Lindar

Just as the sun sank behind the horizon, a smoky cloud of incense began to rise from the heavy brocade tent at the edge of the artisans' square. It seeped under the tent flaps and filtered out through the opening in the ceiling and slowly filled the square with the scents of sage and myrrh. Around midnight, the few dragons who were still out saw the tent flap open. A drowsy slow-moving snapper emerged from the tent, shrouded in fluttering blue robes, and raised her head. Fortuna dragged herself to the top of a ridge overlooking the sea and stared out at the dark waters. Distant waves reflected the moon in cool, ephemeral shapes. Of the dragons who were still awake, the superstitious ones fled into their houses while the curious ones snuck closer to Fortuna. The jewel she always wore on her forehead like a third eye glinted in the moonlight as she whispered: "someone is riding into the storm".

...

Lindar awoke early and sprang out of bed with all the energy of youth. Today she was old enough to officially be considered an adult, but she still ran around like a hatchling. More importantly, today she was old enough to audition for the Circle of Bards.
She climbed like a monkey to the top of the lookout tower and surveyed her world as she hummed her audition song under her breath and plucked imaginary harp strings in the air. The floating island of Inasa was shaped like an oval, and Lindar could barely see the twin lookout tower on the other end. In the middle, she could see some early-rising dragons moving around. Fishers in wide-brimmed hats emerged from lodges, dragging nets and baskets behind them, and headed for the shore. An old tundra scattered grain in front of some frenzied chickens and then snuck into their coop to look for eggs. A group of hatchlings gathered in a road, and when the last one joined them they lifted off, racing to the nearest field.
The sky was yellow and pink at the edges. Overhead, gulls and terns wheeled around and called to each other. Lindar watched them play in the wind and dive for fish as the sunrise gave way to open blue. Letting out a whoop, she launched herself from the lookout tower with one strong wingbeat and somersaulted out above the water. A frigatebird dove toward a gull and snatched at the fish in its bill. The gull evaded just in time and dropped lower. Lindar laughed and pulled her wings into her sides, launching herself down and diving into the water with a splash that scattered the birds. She did a backflip in the water and then rushed back out into the air, climbing onto the rocks and shaking herself off. She perched on the rock and spread her wings like a cormorant until she caught sight of her aunt waving at her from their lodge and dramatically pointing at a pocketwatch. Right, they probably didn't want her to show up to her adulthood ceremony smelling like seawater. She'd almost forgotten about the 'becoming an adult' thing. She was far more concerned with the audition, and that was 5 days from now.
She'd had to study as well as practice for the audition, which she thought was far too much trouble, but she was willing to read a few dry books if it meant getting into the Circle. The dry books talked about how the Circle had been around in some form or another ever since dragons first landed on the island. First it was a group of drummers who could supposedly come up with precisely the right rhythms to blow a storm away or lure a shoal of fish into a waiting net-- although Lindar suspected they spent most of their time accompanying drinking songs around some bonfire. Then, for a long time, they were a proper bards guild. There were fiddlers and pipers and luthiers and singers and storytellers, and they had no homes but constantly traveled around the island. Some went alone and some went in groups; some groups stayed together their whole career and some split up somewhat regularly and formed new groups on the road. According to the books they "unified the cultural identity of the islanders", whatever that meant, and were "greeted wherever they traveled with utmost hospitality", which meant they got free food, drinks, and lodging anywhere they played. There were still bards like that on the island, but Lindar was fairly certain they had to buy their own drinks now. And ever since contact with a ship called the Tidesworn about 80 years ago, the Circle had become far more polished and modern. Members stayed in their own villages and joined large orchestras that played in theaters. Apparently whoever was on that boat had sold the islanders some new instruments, cellos and oboes and flutes and everything, and stacks of paper that they had to be taught how to read (the traveling bards had no room for paper, they played by ear and memorized everything from the music to every word of the stories. It was a provincial method, but Lindar had to admit she probably wouldn't have been able to do it). But now they had complex compositions and symphonies, and musicians in the guild who were experts and set aside time to train young players like Lindar. It was the one subject she studied with focus and determination.
Anyway, today was the ceremony. Lindar started up toward the lodge, then paused. Maybe she'd surprise her aunt by bathing before she told her to for once. Adulthood, right? She chuckled and swerved off her path in the direction of the bathhouse.

