. But they were really disappointed. They'd lost their home and they were about to die. The carvings were just a memorial to..." David trailed off. "I'm not quite certain."
Alice had stopped walking entirely, her mind full of swords and martial arts forms and cave paintings and religious betrayal. When she'd gathered her thoughts, she looked concerned. "We found a sword buried three feet deep in a stone. That's crazy. That's crazy, right?"
David nodded, somewhat enthusiastically.
"But this, this is much crazier than that. You can imagine some juiced up local superhero managing to stick a sword into a wall pretty easily. We're talking about someone who can draw a meaningful picture an inch deep inside a mountain with the pointy, bending bit of a sword. You're supposed to sharpen swords with rocks." She stopped, thinking of the angry gouges above the door and in the pillar.
“The carvings are pretty decent too. Lots of style. Distinct and confident.” She sounded suspiciously like a museum tour guide right now. Alice continued thinking aloud for a little while before she came across the root of all of her more inane comments and questions.
"Why isn't this harder to believe?" Alice protested. David didn't answer her - he didn't have an answer for her.
She hummed Swan Lake for a bit, continuing to consider the situation. "It's where it all begins and where it all ends, isn't it? It must have been the Song. That told you the order the stances were carved, I mean."
David nodded, letting her fit the pieces together in her head, hoping that she'd come across some kind of new insight if he didn't pollute her reasoning with his own beliefs.
Alice plopped down onto the dusty road without a care all of a sudden as the noonday sun passed over them.
"Show me," she said, with a sudden hunger in her eyes. "Show me what that dance is supposed to look like."
David did, moving from stance to stance on the mountainside. The ground was on a slight incline downwards even though it was no longer steep this far down the mountain. He thought he would falter on the steps or even misplace his center of gravity and fall, but as the Song roared again, he realized that his fears were unfounded. This was his and it would take a lot more than a hill to bar him from it.
Alice, who had been prepared for a truly abysmal showing, was nodding along and even clapping at times. David supposed he looked a bit like she did now when he was listening to someone play music.
When he finished, the song died down to a measured gait, settling deep within him again before dispersing. David was proud. Alice's admiration counted for a lot - she was the sort of perfectionist who demanded it from everyone, whether or not she would admit it.
"Thirty six stances," she mused. "Made more complex by how specific the order is and with at least a few which carry the momentum from previous stances and clarify the missing information from following stances."
She whistled appreciatively. "You learned this in one night, with just six months of experience from when you were eight? No, much less than that. The art tracing probably took the longest."
Alice frowned. "Six months of experience in the most basic learning in the most basic forms."
David felt a stab of annoyance on behalf of that great story about the origin of Wing Chun. "Didn't you go to that school too?"
"Well yeah," Alice said slowly, considering his complaint. "Yeah, that sifu? No good," said Alice with the matter-of-fact confidence of someone who'd seen good and not good. "Maybe you would have stuck around if we'd started at the place with my Taichi instructor. That guy was really good."
Alice frowned. "He died recently." It was an afterthought but he could see her shoulders shake.
David sat down on the road beside her and gave her a hug that was accepted easily, but she seemed determined to move on from the topic, so she untangled herself just as easily.
"Show me again."
This time, Alice stood up and stood behind him and to the left. David did not hurry through the Scripture - the performance was one that stressed timing and patience along with technique. It didn't feel natural without that even clip he'd come to associate with his own Song.
Behind him, Alice's Song flared to life, as she imitated his movements.
David frowned, feeling a stab of worry. What nonsense. Five minutes into martial arts fantasy land and he was already afraid of someone stealing his precious scripture or something like that. He squashed his worries with his annoyance at that pervading sense of unease.
David noticed a few seconds later as he slid into the fourteenth stance that this sense of unease had come from Alice's Song. There was something very strange about it - like a guitar that had only a single string out of tune or like a word that you convinced yourself was misspelled after staring at it for too long.
