PDF Format:

The Day the Music Died

From the journals of Khirad Tresellia Fate,

compiled and presented by one who prefers not to explain himself.

"Before the planes. Before the drift. Before even the idea of where something could exist — there was music."

A Note From the Compiler

I did not write this book.

I want to be very clear about that, because I have a reputation for taking credit where it isn't strictly mine and I am trying, in this one instance, to be better than that. What I have done is gathered these pages from the journals of Khirad Tresellia Fate, cut and ordered them, and put them somewhere they will not be lost. She wrote every word that matters here. I only held the pen at the edges.

You may wonder why she didn't publish them herself. That is a fair question and the answer is complicated and not entirely mine to give. What I will say is that she wrote these entries over a very long time, in pieces, and I do not think she ever intended for anyone else to read them. Not because she was ashamed of what she felt, but because this particular grief belonged to her in a way that she was not ready to share. A loss that never fully healed.

I am giving these pages to the world now because the time for keeping them to myself has passed. You will understand why, if you read carefully. I have added nothing to her words except the occasional chapter heading, which she would have found insufferably presumptuous of me. She is right. I am doing it anyway.

— K.

Part One: Before There Was Anything

I. What He Would Tell You

Everyone gets this part wrong.

If you ask him, he will tell you the universe began with space. With distance, and vastness, and the great wheeling expanse of all the places things could eventually be. He was very proud of this and was always been the first to say it, louder than anyone else in the room. And to be fair, he did make the planes. He shaped the architecture of where everything was going to happen. That part is true.

But space is only distance. Distance between what? Distance filled with what?

Before the planes were built and before the drift existed and before even the concept of where something could be located, there had to be a reason for any of it to matter. Purpose does not come from geometry. Meaning does not live in measurements.

No. Before all of it, there was music.

I have been the keeper of fates for longer than most things have existed, and in all that time I have watched mortals get the cosmology wrong in spectacular and creative ways. They build temples to the wrong ideas and argue in very earnest voices about things they've misunderstood from the start. I bear them no ill will for it. The truth of the beginning is not the kind of thing that fits neatly into scripture.

So let me tell it plainly, in the way She once told it to me, on a day when she was feeling especially patient…or possibly a little tipsy.

II. The First Note

She was not the biggest, and she was not the strongest, and she was not even the most powerful when everything was said and done. She was simply the first.

In the beginning, Ao created a note. A single note woven from pure feeling. Not sorrow, joy or pain. Not any one thing, but all of them at once before any had a name.

And from that note, Symphonica emerged.

This is how she explained it to me and I believe it is correct: all music, no matter how small, is always an act of creation. The note had to become something. The mixture of feeling and sound could not remain formless. And so she and Ao created together for an age that had no measurement, because there was not yet anyone to measure it. Just the two of them and the music.

She did not build the laws of anything. She did not chart the systems or define the cycles or establish the rules. That was not her purpose and she would have been dreadful at it, frankly, which she would have been the first to admit. Her purpose was to teach the universe a reason to be.

She taught the universe to dance.

III. The Others

Then came the rest of us.

Not her children. Not anyone's children, exactly, though Ao created us all in the same sense that he created her. We were purposes, given form. Each one of us a different answer to the question of what a universe needed in order to function.

Tanabris arrived with dominion over space and the raw material of the planes, and immediately began building things on a scale that was, I will admit, genuinely impressive even to those of us who found him…difficult. Elus came with Time, and could not stop measuring things, even then. Eldath brought life, and was kinder about it than anyone had a right to expect. I arrived with fate and the long view of things, which is a gift that mostly feels like a burden and occasionally feels like both at once.

And Thraxian came last.

He arrived with death and silence and the understanding of endings, and the rest of us were not entirely sure what to do with him. Tanabris in particular found him unsettling, which in retrospect makes all the sense in the world. Endings are inconvenient for someone who wants everything to be permanent and under control. But Ao made him as deliberately as he made the rest of us, and the universe requires endings as much as it requires any other thing. More, sometimes

We built structure together. We built systems and cycles and destinies. We constructed a universe that could hold people and stories and all the complicated weight of things mattering to someone.

