“So… how do we get into the Fracture?” Enrique asked.
“I actually had an idea about that, too,” Roland said. He looked to Tock and Maxwell. “You called this place a ‘Fugue,’ correct?”
“That’s what she called it,” Tock said, nodding back at the smoking doorway. “Makes sense. A fugue state is experiencing a loss of self. And here we are, lost from the world.”
“But fugue is also a musical term,” Roland said, smiling. He pulled out his ocarina and turned his attention to Tsubasa. “Do you know Hirevetti’s Opus 14?”
“Opus 14?” Tsubasa asked, tilting her head to the side, eyes cast upward in thought. “Oh! That’s ‘Canal Conversations,’ right?” She pulled out her own ocarina. “But isn’t that for three ocarinas?”
“Yes,” Roland said, and at this he looked at Muirrach. “Are you familiar with it, as well?”
“Familiar, if not intimately acquainted,” Muirrach said. “But I don’t play.”
“I didn’t think you did,” Roland said. “I rather thought… I mean, if it isn’t too absurd a stretch… you could, perhaps… sing the third voice?”
“Ooh, and the third voice is for a bass C ocarina!” Tsubasa said. “Muirrach, your voice is so rich! You’d be perfect!”
“It’s not as if I know the whole song perfectly off the top of my head,” Muirrach said. “But, well… I suppose I could try.”
“It’s really not all that difficult,” Tsubasa said, and she raised her ocarina to her lips. “Each voice is very distinct, but pretty easy to follow. The main theme goes…” And she started to play. It was a pleasant, relaxing tune, bringing to mind a gentle journey down the famed canals of Porta Vericci. After just three bars, Tsubasa stopped. “Really, each voice is supposed to be a different octave, but Roland and I both have soprano C ocarinas. But we can work with that, right?”
“I thought we could manage,” Roland said. “It won’t sound exactly like it should, but as long as we have the three voices, it’ll work. If my theory is correct, of course.”
“And that theory is…” Erika started, watching the musical trio with equal parts anticipation and confusion.
“You think you can traverse the Fugue with a fugue!” Tock said. “Oh, that’s clever!”
“And completely theoretical,” Roland said. “The only way to prove or disprove it is, well… to test it.”
“I’m all for it,” Tsubasa said.
“But can you really play this song without any sheet music?” Maxwell asked.
“Hirevetti’s the most famous name in ocarina compositions,” Tsubasa said. “And there aren’t many names in ocarina composing, but she really is incredible. Lots of ocarina sonatas with full orchestra, as well as more intimate compositions for just one, two, or three ocarinas, and more. There are a whole crowd of composers who followed after her, realizing the versatility of this little instrument.”
“Opus 14 through 30 are her ‘core’ ocarina compositions,” Roland said. “Even many novice ocarina enthusiasts will end up learning most of them. For those of us who really pursue this instrument with a passion, memorizing those sixteen works just makes sense.”
“Exactly!” Tsubasa said. “Not only are they real ‘serious’ and invigorating pieces for an instrument that doesn’t get enough mainstream love, but they’re just beautiful, soulful, evocative works, too. It was hearing a collection of Hirevetti’s ocarina sonatas that made me decide to learn the instrument in the first place. But if we’re doing this, there’s a very important question.” Tsubasa looked at Roland with an excited challenge in her eyes. “Which of us takes the first voice, and which the second?”
“Oh, I’m really fine either way,” Roland said with a laugh. “You can choose.”
“Well that’s no fun,” Tsubasa said, pouting. “Oh, well. It was your idea, so you should take the lead. I’ll take the second voice, and Muirrach, you’re the third. Don’t worry, you’ll be great! This won’t be perfect, anyway. But we’ll make the most of it.” She nodded to Roland, raising her ocarina in readiness.
“Do you want any more lead-in or reminders?” Roland asked Muirrach.
“Just hearing the main theme brought a lot back to me,” Muirrach said. “I’ll manage. As long as we have the full fugue, that will be enough to test your theory.”
“Right.” Roland raised his ocarina to his lips and, tapping his foot to count them in, he began to play.
Opus 14 had been the obvious choice for him, once he’d come up with his theory. It was one of only three ocarina fugues in Hirevetti’s oeuvre, for one. And it was certainly the most popular, largely because it was by far the easiest of the three to learn. A fairly straightforward, relaxing melody then saw logical variations from the other two voices, each of which played off of each other to give the piece the “conversational” feeling that Hirevetti had sought to evoke.