...

The dragons in the square were skeptical to say the least. 'Look at the sea,' they said. 'Look at the sky!' But Fortuna was adamant that the storm would come. Her visions had never been wrong before. Nevertheless, the other dragons were confident in their own prediction of calm, lulled by the crowd's consensus into a sense of security, and they went about their day as normal. When the sky darkened and the waves grew tall, it was a sudden change that caught them all off guard. They abandoned what they were doing and flew inland or hid in their basements and caves with the hatchlings and familiars.
Fortuna left them to their own devices and remained crouched atop the ridge. Something told her not to take her eyes off the shore.
She lay low between three tall rocks as the storm raged above. Rain was pelting down on her back, but all she heard was a steady roar, impossibly loud, built from layers of wind and rain and waves and thunder. Squinting hard against the spray, she could barely see the coast below the ridge where water ran onto a narrow bar of sand before breaking on the rocks of the cliff face. Still, she hunched there for hours under her soaked robes among the rocks. Her legs felt like they wanted to freeze to the ground and become rocks themselves, and she vaguely worried that she would forget how to move before the storm was over. But her attention snapped back to the shoreline. There was a new shape against the sand, light blue standing out against the dark. Fortuna stared at it, but it didn't move, it only pushed against the rocks when a wave came in and sagged back against the sand when the wave went back out.
Eventually, the storm subsided, and the dragons started to filter out of the basements to assess the damage. Fortuna stood slowly, the familiar stiffness in her legs multiplied by a thousand, and called to them. She insisted on leading the small procession down to the shore, trying to find the place where she'd seen the shape. Now everything looked brown and gray. Perhaps it has washed back out to sea-- she should have come down by herself earlier instead of waiting for the storm to pass-- but no, someone was calling to her from the rocks. Someone hauled a great mass of seaweed off of a lump stuck between the rocks and revealed a dragon.
Light blue, with patterning like reflections on calm water, a young guardian lay unconscious in the sand. As the artisans worked the limp body out of the rocks, they discovered that one of the guardian's wings was broken and bent at an awkward angle. Fortuna sent two of the dragons off to hunt down straight pieces of driftwood while she bit and tore the seaweed into ribbons. Once they had the wing in a rough splint, they all lifted the guardian at once and flew her up to Fortuna's tent.
After that, the rest of the dragons scattered. Fortuna thought some of them believed the guardian's arrival must be bad luck, but she'd known something was going to come with the storm, and she hadn't seen any signs of bad luck except for the storm itself. She tried to get a reading on the guardian, but saw only water. The guardian would have to be awake before Fortuna could discover anything useful. She pulled herself up and got to work on gathering pillows and silks to make a nest in the middle of the tent and propping up the injured wing. She built up a small fire and set a pot of water on to boil, then she gathered an arsenal of herbs and smelling salts and sat back down next to the guardian.