But it was her music, underneath all of it, that made it hold together. She was the reason any of our separate domains connected into something coherent. Time moves to a rhythm. Life follows a cadence. Even fate, which I always thought of as rather rigid in its own way, is really only another word for the shape a story takes when it finds its own ending. She never let any of us forget that.

IV. The One Who Listened

I want to be careful here, because what I am about to tell you is not my story to tell. It was never mine. I am only telling it because he won’t and she's not here. But someone should and so it is up to me.

Thraxian was never like the others. This is not a criticism. It is simply the truth of what he was.

Where the rest of us were oriented toward things continuing, he was oriented toward their completion. His domain was not destruction, though mortals have often made that mistake. His domain was finality. The specific peace of a thing reaching its natural end. He understood silence not as the absence of sound but as what sound becomes when it has finished saying everything it needed to say. He understood endings the way no one else did, because endings were his entire jurisdiction, and he took that seriously in a way that was quiet and deep and nothing at all like grief until you dared look at it directly.

Because he understood silence so completely, he heard her differently than we did.

The rest of us experienced her music as something beautiful, as a force that moved through us and gave the universe its texture. But we heard it the way you hear weather: present, surrounding, shaping the conditions of things. Thraxian heard what the music left behind after it played. The particular quality of the air in the moment after the last note. The space where the sound had been, which was not empty but full of everything the song had meant.

He heard her in the silence she made.

And because of that, he was the only one of us who truly understood what she was doing.

V. A Quiet Orbit

He never announced it. He was not the announcing type. But somewhere in those early ages, before the mortals existed and before the worlds had names and before any of this had been written down anywhere, Thraxian began to orbit her the way a moon orbits a planet: without deciding to, without quite understanding that he was doing it, pulled by something he did not have the vocabulary to name.

He would leave whatever he was doing and come sit near her when she played. He did not interrupt. He did not ask for anything. He would just be nearby, which for a god of death and endings and the long silence of the void is rather remarkable behavior. The rest of us noticed it. We did not say anything, because what would we have said. Thraxian feels things more than he shows, and the showing of it was so careful and so restrained that pointing at it felt like an intrusion.

She noticed it too. She did not say anything either, not for a long time. She simply adjusted where she played, sometimes, so that he could hear better.

I wrote it down in my journals and said nothing to either of them and felt rather like a person watching something fragile moving through the world and hoping very hard that nothing would knock it over.

VI. The Beginning of Something Dangerous

She was different with him from the very start, and I think she knew it before he did.

The rest of us regarded him with varying degrees of wariness. His purpose made them uncomfortable in the way that anything connected to endings made them uncomfortable, as if by acknowledging him too directly they might invite his domain into their own. Eldath alone treated him with open warmth, because Eldath treats everything with open warmth and has never once in all the ages of the universe been frightened of anything. But even Eldath's warmth was the warmth of acceptance and tolerance, not true understanding or love.

Symphonica's warmth was different. It was the warmth of recognition.

She did not recoil from what he was. She did not soften him or try to redirect him toward something more comfortable. She looked straight at his domain, at all of the silence and the finality and the still places at the end of things, and she did not flinch. She valued it. She saw his purpose not as the shadow at the edge of creation but as the thing that gave creation its weight.

She once told me, when I asked her directly, that she had always thought endings were the most musical part of anything. That the last note of a song was where everything the song had been trying to say finally arrived. That death, done right, was not the opposite of meaning but its completion.

You can imagine what that meant to him. To be seen that way by someone who understood beauty at its most fundamental level.

Something impossible took root between them, the way things grow in places that seem too unlikely to support them. Slowly, and without either of them naming it, and with a patience that only makes sense if you understand that both of them were very old and neither of them was in any hurry.

VII. The Song Before Silence

There are moments that time does not measure and that fate does not record. I can say this with some authority, given my domains. Certain things happen outside the ledger entirely. They matter only to the people inside them, and they leave no mark on anything except the two people who were present.