But those reasons were secondary. In truth Roland, while a great fan of technically complex music, and constantly seeking to improve his own technique and rise to greater heights in his own playing and range, found himself constantly coming back to the deceptively simplistic Opus 14. He’d heard a few other pieces like it, and each time they showed a mastery of minimalism, a way of evoking a powerful theme with as little technicality and complexity as necessary. It was a simplicity not born out of incompetence or a desire or need to hold back their prowess for the sake of lower-skilled musicians, but out of choice.
A choice born from the heart, from a soulful passion for a theme, an idea, that words could not express, and that technical complexity would only complicate and obscure. There was a place for all kinds of music, and these simpler pieces, simplicity born out of the heart and soul, were powerful reminders to Roland of the breadth of meaning and beauty music could hold.
Opus 14, “Canal Conversations,” began with that opening, not of conversation, but of the canal. There were two “main themes,” really — the one that Roland opened with, and repeated at various times, almost always from the first voice, evoked the relaxing, gentle bounce of a gondola upon the waters of the canals: the “canal theme.” After several bars, Roland then took up the “conversation” theme, and it sounded very much like the opening of a conversation. Not a debate, not an argument, nothing so dramatic or confrontational, no. This was a conversation born of the rhythm of the water, coaxed along by the pleasant journey of gondola along the canal. It was amicable, gentle conversation.
Tsubasa took up the reply, as Roland returned to the canal theme. Roland then responded to her, and she layered over his response, like a friend replying to another before they’d finished, as if they knew where their friend was going before they got there. Then Muirrach sang, the richness of his lower, resonant voice adding beautiful depth and warmth to the conversation — and his own variation on the conversation theme, and Roland’s reply to him, and Tsubasa’s to Roland, brought forth the beauty of Opus 14.
This was a conversation among intimate friends — perhaps family members, perhaps lifelong friends and companions, but whoever these three voices were, they were three voices that knew each other as well as, or perhaps even better than, they knew themselves. Here along the picturesque canal, surrounded by the beauty of Porta Vericci’s sweeping, colorful architecture, three friends rested from the burdens of daily life, stepped away from whatever conflicts might plague them beyond this moment, and relaxed in the comfort and warmth of knowing, and being known.
In these gentle melodies, layering over each other, expanding on and deepening each other, Roland was brought back to his investigation of the land here with Kirin’s guidance. There were layers beneath their feet, complex and intricate, but like a fugue, there was an order to them — an order Roland hadn’t recognized at first. He still didn’t see the full picture — if this piece he, Tsubasa, and Muirrach brought to life had three voices over two themes, Aîrchal itself must have hundreds of voices playing off of a multitude of varying, interconnected themes — but he began to see things he couldn’t see before.
There were things in this world, truths in this life, that only music could properly illuminate.
There were stumbles in this performance — Tsubasa skipped over an entire section, jumping ahead to a later variation, while Muirrach made up his own variations a few times, clearly forgetting the exact notes of the original composition, and Roland lost the tempo a few times and needed the guidance of the other two to get him back on track — but they found their way to the end, and finished with a beautiful harmony into the resolution. But despite this not being Roland’s best playing of a piece he’d played hundreds of times before, he didn’t come away from it disappointed or critiquing himself or his partners.
There was something in the air between himself, Tsubasa, and Muirrach. The errors they worked through, the ways they improvised to keep things going when they lost their way, the ways listening to each other helped them find their way again… it made Roland feel closer to these two, and grateful for their presence in his life. And it made their musical conversation feel so real. They weren’t yet close enough to each other to be able to share the kind of conversation the song evoked, of such familiarity and deep understanding of each other.
And yet, with this shared attempt that they’d brought to a solid, lovely finish, they grew so much closer to that ideal.
As that final note was still hanging on the air, not yet faded, Roland felt a shift in the air — there was something magical changing around them. He opened his eyes, and saw the mists moving, sweeping away from their group, swirling around a point a few paces distant from them, collecting into a thick shroud.
“Looks like Aîrchal’s responding to you,” Tock said.
“But for good, or ill?” Muirrach asked, eyeing the shroud warily.
But after several tense moments of watching the mists swirl and thicken into a tight ball… the mists suddenly parted. And in the space between them, a stairway descended into the dim unknown.
“Looks like we have to go deeper in,” Erika said.
“Are you sure?” Enrique asked, holding his sister’s hand, eyeing the stairs. “It could just get us more lost.”
“Perhaps that’s the point,” Maxwell said. Roland turned to look at him, and Maxwell withered a moment under the attention, until Tock rolled her eyes and elbowed him in the ribs. Maxwell yelped, then collected himself. “I just mean, well… I’ve lived a very long time. And one lesson I’ve learned in all that time is that ‘finding’ is not always a straightforward task. Sometimes we have to, well… ‘get lost,’ so to speak, in order to find ourselves, and where we belong.”
