metamorphantasize

Playing the flute requires a tremendous steadiness, in all aspects.

It's a concerted effort, all pistons pushing together: your hands, your lips, your nose, your breath. It's not the same physicality as playing a violin, no, but even the most spirited of tunes rendered via the slim, cylindrical woodwinds are centered and focused, at their core.

It's not very freeing, is it? The spirit in most of the off-seers' melodies is a haunting, haunted one. No one ever dances in or on Aionios anymore. Maybe they never did.

Keves and Agnus owe a lot to history. Their leaders, their technology, their beliefs and their ways in which they've gotten so set all owe themselves homage and tow lines to nations buried deep in the past.

That's not about time. That's about a committment to keep it down, to keep the sheepish lambs inside their pen, away from the gods that don't so surely rule over this world anymore.

Did they ever care? Will they ever again? Was it ever worth it?

It'd be nice to believe so. To see the end as complements the beginning, a call-and-response bookend on the whole thing. Every descendent has their antecedent; every antecedence has its consequence.

Indeed, even with the flute. One might think that musicianship is an ongoing situation, but that's not...not always true.

The embouchure is the first thing learnt and the last thing forgotten. It may change, iteratively, as the player adopts and adapts to subtle techniques to advance the quality of their breathing, but that form is a very basic one. You can't change in the blink of a sixteenth note staccato, turning on heel and skipping across to the other side.

No. No, you can't change. Not even if you truly want to. And maybe that is the most difficult thing of all.

"Do you know why we're fighting, Mio?"

As he asks it - says it, more like, it's much more or maybe much less than practically rhetorical - Noah turns his flute over in his hands, inspecting the filigree that he's quite used to, by now, the familiar way it sits under his fingers. He couldn't play any other off-seer's flute; it wouldn't be right. It's not so much that he cares about swapping spit.

Mio glares, shucks a murmured curse at the slick slate of the plateau overlooking the greater expanse of Swordmarch. "I already told you. We're fighting because that's just the way life is - even if it's not, we're threatened to damn near within an inch of our lives every day, isn't that enough of a reason for you?"

Isn't it? Shouldn't it be? Who's to manage the hypocrisy of should and shouldn't, now? Empress Melia? Praetor Nia?

(She's an assassin, more or less, much more shockingly molded to the mask than Melia ever seems to be. They don't know what to call her; Praetor suits, more or less.)

"It's not," Noah admits, very nearly under his breath but for the fact that playing has trained him always to be clear and audible. He can't escape the behaviors and habits that have been trained, nearly programmed, into him, by life and death both.

How many people - not just soldiers, people of all walks, if that even means anything anymore - has he seen off, with no real corporeal sacrifice to even look upon?

They always disappear into the ether. Both Kevesians and Agnusians know this. And so, of course, sometimes Noah wants to see himself off too.

Maybe Mio agrees. Maybe she doesn't. What's clearer than crystal right now is that she is very, very angry about whichever side it is she's picked, whichever way she feels. Her flute, just then wending its way on a flip over the back of her fingers, snaps with a righteous crack back into her half-gloved palm.

She stabs it at Noah's chest, right at the place opposite where her Core Crystal is. "So you want to die? You want me to play this bloody flute for your disintegration? You think you've earned that right?"

She's older than him. Whatever eighteen years of living in this world have given him, she should, by rights, be owed even more.

So, "Haven't you?" Noah finds himself biting back. "Aren't you sick of it? The way the saying goes - 'fighting in order to live and living to fight' - it makes it sound like we should be grateful for the chance to fight, to bleed and suffer every day, to wage war against people that might very well have been our friends!"

Our friends. "You think I don't remember?!"

It's a horrible question. Oh, it feels sick on his tongue. Long has he buried his anger. The way it bubbles up from his gut to the very viscerally bony crest of his sternum is frightening. He could jump off that cliff right now. Maybe it wouldn't kill him.

They watch each other for several long moments, tick and tock on the flame clocks that mean it's not really rebellious, volatile eye contact they're making. That, above all things, makes you wonder if you should be asking of every single person you meet, who even are you anymore?

"I wouldn't play it for you, if you died," Mio says softly. No, softness is not comfort, not for either of them. "I don't think I'd even care."

"You're lying." The accusation comes with a violent shake. "You can't be that different."

They come, now and then, from different places, different traditions and different rules for the way they conduct their lives - as individuals, as beings, not even as soldiers. But they are both off-seers. They are both so much the same.

Noah's flute is black. Mio's flute is white. But she'd been the one with a bleaker outlook, even just those few minutes ago. Nothing is black and white, truly, even looking side to side.

Again, Noah wishes it were. All he knows is that the dead are dead. God, what an awful thing to have to know. But it's his job. Nearabout, he's never known much else.

This is the way now. This is the way. You've learned it, and you cannot discard it. This is the way.

Steady on, Mio. Steady on, Noah.

The wind whistles malevolently in the surrounding oaken trees. Those, too, are quite old. There are no little acorns anymore.

Still, saplings bend to the light.

Mio sighs, lowers her flute, seems to lose the pocket in which she'd intended on keeping it. For a split second, Noah can see her, somehow, consider dropping it on the ground and smashing it to bits underneath her heel. Even still, she has recovered.

"Maybe I can. Wouldn't that be for the better?"