Chapter 49 Magellan #2
The symphony contained the harmonics of the Earth.
Just as one note could be divided into an infinite number of notes, this song was for all life and every heartbeat.
Magellan almost faltered under its vastness, but Nannerl held her gaze as they played, her eyes bright with understanding.
Every song has a moment of forgiveness, like a doorway to allow anyone entry, and this song had infinite doorways.
Magellan and Nannerl walked through one door together, forgiving the world and themselves for their faults.
Then they were soaring together in the music, touching life directly at its source, and for a moment they were transported to the place where prayers live and all answers exist. They played on until Magellan had the song resonating inside her, like a star ready to be born.
When Nannerl struck the last note, the echo stayed in the room. And stayed.
The sound persisted, becoming an ancient gong heralding the end of a long journey. Magellan held her breath, waiting for the echo to fade, only it didn’t. The vibration built and built until the floor began to shake and tremor.
Magellan and Nannerl looked to each other with wide eyes as every piece of porcelain and candlestick in the room rattled and fell over. The shaking continued, gaining momentum. Nannerl jumped up with a cry and ran upstairs, calling for someone.
The tremors became violent. The labyrinth was breaking.
Magellan heard unearthly screams in the distance. The vortex had found its way in.
She had to get to Rhys and Godwin. She grabbed her oboe from the couch and dashed from the house.
Outside the sky was a dark, ominous canopy, with storm clouds rolling in like an army.
The ground wouldn’t stop shaking. Magellan stumbled several times as the wind whipped at her clothes.
Thunder cracked, and within its reverberation she could hear horrific cries from human voices, a chorus of wails and words spoken in every language with echoing despair that went on forever.
The air itself was becoming charged by its sound, growing louder and more powerful.
She ran down the path and saw Rhys sprinting toward her, with Godwin not far behind.
She launched herself into Rhys’s arms. They quickly ran their hands up and down each other’s bodies, reassuring each other they were still there.
“Thank God.” His voice was shaking.
“We did it. I have it. We have to leave right now.” Their plan to ride to the ancient stone circle didn’t seem feasible anymore. She was already thinking of nearby places where she could open a Ley Line. “We can’t make it to the circle. It’s too powerful this time.”
Rhys was nodding and looking frantically around. “There’s a small church. Perhaps—” Before he could finish, a bolt of lightning struck the tree right beside her and she screamed. Her dress was on fire.
Godwin yelled, “Drop to the ground!” Rhys pinned her down, trying to put the fire out with his own body. Godwin yanked off his jacket, screaming at him, “Move! Move!” and he used it to smother the flames while Rhys held on to her.
Magellan writhed in pain. Her feet and calves were burned. The sounds were now circling her like a predator, the screeching assaulting her ears. She tried to cover them and chant, but she was in too much agony.
“Get her to the lake!” Godwin yelled. “Quickly!”
Rhys swooped her up and took off running. Godwin was right behind them, holding the oboe. The ground continued to shake as the labyrinth broke further, allowing the shadows to pour inside the world with their screams.
Everything was a blur. Rhys ran the length of the pier to the water’s edge and plunged her legs in. The water was ice cold. She cried out but immediately felt numbing relief.
Rhys was beside himself. “Is it helping?”
She nodded, unable to stop shaking. Not from the pain but from the shock. Her teeth began to chatter as the sky opened up like a widening crack in a wall and rain fell on them in a stinging curtain.
Behind Rhys, through the rain she could see humanlike figures coming toward them, pouring in from more cracks in the labyrinth.
Ear-ringing thunder clashed in the sky, sounding like cannons of war.
With each crashing boom, the screams grew louder.
An army of beings were arriving out of thin air, slipping into this time, along with more shadows than Magellan had ever seen in a wave of darkness.
The sound turned deafening, a torrential onslaught seeking to destroy atoms at their core.
She began her deep hum to ward it off, but it was too powerful.
The song had opened countless doorways to lower dimensions. Shadows and misshapen figures entered along with gales of sound. Thunder boomed and lightning raced across the sky. The labyrinth was being destroyed by this force, and it would be the end of the world if she did not leave it.
In the distance, murky figures marched toward them like a moving “valley of the shadow of death.” Were they human? From the past or the future or from another world? Magellan had no idea what she was witnessing.
Rhys breathed in. “My God.” There was no way to get to the carriage or the church. They were pinned at the shoreline.
Desperate, Magellan picked up her oboe and launched into playing Flight of the Bumblebee by Rimsky-Korsakov, the fastest-moving medley of notes she could think of for the instrument.
She played in a flurry to block the violent discord bombarding her.
The piece’s original tempo was two hundred beats per minute.
She was playing it even faster to create a whirlwind of sound, but it wouldn’t hold as a defense forever.
Rhys turned to Godwin. “What do we do? We’re trapped.”
Godwin stared at the water, his face riveted. Then he said, “That is why miracles were made.” Magellan didn’t dare stop playing as she watched Godwin spring into action with urgency as he worked to untie one of the small boats from the pier.
“What are you doing?” Even as he asked, Rhys hurried to help him.
Godwin quickly untied the rope as he explained in a rush, “This is Lake Wolfgang, named for the man who came here a thousand years ago. A man who supposedly could perform miracles.” Godwin turned to them with a brilliant light in his eyes.