This was one of them.

And so, this comes from his telling much later.

She stood at the edge of everything, at the place where the last of what had been built dropped away into the crossroads of possibility. It was the kind of place she loved best, where nothing had been decided yet and the music had nowhere to be except exactly where she put it. She played differently there. Notes fell into the void without expectation. Melodies rose and collapsed into themselves and became other melodies. Rhythms formed and broke and reformed into something that had never existed before.

He was beside her. Not watching from a distance as he usually did, not sitting at the comfortable remove he had always maintained. Present. Close enough that she could have reached out and touched him without having to take a step.

"You hear it differently than the others do."

She did not look at him when she spoke. She didn't need to in order to see him. That was a quality she had that I have never fully understood: the ability to perceive someone completely at all times.

He did not answer immediately. Words were inefficient things, difficult for him to bend to his purposes. He thought in silences and spoke in careful, measured sentences that always felt like they had been considered from several angles before being released.

"They only hear what is," he said at last. "I listen to what remains after."

A small smile appeared on her lips. She played again, and this time the music was different in a way that I cannot describe precisely because I was not there, but that he told me about once, years later, in the only vulnerable conversation we ever had. He said it felt like she was playing directly at him. Not for him, but at him, the way a question is directed at a specific person rather than the room.

"This is what they don't understand," she said. Her fingers never stopped moving. "They think everything has to resolve. Every cycle has to close. Every story has to end cleanly."

He tilted his head slightly. It was the gesture he made when something interested him enough to examine it from a different direction.

"Isn't that my purpose? To bring about endings?"

She paused in her playing.

"I don't think so. Some things are meant to linger. To exist beyond their purpose. Beyond their ending. That is the true measure of a thing."

He was confused by this.

“What does it mean to exist beyond your ending? A thing either is, or it is not."

She leaned forward and put her hand against his chest, gently, over the place where the heartbeat of a god is very slow and very certain.

"You still feel it in here, even though it is gone forever. So, what is that to you?"

He closed his eyes and took a slow breath.

"A memory. An emotion. No — a transformation. Like a change in the state of matter."

She smiled. And he opened his eyes and looked at her and I imagine that in that moment he understood quite a lot of things at once.

"Now you're getting it," she said. "This is what it means for something to have a soul."

They sat together in silence after that, for a time that had no particular length.

Eventually she said, with the particular lightness she used when she wanted something to seem smaller than it was: "The others have started going down into creation. Existing amongst the wind and the waves. They invited me to go, but…I don't know. Will you come with me?"

He smiled. A rare occurrence.

"Are you sure?"

She smiled back. "Always."

Part Two: The Day the Music Died

VIII. Swan Song

I have written many accounts in my time. More than I can count, more than I can remember clearly, the full weight of every fate I have ever recorded. I have written the endings of empires and the quiet last moments of people whose names no one else would remember. I have written down things I wished I could change and things I was grateful came out the way they did.

I have never written anything as difficult as this.

We had heard rumors about a creature moving through the space between the planes. Something vast and wrong and hungry, eating stars and leaving nightmares behind it in the planes closest to its path. Thraxian recognized the description immediately and went quiet in that particular way he had when something was troubling him that he did not want to admit was troubling him. The creature resembled something from his domain, a Voidspawn, and he had believed them to be under his control. In truth, they had always been more feral than he wanted to acknowledge.

We set out aboard The Prism, which was a craft built from the combined gifts of several of us and powered by light and music. Symphonica at the helm meant powered primarily by music, and when she was in the mood for speed she did not do anything by half measures. She stood at the very front of the ship, at the furthest possible point, a few inches from the edge of everything, with the auroric waves of the Expanse streaming past her and her instrument making a sound that I can only describe as a very large animal that is also somehow joyful. She loved piloting that vessel. She loved the speed and the chaos of it, the way the universe rushed past like it was trying to keep up with her.