“Hey, that’s like our journey together so far, too!” Tock said. “We’ve spent more time winding up in places we didn’t plan on than getting to where we were trying to go. But we always ended up where we needed to be, and in the end, did manage to get where we’d set out for in the beginning. Just not the way we expected. Getting lost isn’t so bad, after all.”
“You think it’s that simple?” Tsubasa asked. “Go deeper into Aîrchal — deeper into getting lost — to find our way out?”
“We’re not getting anywhere just sitting around waiting, are we?” Tock asked. “You guys did something amazing! It’d be a shame to waste this new path you just opened. Besides —” she grinned, mischief glittering in her azure eyes, “you can’t help but be curious about where it leads, right?”
“You’ve got me there,” Tsubasa said, and turned her smile on Roland. “Well?”
Roland nodded. “We go further in,” Roland said. “Through Aîrchal’s layers, to the answer awaiting us.”
“And if that’s the case, we can’t just leave her behind!” Tock said. She walked towards the door, waving smoke out of her way, coughing a bit here and there. She disappeared into the smoke for a moment, and then there was the sound of a door slamming shut. The smoke gusted away, and Tock pulled out an ornate brass key. Inserting it into a lock on the door, she turned it, and with a click…
The door vanished.
“Wha…?” Tsubasa started, staring.
“Just locking her up,” Tock said, tossing the key in the air and catching it. “Like I said, we can’t leave her behind.”
“Of course not,” Roland said, as bewildered as Tsubasa. He turned and started towards the stairs, and the others followed.
“I have got to check out that ship later,” Tsubasa said softly.
“And I’ll have to join you,” Roland said. They shared a smile.
And then they reached the stairs. Peering down, Roland didn’t see anything of note as far as he could see. Lights flickered here and there in the depths, but they didn’t reveal any features of the landscape beyond.
“Get lost, to find our way,” Roland murmured. He started down the stairs. The entrance was only wide enough for them to enter single-file, but after only a dozen steps, the stairs widened considerably, so that Roland, Tsubasa, and Muirrach walked up front side-by-side, and the twins, Tock, and Maxwell followed close behind.
No walls bordered the stairs, nor railings. There was open air to either side, an unknowable abyss beyond them. The sky closed up overhead, but it wasn’t that a ceiling formed over them. It was more like… a different sky came between them and the sky they’d been under before. This sky was darker, shrouded in mystery. Lights danced here and there — above, and to either side — like fluttering fairies or lightning bugs.
Down, down, down they went.
“This… doesn’t seem like a Fracture,” Enrique said.
“No,” Roland said. “I think the Fracture Kirin found is much, much deeper. But things are all so complex and difficult to discern down here. It’s hard to know how far we’ll have to go to find it.”
“Or an escape, before any kind of Fracture,” Tock said. “That’d be nice.”
“I… kind of want to understand this place, though,” Enrique said. “If it has any sort of connection to our home, I want to know why.”
“Me, too,” Erika said, in a small voice.
“Up ahead,” Muirrach said. “Something’s there.” Roland spotted what he was talking about a few steps later — down, about a hundred more steps, something was moving in a shroud of smoke.
And a few steps later, Tsubasa suddenly drew her tonfas. “Oh, no you don’t!” she cried, and leapt a whole eighty stairs down in a single bound, spinning into a powerful kick just before landing. She blasted aside the entire cloud of smoke…
And nothing else. There was no one there.
“What did you see?” Roland asked, racing down the last steps to join her. He looked around, seeking out shadows or dangers here where the floor leveled out, but saw nothing in any direction.
And then, realizing Tsubasa hadn’t responded, he turned to look at her. And the wide-eyed fear he saw on her face chilled him to the bone.
“Tsubasa?” he asked. He reached for her, to comfort her, and she flinched back, looking at him like a tiny, cornered animal eyes a predator. A moment later, the look faded, and she shook her head vigorously.
“Sorry,” she said quickly. “I… I just…” She shook her head again, then sheathed her tonfas. “Saw a… ghost, I guess. I’ll keep my guard up from now on.”
“It’s okay,” Erika said. She held Tsubasa’s hand and smiled encouragingly up at her. “We all get scared, sometimes. If you want to talk, we’re happy to listen.”
“I know,” Tsubasa said, firing a smile back at her. To Roland, it looked forced, but he didn’t press her.
Whatever spooked her must be deeply personal. If it surfaces again, I hope she’ll talk about it. And I hope we can help her with it.