“And I would bet our whole library collection this water is on a Ley Line.” Godwin fought to steady the boat. “Quickly now.”
“Don’t stop playing,” Rhys told her as he carefully helped her into the boat and climbed in after. “I’m going to row us out.”
Magellan was too terrified to stop. She knew if she did, the vortex would destroy her.
There was no question. Its sound was towering above her and pushing down on the resonance of her oboe like a g-force, trying to break through.
Her fingers played faster, and she fought to steady her breath to keep going.
She focused on the continuous string of sixteenth notes with steely determination.
The power in the notes’ harmony was unbreakable. She just had to be unbreakable too.
The boat made a dangerous wobble but didn’t tip. Godwin gave the bow a strong push. “Row, Rhys! Don’t stop!”
The swarm of shadows and figures were descending like locusts. It was not the goodbye any of them had envisioned.
“I will see you in the next life!” Godwin promised her as he began to jump from moored boat to moored boat to get away from the pier and the coming horde. But the path was taking him farther and farther away from them.
Magellan’s eyes were blinded with tears. She was unable to say goodbye to him, to say any words. She had to keep playing even though the pain was becoming too great. In this moment they were a triskelion, three interlocking spirals about to break apart.
Godwin called out to Rhys, “And I will see you when you are born!”
“Get to Vienna!” Rhys’s voice choked on the words as he fought to row away from shore.
“Get as far out as you can to the center!” Godwin yelled from the shoreline. The wind was fighting them, the boat rocking dangerously as Rhys struggled to paddle. The storm was trying to push them back to the pier, where a swarm of bodies now gathered.
Hell’s orchestra surrounded her, battling her oboe and its purity. The horde began jumping into the water one by one like a herd, all with the same mind to stop her.
Rhys yelled over the gusts of wind, “You must play the song!”
The song was the key to going home, and she was terrified to play it.
Right now she was the bumblebee in flight.
If she played the song, would Rhys fly with her?
Would he be left here? Or would he go back to 1829 without her, forever apart?
Or would he be there with her when she woke up on the other side?
The fear of the future was about to take her breath away.
There was so much she needed to tell him. It was all happening too fast. She needed to hold him again. To tell him she loved him. It wasn’t supposed to have ended like this. She couldn’t hold back the grief rising from the deepest chamber of her heart. She wasn’t ready.
He seemed to know what she was thinking. She didn’t need to say the words.
“You will never lose me,” Rhys promised as he pushed on with the oars.
They were about to go into an abyss. The water around them was becoming like tar as the cesspool of shadowed forms rose up in a hellish tidal wave on all four sides.
“Where you go, I go, Magellan. Do you hear me?” he yelled. “Where you go, I go.”
She nodded. Her tears would not stop falling, and her breath was about to falter. The fear of the future was too great. The pain in the world was too great. She didn’t know if she could survive it.
He yelled, though his voice was dimmed and sounded far away from her over the battle of sound raging in her ears. But she heard him. “I had a dream of the future. I was with you onstage when you played the song. I was right beside you.”
Hope flared in her heart. She’d had the same dream. To hear Rhys did too filled her with faith—a faith she grabbed hold of like a lifeline if she was going to get home.
A shared dream could be a life lived together.
Tears filled his eyes too and ran unchecked down his face. “Play the song, Magellan. Play, my love.”
She nodded and surrendered. She surrendered her thoughts, her fear, and climbed back into the seat of her heart. Never taking her eyes from him, she seamlessly shifted, no longer the bee flying away. She was a force, full of love.
Trust the compass of your soul, Gwynedd had written. One life was not the whole story, and a soul’s journey did not have an ending.
Magellan played all the song’s parts she had inside her, buoyed by the women who had gifted their strength to her. She blew all her breath into the oboe, sending the notes valiantly into the dark.
By the end of the first movement, the tower of water bearing down on them froze as the ring on her finger lit like a lantern. And the mountains—a part of a much more ancient stone circle—bore witness to the miracle at hand.
The song made the water shimmer as its sound pushed outward like a supernova, reordering time and space to eclipse the darkness with the light. Magellan played on and Rhys released the oars, no longer needing to row as their boat headed toward the horizon like an ancient burial at sea.
They were leaving the labyrinth on the oars of sound. In this moment she was the captain of an ancient ship and as powerful as the magicians of old. Her voyage into the labyrinth had ended.
Magellan held Rhys’s eyes as she played. They did not dare look away from each other as they sat in shimmering brilliance, existing in a moment both finite and infinite while the labyrinth folded peacefully around them.
Her body fading, she could no longer feel Rhys beside her. She could only see his eyes and his light shining. She could see the love, and she had to believe the Ley Lines connecting their souls would lead them to each other again.
She gave her breath for the final note, and the remnants of her fear fell away as she tuned her heart to the world.
She was not alone. She was never alone, but a part of an enduring symphony.
She felt Earth’s power rush through her and the labyrinth release them, propelling her back to her own time, where humanity was waiting on the eve of the darkest night for a song to sing—a song holding the power to illuminate every atom with the force that spun atoms to Life: Love and Music.
The most ancient triskelion of all.