“In the last breath, there’s balance”

  From the song of the Duu’ra.

  The firelight flickered low as twilight bled into dusk. After the training, Davy returned to his cave with Rebecca, sharing a simple meal of roasted roots and spiced greens. He could feel the weight of the day in his bones, but Rebecca’s energy remained curious and light, her ears pricking with some quiet anticipation.

  She looked up from the fire, her eyes catching his across the flame. “Come with me,” she said, rising to her feet with the fluid grace of a shadow slipping free of the night. “There’s something you should see. Something I want you to hear.”

  Davy rose, curious and followed her through the narrow path past the cluster of rocks that marked the edge of the grey’s main encampment. The trail curved and descended gently toward a wide clearing nestled in the hills like a secret kept in soft earth. Warm light danced across the tall stone walls as if the rocks themselves had caught fire. The air was rich with the scent of bark smoke, moss, and something faintly sweet.

  As they rounded the last bend, the sound reached him.

  It began low and soft, a rhythmic beat like the pulse of the earth. Then voices joined it; the sound was flat as if missing dimensions.

  He paused, frowning slightly, “like tryin’ to explain colours to a blind man.”

  “What is it?” he asked.

  Rebecca glanced back; a knowing smile spread across her face. “Take the decoder out.”

  “What?”

  “Take it out. You’ll never hear it properly otherwise.” She gestured to the decoder nestled inside her ear. “When we sing the Old Music, it makes it too neat. Too… human.

  “You lose what we sing; what we say when we don’t say; it can’t be translated without losing the feeling.

  “We say it’s the blood of the song. We feel its blood.”

  He hesitated, then slowly pulled the decoder free. A dull pop in his ears, then…

  The sound shifted instantly.

  Gone was the smooth overlay of interpreted speech and contrived nuance. Now the air was alive with a rising tapestry of clicks, coughs, throat-tones, and warbling pulses; tunes layered upon each other but combined as one.

  It made him shiver.

  Voices clicked and spat in complex cadence, blending like wind through dry leaves with the steady growl of distant thunder a tympanic backdrop. It was wild, raw, and impossibly alive. Not just melody: it had texture. The music seemed to draw the firelight to it like it was a living thing.

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  They stepped into the clearing.

  The greys had gathered around the fire in concentric circles. Older ones stood close, their faces painted with pale dust, their limbs marked with smudges of ochre. Kits darted and spun between the adults, mimicking the dancers in the centre. Some of the flyers hung low from overhanging branches, swaying with the rhythm, their painted wings shimmering as they caught the fire’s glow.

  At the heart of it, a group of musicians played instruments Davy had never seen.

  Hollowed gourds strung with sinew, polished bones that rattled and snapped when shaken, long reed flutes that gave breath to mournful tones.

  One elder played what looked like a drum carved from impossibly thin stone and strung with something that might have once been vine or tendon. Inside a candle, visible through the thin rock, flickered in time with the drum’s voice, a resonant humming, deep and low.

  Davy stood still, held in the moment as every instinct urged him to listen. He followed her gaze.

  A lone ringtail stood at the circle’s heart, their body smeared with golden ochre, moving in a strange, spiralling rhythm. They stomped the ground with deliberate force, then twisted into fluid turns, their tail snapping like a whip. Everything given up to be free.

  His skin prickled.

  Rebecca leaned close, her voice was soft and unfiltered yet somehow understood.

  “The Old Music is how we pass our stories, our memories forward in time and down the generations; how we remember what the skin forgets.”

  “What’re they singin’?” he asked, his voice sounding flat and dry compared to the living texture around him.

  “A beginning,” she said. “And an end. This Old Music is about the First Hunt, and the Last Breath.”

  He blinked. “Seems contradictory.”

  “Not to us. In the Hunt, there’s purpose. In the Last Breath, there’s balance.”

  She touched his arm gently. “Look there; see the dancer in the centre?”

  “The one with the gold paint?”

  She nodded, whispered, “That’s Duu’ra. They carry the memory of the One Who Walked Alone. A scout who found the poisoned river before it spread. Died of the knowing without being known. That story’s over two hundred cycles old.”

  “No words?” he asked.

  “Only what’s sung. Only what’s danced.”

  He watched, transfixed. As the tempo quickened, the kits joined in, forming spirals around the dancer like galaxies pulled into orbit. Their clicks and coughs rose in call-and-response. Some of the harmonics hit notes so high, they shivered through his bones rather than his ears.

  His skin prickled again. Hairs standing on end.

  The harmonies were primal; evoking old memory buried so deep it transcended language, escaped time.

  And something else stirred.

  Tiny motes, no larger than ash flecks, rose like dust on a breath of memory. At first, Davy thought it was the smoke catching the firelight.

  But they shimmered too clearly, moved too deliberately. They spiralled above the dancer; faint glints of blue and green, purple and red; weaving in counterpoint to the steps below.

  There were also motes whose mantle, whose burden, was indistinct: their purpose and colours yet to be fixed; more felt than seen. Shadows that carried the memory of a song long since sung. One that resonated with the heart, with the mind… and the soul.

  Were they actually here?

  Rebecca knelt and picked up a small carved instrument. She handed it to him: a narrow tube with slits cut through one end. “Blow gently, but not with your lips tight. Let the music… the sounds breathe.”

  Davy raised it to his mouth and followed her lead. A soft, warbling tone spiralled from the tube, faint and mournful, as if the wind itself had a voice and a memory it had never spoken. The music was alien, but his hands knew its tune and understood its weight.

  Somehow, the song needed his breath.

  As he lowered the instrument, Rebecca studied him. “You see the others? They wear ochre, the colour of the ground, deep orange or browns. But the Duu’ra wears gold.

  “Sky-colour; of the morning glow. Dream-colour; of warming fire.

  “Not part of the mob. Not apart from it either.”

  He glanced back toward the dancer. Alone in the centre. Moving against the rhythm yet never outside it. As if the beat flowed from somewhere else entirely; through them.

  “We don’t choose a Duu’ra,” she continued. “They arrive. No one trains them. No one rehearses the Duu’ra’s steps. When they appear, it means something is changing. Or must change.”

  He narrowed his eyes, lips tightening just slightly. “What kind of change?”

  She gave a small click, the sound both warning and wonder. “Sometimes change we want. Sometimes not. But always change that’s needed.”

  The motes answered her words.