Part III The Guardian
THERE WAS A CRUEL SORT of irony to being born a musical prodigy in a world that demanded silence, but such was Orfeyi’s curse.
The world had not always been so quiet. It was full of song once, when music had been a way to invoke the divine—a token of worship, an oblation made to the Celestials who ruled the skies.
Different songs, whether sung or hummed or played in any way, shape, or form, called on different gods from this great pantheon.
The Celestials were fascinated by music and would bestow blessings upon those who created it, magic both big and small depending on the skill of the musician.
By this logic, Orfeyi should have been highly favored by the gods. But the Celestials were gone, and to make music now was to tempt fate. To gamble with death.
So silence reigned.
But everything was music if one paid close enough attention.
When Orfeyi was a boy, he would sit for hours by the fjord his village sat upon and listen, enraptured, to the orchestra of sounds around him.
The water, the wind, the birds, the grass.
The buzz of insects and the faint tremor of the earth shifting beneath him.
He learned music without ever holding an instrument, simply by closing his eyes and tuning in to the song of the world.
He would fancy himself its conductor, guiding the notes with his very soul.
Yet his hands yearned to hold an instrument. His voice begged to be heard.
Once, his mother caught him humming to himself while they tended to their small flock of sheep. She gripped his arm so hard it left a mark, though nothing was quite as scarring as the fear in her eyes.
“You must never sing,” she warned in a frantic whisper, “or the Soulless One will come steal your song.”
The Soulless One was said to be the reason for the Celestials’ demise, the rogue deity who brought down an entire pantheon. If anyone was careless enough to make music now, it was the Soulless One who answered, and he was no benevolent god.
“What would happen if he took my song?” Orfeyi asked, his already pale face blanching to a deathly pallor as his imagination ran wild with the worst scenarios: the Soulless One ripping out his vocal chords, smashing his hands so he might never play an instrument, taking his hearing so he would never again hear the music of the world.
“Music is not tied to voice or hearing.” His mother tapped the center of his chest. “It resides here. If the Soulless One were to take your affinity for music, you would stop feeling it in your soul. And a soul without song is no soul at all.”
Orfeyi resisted the urge to sing after that—until, years later, his mother fell ill. Death waited at her bedside, laughing off all the would-be cures Orfeyi brought his mother in a desperate attempt to save her life. Nothing worked.
So one desperate day, Orfeyi decided to tempt fate and sing.
His song was an imploration to the gods, a plea for them to save the person he loved most. Thunder rumbled in answer, as if in punishment for breaking the silence of the world.
A vicious storm erupted, the skies going dark and blue with veins of lightning, and raging winds shook the peat-and-stone house Orfeyi and his mother lived in, tearing off the roof over their heads in a violent gust.
The Soulless One was coming, but Orfeyi remained undeterred, singing ever louder.
And perhaps because there had never been a more beautiful voice or a more moving melody, the heavens split open.
A shaft of brilliant light pierced through the dark to shine upon the peat-and-stone house.
The prodigious singer within felt his soul expand as the Celestials answered his song.
Miracles danced at his fingertips. He cupped his mother’s wan face in his hands, pressed his forehead to hers, and with one final note, sung health back into her.
Lightning shot through him. Orfeyi went rod straight, head tilted up to the angry sky. Forks of blue and white entered his open eyes and ears and mouth and coursed through him, burning, burning, burning.
He couldn’t hear anything. Then he stopped feeling. And finally, he became nothing.
Death’s claim on Orfeyi, however strong, was not meant to last; the Celestials had other plans for him. He woke to find root-like scars running all along his skin from where the lightning had burned him, a sign of the Soulless One’s fury at not being able to steal his song.
“My marvelous boy, my sweet angel.” His now-healthy mother beamed at him.
“You are Godstouched.” She brought a mirror to his face so he could see the spiral-shaped brand that had appeared on his forehead.
The mark of the Celestials who had answered his song and saved not only his mother’s life, but his own.
Word of what Orfeyi accomplished spread across the village and well beyond the fjord.
He was proclaimed the champion who might finally defeat the Soulless One, whose anger now darkened the world with storms that raged in near permanence.
Orfeyi gladly accepted this role. His soul soared with purpose as he set off toward the Godsgate, the ancient seat of the Celestials’ power.
If anyone could sing this pantheon of gods back into existence, it was he.
His journey was a lonely one—had to be, for only those who were Godstouched were allowed up the perilous mountain range where the gate stood—but Orfeyi did not mind.
He filled his days with song, plucking at the strings of the golden lyre his people had gifted him before he left.
It was a beautiful instrument, one that had survived all these years of silence since the Celestials’ fall, and playing it felt more natural than breathing.
The skies above still stormed, but the Soulless One did not come to steal Orfeyi’s song.
In fact, the more music he played, the more his connection to the Celestials grew.
They shared with him visions of what had been and what could be, of people he had never seen but whose souls echoed his own.
They showed him what would be needed to defeat the Soulless One and lent him strength as he weathered storm and snow and cold.
When Orfeyi reached the Godsgate, his body was weary but his faith remained unshaken.
He was elated to find the others like him already there—the pieces of the whole they would rebuild together—and the one who could bridge the gap between them all.
The Tidecaller. The opener of doors. The bridge between worlds.
But darkness walked alongside this Tidecaller, and Orfeyi knew it would be their unmaking.