…

The first time she opened her eyes and lifted her head, she groaned.
"Be careful, your wing is broken." Fortuna was ready with a bowl of willowbark tea. "Here. Drink this."
The guardian drank and lay her head back down, but didn't close her eyes.
"I'm Fortuna. What's your name?"
"uhhh... Lin... Lindar. Where...?"
"We're on a peninsula connected to the Scarred Wasteland. Where are you from?"
"In... have you seen..." Lindar's head shot up again and she vomited into a bucket and immediately fell back asleep.
Fortuna shook her head, dragged the bucket outside, and started to brew some more tea.
Later that night, Lindar woke up again and managed to stay awake for a few hours. She drank willowbark tea and water, and after a while, some thin broth. This time she told Fortuna where she was from. No wonder she’s seasick, Fortuna thought, since the only land she’s ever been on her whole life was a floating island.
The next day, Lindar asked a lot of questions. Fortuna had to tell her that she hadn’t seen her island or any of her family, friends, or neighbors, that she had just washed up on shore already unconscious. Lindar remembered the storm, remembered the island tipping and crashing in the waves, but nothing that would have explained how she ended up here. Fortuna had the ominous feeling that Lindar was about to try flying off to look for her island with a broken wing, so she did her best to distract her. She coaxed stories out of Lindar, descriptions of Inasa and its dragons, Lindar’s family, her music. She reciprocated with stories of her own life among the artisans. Of course she talked about her craft, and Lindar was immediately interested.
“You mean you saw me coming? With the storm?”
“I saw something coming with the storm. It wasn’t until I saw you that I knew you were that something.”
“What else can you see? Can you see what’s happening now, somewhere else?”
“Sometimes.”
Lindar grew still and stared at the floor. “Can you… can you see my family? What happened on Inasa?”
“It could be something bad. You’re not recovered yet.” By which Fortuna meant ‘I don’t want you fainting, vomiting, panicking, or running away’.
“I know.” Lindar was almost whispering. She looked old just then, faded and dull.
Fortuna sighed. “I’ll look. Come over here and touch the side of the sphere. Don’t let go of it until I tell you.” She lifted the thick velvet cover off of her vision sphere, a crystal ball with undefined swirls of smoky white drifting around its surface. Lindar put a hand on the wide of the sphere, then Fortuna laid her fingertips on the top. She looked intently at the space between her hands and the rest of the world fell away as the swirls resolved into a picture.
“I see the island in the storm. It’s up on a tall wave approaching… another island? No, just a massive rock. There… it’s crashing into the rock. I can almost hear the impact. The island is cracking in two. One half is crumbling and sinking, the other half looks like it’s still floating. Dragons are scattering into the sky. Everything near the break is collapsing… I see a guardian trying to free an obelisk from the rubble of a building– a log just fell through her wing and now she’s falling into the ocean. There are other dragons in there who can’t seem to swim or fly, maybe they’re injured, but it looks like some of them were knocked unconscious by the impact.”
Fortuna wished she could steal a glance at Lindar, check to see if she should continue, but the vision wasn’t about to let her go just yet. She trusted in the guardian’s maturity and curiosity and continued describing what she saw.
“I see a group of dragons taking to the air. It looks like some of them have bags; they must have been able to salvage something. I can’t tell where they’re headed, I think they just scattered in different directions. Some are being carried away by the storm… okay, now I see the dragons on the surviving half of the island. I think the storm has passed already. Everyone is working on something. They’re building huts and fixing houses. There are first aid tents set up all along the shore. Scouts are flying out over the sea, and some of them come back dragging unconscious dragons.

The vision dissolved. Fortuna was back in the tent, anxiously looking at the guardian still clutching the sphere. Lindar’s face was pale and she did nothing but stare into space for a minute before she finally whispered, “That was my aunt.”
“Who?”
“The blue guardian. The one who died trying to save the obelisk. That was one of her brothers.”
Fortuna was startled. She definitely hadn’t mentioned that the guardian was blue, or described them in any way at all beyond their breeds. “You could see?”
“Only some of it. I was touching the sphere but maybe I wasn’t focusing very well. I couldn’t see everything you saw, but I saw bits and I could recognize some of the dragons. I know my aunt is gone, and I didn’t see any of my other relatives. I saw one of the dragons I knew who got taken by the storm wind up in the middle of the sea. I guess he’s going to die with nowhere to land, not to mention food and water… I only saw shadows of that last bit. I suppose everyone left on the half-island is just going to be surviving now. Rebuilding houses and tending the injured like you saw. Replanting crops. Can half an island even feed all the survivors?”
“Lindar, you shouldn’t have been able to see anything. You’ve never used one of these before? Never learned any divination?”
Lindar shook her head. “I don’t even know that word. I’m just a musician.” She sighed and flopped onto her nest of silky pillows on the ground. “I couldn’t tell where the island was.”
“Good!” Fortuna said as she covered the sphere again. “And I won’t tell you until you’re actually healed. Now that I’ve seen it I will be able to find it for you when you’re fit to fly, even if the half-island floats randomly like the full one did.”
Lindar was quiet. She sounded ashamed when she said, “What if I don’t want to go back?”
Fortuna paused. She turned away from the sphere and sat down next to the guardian. “There’s no shame in starting over, Lindar. The dragons on that half-island will struggle for a while, but they’re already rebuilding, and they’ll make it just fine without one teenage musician. And the part you didn’t say out loud is right– even if you found the half-island, it wouldn’t be your home. Your home is gone. You’ll have to live with that no matter where you go.”
Lindar sat up. “I feel like I should help them… but my family is gone, and the Circle won’t exist anymore, not for a good while anyway. Who has time to think about music when the world is collapsing and you’re doing all you can just to survive?”
Fortuna smiled. “You’d be surprised. Dragons have always found ways to make music during the worst of times. It might even be a necessity at those times more than any others.”
“I guess the original Circle was just some drummers. Drums are easy to make, and almost everyone would know how to sing.”
Fortuna thought of something. “What did you say earlier about them again? The drummers?”
“Oh, that they could call in fish and stuff? I think that’s just a legend. They were supposed to have special rhythms to control the weather and the fish, just typical things dragons on a floating island worry about. They probably started the rumor themselves to enhance their mystique.” Lindar put on a sarcastic ‘scholarly’ voice when she used phrases like that, the ones that sounded like they came right out of one of the Circle history books.
Fortuna didn’t notice; she’d started tapping her tail on the ground, which Lindar had learned was the arthritic snapper’s replacement for pacing around the room. “No, wait, I think they might have been onto something. One of my teachers used rhythms like that, albeit in a very different context. And if your family has been on the island for many generations… Maybe you could see that vision because of some drummer’s blood in your veins. You might just have a little magic streak in you after all.”