I know this is not the image that most statues and paintings have captured. I have seen the statues. We have all laughed about them. There is something irreconcilable between the celestial harp-playing serene goddess of music that mortals imagined and the actual Symphonica, who wore entirely too many straps and studs for someone who was theoretically the personification of beauty, whose hair glowed like bioluminescent jellyfish in different colors depending on what she was feeling, and who played her instrument like it had personally offended her family.

Thraxian watched her from his place at the helm. He always did. He had never been subtle about it, exactly, but he had always managed to maintain a kind of plausible distance, the way you can admire something very much without quite looking directly at it. On that particular journey he abandoned even that pretense, and I watched him watch her with an expression that I recognized from having recorded it in many mortal faces: the expression of someone who intends to say something important very soon and is still choosing the words.

He never chose them. I want you to know that, before the rest of it.

IX. What Happened

The creature defied adequate description. I have tried many times in my private journals and failed each time. It was the size of a large meteor and constituted primarily churning darkness and had the particular visual quality of something that should not exist, designed to make the mind slide away from it rather than hold its shape clearly. All of us felt something primal looking at it, except Thraxian, who looked at it with mild academic interest and mentioned quietly that he thought it was kind of cute, which I believe was a genuine opinion and not a snarky remark as he doesn’t have a humorous bone in his body.

We understood immediately that it was dangerous in a way that went beyond its size. We set to work. I will not pretend I am a battle chronicler, because I am not and what happened was complicated and frantic and does not benefit from my attempt to reconstruct it in clean narrative terms. What matters is that it was not going well.

Elus devised a plan to hit the creature with a wave of rolling time loops, which he believed would destabilize it by compressing it back to an earlier, smaller version of itself. Tanabris and Thraxian and I all told him this was dangerous and that we did not know how time manipulation would interact with a creature of this nature. Elus has always had difficulty receiving that kind of input, and in the chaos of everything, we did not stop him the way we should have. That is a failure I have thought about often in the centuries since.

The plan appeared to work, in the way that plans sometimes appear to work before revealing how wrong they've gone. The creature compressed. It shrank. And then it screamed in a frequency that none of us could defend against because none of us had ever heard it before, the sound of something in the kind of pain that comes from being forced backward through your own existence.

Thraxian went to it. Because that is who he is. Because it was suffering, and he is the god of endings and silence, and his purpose has always included the mercy of presence at the end of a terrible thing. He reached toward it.

The moment he touched it, the pain became rage. It reached for him. Elus launched an attack over Thraxian's shoulder — fast, effective, the wrong sequence — and did not shout a warning to the rest of us who were all also moving to intercept, because Elus has always been somewhat in his own head and distracted, and in that moment he was very focused on the threat in front of him and forgot that the people behind him existed.

Symphonica was at the front of The Prism. She was always at the front. She saw the attack coming before any of the rest of us had processed what was happening. She stepped between the creature and Thraxian and began to play, pushing the creature back with her music the way she always could, balanced on the edge of the ship as if the void below her was simply a floor she had chosen not to use yet.

Elus's attack hit her squarely in the back.

She fell off The Prism and into the Expanse.

Despite what must have been a pain beyond any scale I have to measure it against, she turned as she fell. She looked at Thraxian. And she said, very quietly, the three words that I have written down in more places than anywhere else in all my journals, the three words I will carry in my memory until whatever ending is eventually written for me:

"I see you."

And then she was gone.

X. The Three Notes

The creature took her in. We fought it with everything we had. We raged and we tried and we failed, and somewhere in the middle of all of that failing, something changed.

Through the noise of battle and our own voices, through all of it, I heard something that did not belong to the fight. Three notes, ascending. Just three, and they were so clear and so certain that everything else went quiet around them the way a single light makes a dark room make sense.

They sounded like the universe itself had been an orchestra all along and had been waiting to play this specific chord.

They came from inside the creature. And then the light came.

The shockwave hit The Prism so hard we spun for what felt like an eternity. When we steadied and could see again, there was only stardust. A great deal of stardust, scattered across the space where the creature had been, glittering and drifting in the slow currents of the Expanse.

