“We found peace in sacrifice, but it without balance it is short lived.”

  Remembered words of Rebecca

  Motes were attracted to them as they talked, responding to the memory named.

  To Duu’ra; not a person, but a pattern. A resonance of their making that echoed across timelines, binding threads with purpose.

  She led him to a worn path, its loose gravely surface slippery and close to the cliff’s edge. Below, the misty haze rising from the river in the valleys centre curled up through the lower areas of forest like breath from an old slumbering beast.

  “Cycles ago,” she said, “there was a foul sickness in the land. The trees drank it up through their roots. Fruit spoiled on their branches and even the ferns began to curl wrong, towards the dark.”

  Davy looked out across the trees. “Poison?”

  She shook her head. “Not like you’re thinking. It didn’t carry the rotting stink that comes with poison. And it was slow. Took over in a quiet way that made the land forget how to sing, to live, to breathe.”

  They came to a place where the stone fell away, and the trail widened. Rebecca paused, her gaze sweeping the horizon.

  “We don’t think it was from here but came from the sky. From a war or battle that was not ours. A husk or fragment of something that fell into the land’s heart, bleeding into our forests and rivers.”

  More motes joined, shimmering at the edge of recognition, as if watching through a fine weave. They remembered this sickness, knew it. Not just here, but in resonant echoes across other threads. But they had also known the Scout, the one who walked alone, into the darkness willingly.

  “One Scout,” she continued, “young and stubborn; said they would find the source. Said they weren’t afraid. We let them go, didn’t stop them.”

  She crouched by a fern, letting her fingers pass through the soft spiral of its leaves.

  “They followed the poisoned stream, walked up its course into the dark, beyond even the umbra. They crossed into places where the wind spoke lies and trees wept blood. They talked to the rocks, sang its songs to keep from going mad and forgot their own name.”

  The motes, now surrounding them, pulsed in sympathy; it was a song that passed through them across time. One they had carried and preserved, keeping fragments of its rhythm as vibrations so the world could be reminded of itself.

  Davy stood still, letting the weight of her words settle. “They make it back?”

  “They did,” she said. “But they carried the poison back with them. Not in their flesh, but much deeper than that. In their knowing, where they’d seen what the land had been forced to hold. They never recovered, their breath failed them, and their eyes never stood still, never in focus.

  “But they knew where the sickness hid.”

  She rose. “And because of them, we were able to remove it. They saved us then, and they save us now.”

  The motes remembered, not as individuals, but as memory itself; that moment when the knowing became burden carried, not forgotten. When the Scout gave balance a tether in our world as it unravelled.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  They walked on, her voice softened and her eyes glazed over, “We dance Duu’ra to remember what courage is and remind our people of its weight; the kind that keeps going forward even when they know they won’t ever be the same.”

  Davy glanced over. “You’ve danced it?”

  She nodded slowly. “After an attack by a party of reds. When we thought two of the kits were gone. Taken. I was Ok at first but then I couldn’t hear their names anymore. So, I danced Duu’ra that night.”

  He watched her for a long moment. “That’s why the dancer moved alone?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But the circle around them; that’s us. The ones who offer support and gain benefit from their choice. We watch and learn. We hold them in our breath, unspoken but danced. That’s how we keep their path from vanishing.”

  The motes shimmered again, drawn faintly toward Davy now. Drawn not to the memory he heard, but the one he carried.

  Not yet danced, but becoming inevitable.

  They stopped beside a weathered tree, its bark covered in scars that had grown over with straggly moss. Rebecca leaned against it, pulling something from the side of her belt.

  “You ever wonder what it really sounds like?” she asked. “Not what the decoder tells you. The real sound.”

  “Didn’t I hear it last night?”

  “Maybe. But did you listen?”

  Davy blinked, her words landing heavy. “You want me to take it out again?”

  She nodded. “Just for a moment. To hear the music in the words.”

  This time there was no hesitation, he slipped the decoder out and again, the world instantly changed.

  Wind hissed like breath around the mouth of his cave. Leaves clicked. And then Rebecca; when she spoke, her voice came as the usual complex pattern of coughs, guttural clicks, and rhythmic pulses, but it was somehow rich, sorrowful and alive all at once. She sang fragments of the Duu’ra song.

  The sound vibrated throughout his body rather than in his ears. And even though it was comprised of words; he ‘heard’ it as a feeling.

  The hushed ache of silence. The stomp of steady feet. The peace found in sacrifice.

  And there beneath it, above it, around it the motes responded. It wasn’t just a reaction to her words or their cadence; they were in harmony with it.

  They knew the song.

  Had known it before language, before first light. In this world and others, the Old Music’s rhythm was a call for realignment.

  The presence of Duu’ra meant a shift, and the motes knew it. It also meant the Thread itself was flexing and that Davy’s presence amplified it; he was not just hearing the Lore, he was becoming it.

  She stopped and tilted her head, as if asking what he felt. Davy didn’t try to speak right away. He just nodded, slowly, the corners of his eyes became tight with something he wasn’t ready to name.

  Rebecca smiled; not wide, but real. Then she handed the decoder back.

  “You see now,” she said, “why we don’t let the machine tell us what the Old Music means.”

  As darkness began to fall, they returned to the valley and Davy decided to scout out the spot where the map box said the reds had been. He didn’t tell Rebecca all that he was up to, she’d have tried to stop him. She was starting to talk of peace.

  But Davy? No. He believed in leverage.

  And at the moment, the reds had too much of it.

  He didn’t take a direct route to where the scout had been seen in the map box. He went via the valley; to where they’d dragged the dead bodies from the skirmish a few days past.

  He found a red and a brown, side by side in the pile of bodies left in dark shade near the river.

  The brown’s muzzle had been caved in from a spear thrust; the red’s ribs were shattered, most likely from a fall off the ridge. Both had started to bloat in the heat, their fur was stiff, and their joints were drawing tight the rigor of decay.

  Didn’t matter. What Davy needed wasn’t life; it was a story. A message. One soaked in just enough blood and bitterness to tear a fragile alliance apart.

  He looked over his shoulder. The valley stood quiet behind him, no one was watching, no eager kits testing their tracking skills.

  He pulled the brown's corpse aside first. The smell lifted with it; a cloying, rot that was slightly sweat on the nose. Davy grimaced, but he’d smelled worse. He then grabbed the red, tied the two bodies together and lifted them onto his back before setting out to the location in the map box.

  He went higher up, below the skyline and parallel to the river. He moved quickly and as quietly as he could with the extra weight.

  His breath laboured under the strain.

  As he walked on, he listened to the valley’s voice. It remained hushed but not quiet. A mob of flyers skittered around, ignoring him and getting the last of the pickings before it got too dark. The freedom of their movements told him there was no danger ahead. He traced his route across the map in his mind and climbed further up the valley until he was adjacent to where the red marker had been seen.

  Davy cleaned the side branches from a long stick and sharpened its tip as he started to close in on the spot. Slowly, gently he moved forward waving the stick ahead of him, tapping the ground to make sure he didn’t walk into any traps.

  Despite the gathering darkness, he saw a roughly hewn, lean-to bivouac up ahead.

  “How am I seeing that?” he wondered.

  He stopped, carefully laid the two bodies against a tree, sat on his hunches next to them and watched, listened and waited.

  “Was that something?”

  Nothing.

  He waited more. Listening to the forest around him, trusting instinct.