…

Lindar stood on top of her little tower overlooking the sea. Her freshly washed tunic and composer’s ribbons were rippling in the salty breeze. The sun was starting to creep toward the waves and the light in the guardian’s face was golden yellow and soft pink. She took a deep breath, then flew down from the small wooden tower to the ground floor window of her house, where she plucked a stack of sheet music from a stand near the windowsill and set off toward the center of the artisans’ square. Fortuna met up with her outside her tent, and Lindar slowed to talk to her.
“You should look more excited! It’s your first concert! How do you feel right now? Butterflies in your stomach?”
Lindar put on her haughty voice. “I don’t see what a bunch of flappy insects have to do with a concert.” She grinned. “Seriously though, I’m not nervous. I’ve been training for this my whole life. And it’s mostly just our neighbors anyway. There will probably be more people in the orchestra than in the audience!”
Fortuna shrugged. “Still… Did you think you’d already be a composer at your age? And directing your own orchestra?”
Lindar smiled. “I guess not.”
“Did you decide about the solo?”
“I gave it to my student. It would be a little egotistical to play it myself, wouldn’t it?”
“Not at all! Also, I may have secretly talked to your student, and even she thinks you should play it.”
Lindar raised an eyebrow. Fortuna just smiled.


As Lindar’s orchestra started its last piece for the night, the sun bathed them in one last burst of vibrant orange light before sinking below the waves. The square was strung with fairy lights and enchanted lanterns in various colors floated among the audience and over the players. When it was time for the solo, Fortuna handed the harp to Lindar herself. Shaking her head, Lindar took it and settled in. The audience disappeared into the night and she played for the stars, she played for the sea, and she played for her family and her island and for whoever remained on its floating half, working and surviving and singing. Then she surprised Fortuna and the others by standing up and bringing the harp to her young student, then disappearing behind the percussion section. The student took up the solo, and after a moment Lindar re-emerged with a simple hand drum. She sat in the back of the orchestra and beat out a rhythm. This time it was Fortuna who raised an eyebrow. It was unmistakably a magic rhythm, and Fortuna found that she could read it clearer than cards or tea leaves: it was a call to bring in good things from the the sea and sky. As the solo ended and the rest of the orchestra joined back in, Lindar changed the rhythm. This one was harder to figure out, but as Fortuna listened she got a sense of its meaning. It was a blessing for the makers, the helpers, the wanderers, and the singers of the world. In the final measures of the piece, Lindar slowly transitioned her drumming to a simple heartbeat, matching the waves on the moonlit sea.

[WRITTEN BY Lindenshield ]