Because I don’t think she saw a ghost. Muirrach and I saw something, too.
“Stay on guard,” Muirrach said softly. He stepped to the front, and Roland stood beside him. But a glance backwards completely disoriented him.
“Where are the stairs?” Roland asked.
They all suddenly turned back, to see that the stairs were gone. There was just level stone floor, as far as they could see, back the way they’d come. And to the left, and the right, and even in front of them.
“What the heck is going on here?” Tock asked.
“Aîrchal,” Maxwell said. “It’s made to make people get lost. Though it’s invited us further in, we shouldn’t take that as a sign that things will be easy.”
“So we need to stay very close together,” Erika said, holding both Tsubasa’s and her brother’s hands tight. “No getting separated, okay?”
“Right,” Roland said, smiling at her. They’d be all right. They just needed to proceed carefully, cautiously — together.
But they also needed to decide…
“Which way do we go?” Enrique asked.
“Right,” Roland said. “I mean, correct. We need to figure that out. We came from…” And he paused, as he realized that he didn’t know which direction they’d come from. They’d all moved, at least a little bit, to look around, to try and get their bearings.
“It probably doesn’t matter which way we came from,” Tock said with a shrug. “Stairs are gone. Any way will get us somewhere. Probably.”
“You’re so reassuring,” Maxwell said with a sigh. “For what it’s worth, we came from this direction.” He pointed to his right. “But with the stairs gone, it’s true that it probably doesn’t matter. We should take a moment to get our bearings, at least. Not with whence we came, but anything that might serve as a beacon to where to go next.”
“I thought I saw something that way,” Erika said, nodding ahead into the dimness. “It’s hard to tell down here, though. It’s like the mists from above are down here, too. And there’s even less light.”
“I’m not seeing anything of note anywhere I look,” Roland said, and Muirrach echoed the sentiment. “Tsubasa?”
“Hmm?” Tsubasa asked, and again Roland a bit of jumpiness to her. She saw the look in his eyes, though, and quickly put up a façade, shaking her head. “Yeah, right, um…” She looked down at Erika and smiled another forced smile. “If you saw something over there, then let’s go check it out. Good a clue as any, I say.”
“Sounds good,” Roland said, smiling. Tsubasa looked at him again, and this time, she didn’t immediately look away. Her smile softened a little, into something slightly more genuine, and she nodded to him, expressing what words couldn’t.
They headed in the direction Erika indicated, the mists thin, dancing around them. After a while, Roland noticed, not something to see, but something to hear. The sound of a tide, going in and out. It was odd, though. As they drew closer, it wasn’t Roland who figured out why, but Shureen, listening within him.
“The tide is too regular. Something is controlling its rhythm. Like how you described the smells above, there is something artificial to it.”
An artificial tide… didn’t Erika mentions something like…?
They passed through a veil of mist, and all came to a stop, gazing in amazement.
Before them was a lake. It wasn’t the ocean — Roland couldn’t smell salt in the air — but it was vast, with the far shore invisible at the horizon. The stone floor beneath their feet was grass, now, that slowly gave way to a soft, sandy beach. But this, too, was… odd.
“It’s too even,” Tsubasa said, eyeing the shoreline. “The way grass transitions to beach… hold on.” She looked down at Erika and Enrique, but they were transfixed by the lake.
“Erika?” Roland asked. “Enrique?”
“It’s just like home,” Erika said in a soft, longing voice. “No, it’s…” She looked at Enrique, who nodded slowly.
“It’s exactly the same,” he said. “This…” He looked up, and the others followed his gaze.
The sky was gone. Now, high above them, was a ceiling of steel beams and plating, but the constructed elements were cleverly disguised by light fixtures that created the facsimile of an afternoon sky, bright and clear.
A false lake. A false sky. Constructed, by human hands.
“New Elysia…?” Roland asked in disbelief.
“Not quite,” said a voice. The twins gasped, shock and hope intermingled in their voices. Slowly, all turned to see a woman walking barefoot along the shore. A long, white dress and platinum-blonde, silvery hair billowed in a false breeze. Bright, clear green eyes matched the smile on her lips. Dangling from her ears were a pair of white feather ornaments.
“You’re…” Tsubasa started, reaching the same conclusion Roland had. The resemblance was too uncanny not to notice.
“Mother…?” Erika asked in a hushed voice, eyes shimmering with hope.
The woman stopped several paces away from them and smiled at the twins. “Yes,” she said in a lovely, melodious voice. “Oh Erika, Enrique. It’s so wonderful to see you again.”