The first hint of true disharmony came on the twenty third stance. Something in Alice's Song had clashed horribly with his own.
David could almost hear her gritting her teeth in anger. He did hear her exhale sharply. Alice rarely made mistakes - especially in cases like this. She had performed every stance individually before, after all.
His Song continued onwards without any hint of difficulty or inaccuracy, setting a good example.
Just three stances later, he heard a sharp gasp from Alice. There was a pregnant pause after the sound - he'd stopped moving himself. Her song flared to life yet again but now it was angry and strong and proud.
David understood fully that first reaction of fight or flight that Alice had when he'd named that Mantra of starting over in his mind as he stood before her. There was something all-consuming about thoughts like those. When they'd spoken in the Library about the Song the very first time, they had both insisted that the Song did not have a will. After some experience, that seemed to be a false premise.
Alice did not have trouble again until the thirty second stance. Here, she made no visible noises but her Song, usually frantic and sharp and complex, was a single ear piercing whine which trailed off into the distance.
David was struck by the imagery of an ambulance with its sirens on driving off of a cliff. If it had been a real sound, perceived by his ears, he was sure that it would have rang in his ears because he had physically wobbled in reaction to it.
"I'm fine," Alice all but growled. "Four more. That's it."
David had not considered that something might have actually gone wrong with Alice, so he hadn’t turned around the whole time he had been performing the Scripture. After the thirty sixth stance, he wished he had.
Alice had encountered yet another issue with her Song. After that final, annoyed frenzy of motivation, Alice had allowed her Song to bloom. This was the only way David could describe that feeling which gave it justice. The imagery of a lotus flower opening its petals on a still pond and creating waves out of the ripples clashed horribly with the high pitched whine from earlier.
He had performed the entirety of the Scripture, so David now found himself by Alice’s side. She didn’t look well.
The first thing that David noticed was something quite peculiar - there were no more sounds of nature around them. It seemed like they were back in the Library again for just a moment, in that deep silence with no insects, no speech, no sounds of city life.
The silence was interrupted by a soft thump.
Alice had collapsed onto the ground like a carelessly maintained tent, folding onto herself. She was out of breath and dazed and her face was white.
"That might have been a little foolish," she panted. "It's a strange story, isn't it? You don't know it's a story until it ends and then you discover that you had no right to hear it," she babbled.
Flecks of foamy saliva gathered at the corner of her lips. She had bitten her lower lip hard and it had split - red and angry.
David ran forward, alarmed but Alice had found her strength to stand again and attempted it immediately. This time, she fell in an even more heart wrenching way. She hit the grassy mountainside with a thump, her legs folding together like a wounded deer. There was an animalistic distress in her eyes. There was a glassy light in her brown eyes that didn’t belong.
Despite all this, something fundamental about Alice seemed to shine in that moment, and she wiped the foam from her lips. A trace of annoyance touched her face for a scant second, but then the combination of a sharp wince and a heavy retch hit her and that flash of normalcy vanished.
"It's kind of loud inside of my head right now, David," Alice whispered, her eyes still glassy, her body still shuddering. Her eyes focused after that, not on him but past him and she thrashed on the ground, pursued by terrors David was sure she couldn't name, terrors David hoped didn't exist.
"I don't like this Song very much," Alice admitted. “But I like you. I don’t understand. You’re the Song. But…” Her eyelids drooped, but even in this state Alice had better sense than to let herself fall into unconsciousness. She did the only thing she could to keep herself awake - drawing in long, deliberate breaths and exhaling sharply after.
It was also loud inside of David's head - but it was panic, simple and clean. He scooped her up frantically, with an arm supporting the back of her knees and the other supporting her back and started making his way back towards the temple, back up the mountain.
David wasn't sure why he was so, so, so sure they needed to go back, so he came up with good reasons as he walked briskly up the road. Alice lay in his arms as pale as the moon and as removed from the world.
The carvings were at the temple, as were many things of great significance. Maybe something, anything, would help.
David was sure that something would help. He had to be.