The Twain

There weren't always dragons in the valley. There weren't always a lot of things that never used to be. Monsters in the sea, and trolls and goblins, and worse. Much, much worse. But there weren't always faeries in the forest, either. Or dwarves in the rocky depths, and elves and giants, and better. Much, much better.

No, there weren’t always dragons in the valley. It was an ordinary land, once. It had green hills and tall trees and buildings that reached for the skies. It had regular folk who went for walks. They toiled and loved. They had families and grew old. They bickered with neighbours and sometimes built fences. They searched, like most do, for their own slice of something.

The world before the Twain met was, like most worlds, an imperfect one. It contained imperfect people living their lives. There were times when they understood themselves and each other, but mostly they did not. There were times when they would tend their world, and other times when they’d ravage it. Even so, they mustered their way, becoming this and begetting that. Until the Clysm, when the Twain met, and this world became something else.

Key was not a complicated man, and before the Clysm, he understood his life well enough. Work hard when working. Eat well when eating. Sleep soundly when sleeping. And whenever else he could, find the music. It came to him like sun to a leaf, so the finding was never long. He needed no instrument. A blade of grass carried windsong, the concrete pounded a drum. The rainfall was a symphony to him. Everything was an instrument, and every one was an old friend from the beginning.

His name was a happenstance of geography. His mother could very well have been traveling in another distant land and his name would have been Stan or Rus. It could have been anything else. But coincidence and fate intertwined, and Key was so named. Perhaps he should have been famous, sharing his gift with the masses, the beauty and the honesty of it all, but he preferred a simple, quiet life. He did not own a conveyance of any kind. He once had a bicycle, but found he missed too much trying to stay upright and headfirst. He walked whenever he went, and he never went far.

He was the rarest type of person, content and happy with who and where he was. The people who gave him their guitars and flutes and everything else were happy, too. He tuned them and cleaned them and fixed them. And every time, they played a little easier somehow. As such, there was always a steady stream of customers that his mother navigated. A delivery truck had been arriving weekly for two years now, his reputation and expertise escaping the bounds of their cottage home, until the Clysm.

Scholars argued it was inevitable. Skeptics, that it should have been impossible. When the world became something much more than it was. When Key became something else altogether. When solace became a dream.

It was the magic that was the problem.

You see, the Twain were never intended to meet. Opposites like dark and light, or poles of a magnet, they existed separately, and for good reason. When the Twain met, old reality was no longer, and magic entered the land. Thought became. And everyone and everything had it and was changed, some a very little and some a very lot. Key did not change a very little or a very lot. He transformed

He heard the Clysm before it happened, even before the other Intuitives felt the shudders.

Off by himself, as he almost always was, after the day’s work done, Key sat cross-legged on the grassy edge of the brook. His favorite place. The water nibbled at his dangled fingers. He danced them to and fro, gracefully plucking the current as if it were the liquid strings of some endless instrument, gentling a melody that only he could hear. In the midst of his reverie, he heard the strands of his song peel away and fade into a distance, like they were reeled away by scrabbling invisible hands. And then, nothing.

Even in the stillest of nights, in the deep quiet, there was always something. The silent creatures in the sky on the hunt, and the ground dwellers on the prowl. The ground itself was a steady source of soundmusic. Its constant shifting from massive pressures. The burrowers large and small within. Its flowing currents of magnetic energy. Key had never heard nothing before, and as he struggled to grasp this unprecedented loss, he heard a keening far away within the void. He heard a shredding that was Not.

The hairs on the back of his neck stood up, and he felt the Tuggings.

Key had never been afraid before.

On a large island in a warm sea, very far away, one of the sheep nudged Eira with its hip. The sun was spilling over the horizon and pouring like a slow blanket down the green slopes behind them and onto their pasture. She closed her eyes and breathed in through her nose as she stood still and tall, opening her arms in salutation. The flock waited with her. If anyone had happened near, they would have noticed that the sheep all had their eyes closed as well.

Eira waited for the comfort of heat on her face and the warming glow of red inside her eyes. She breathed in again, deeply, relaxed and strong. She breathed out and cracked an eye open, eyelashes watering in defence. "Odd," she thought, as she popped both eyes open, blinking. She cocked her head slightly, and like a premonition, she raised it up again with knowing. She shuddered and turned around. The sunline had stopped on the hill behind her. It was stuttering on the morning green like a faulty gear in a machine.

She felt the Tuggings within her like a hunger, and looked helplessly at her flock. Panicked and bleating madly, they stumbled in different directions. Some simply trembled in place, as she, all the while, was being re-created.