That was the day the music died.

I know that because I felt it happen, and every one of us felt it happen, and the mortals felt it happen too, though they did not know what it was. They described it in the journals and letters of that age as a sudden strange sorrow with no cause, a moment of unaccountable grief, a feeling as if something beautiful had been removed from the world so quietly that they had not noticed it was there until it was gone. It was like watching color drain from a painting. Except the painting was everything.

None of us knew how to bring back one of The Six. It had never needed to be done before.

Before we had left on the journey, Symphonica had done something she sometimes did when she was going somewhere she expected to be dangerous: she placed her deific power in a Resonance Repeater, a small musical disc that functioned as an echo of her abilities for a limited time, meant to return the power to her once the danger had passed. With no one to return to, the disc went quiet. The power it held simply faded.

Tanabris was furious with Elus. Furious in the way that only comes from grief and the need to put the grief somewhere outside of yourself. He said that he would dedicate his life to making Elus answer for what he had done. Eldath physically restrained him from going further than words. I do not know what I did in those moments. I have not been able to write it down clearly even in my private journals. I remember the stardust, and the silence, and Thraxian's silent tears.

He did not speak. He stood at the prow of The Prism, in the place where she had always stood, and he looked at the drift of what remained of her across the Expanse, and his face was entirely still.

We petitioned Ao to bring her back. He told us to have faith in the path of her destiny. I was a little offended, because that is exactly the kind of thing I say when I don't want to explain something, and hearing it said to me was illuminating in ways I did not enjoy.

That was the last time we went anywhere together. That was, for a very long time, nearly the last time I saw Thraxian at all.

Part Three: The Echo

XI. What He Did With the Centuries

I saw him one more time before the end of the age. He invited me himself, which was unusual enough that I came immediately, and he told me to come as chronicler. He wanted me to witness something.

He had spent the intervening centuries doing something that should not have been possible. I still do not entirely understand the mechanics of it, and I say this as the god of fate and divination, as someone whose entire domain is the tracking and recording of things that happen. What he did was beyond the edges of what I thought could be done.

He found her.

Not her, exactly. Not Symphonica, alive and whole. But her power, her essence, the specific quality of what she had been, which she had spent herself to destroy the creature and had scattered across the heavens in the process. It had been dispersed into the Expanse in fragments, spread across incalculable distances, mixed in with stardust and the slow drift of cosmic material.

He gathered it. All of it. Every fragment. I do not know how long it took to find each piece or what it cost him to retrieve them. He did not tell me and I did not ask, because some things are private even from the keeper of fates. What I can tell you is that he had been methodical and patient in the way that only someone with a very specific and important reason to be patient can sustain for that length of time.

He had coalesced her scattered essence into five instruments.

They were extraordinary. I recognized her in them immediately, which is not something I expected to feel and which hit me harder than I was prepared for. The instruments held her the way a room holds the warmth of a fire that has gone out.

He showed them to me without saying much. He laid them out carefully and stood back and let me look at them.

A guitar, strung with what felt like the fabric of possibility.

A drum, deep and certain as a heartbeat.

A cello, whose resonance I felt before I heard it.

A keytar, bright and strange and somehow both ancient and completely new.

A saxophone, made of something that held the particular quality of silence at the end of things.

The Arcanium Symphonic.

XII. Why He Gave Them Away

I asked him, when I could ask things without my voice doing something embarrassing, why he didn't keep them. He was quiet for a moment in the way he was quiet when he was being honest about something he had not put into words before.

"Because she loved them," he said. "The mortals. She loved teaching them. She loved watching what they did with music when they had it. She would not have wanted them kept in my domain. She would have found that unbearable, honestly — all of that music in the one place in the universe with the least noise."

"And the other reason?" I asked, because there was clearly another reason.

He looked at the instruments for a moment.

"Because I want to hear her music play throughout the planes again. I cannot make it play. I do not have that gift. But if I give the instruments to the mortals, who are her people and always were, then somewhere, at any given moment, her music is playing. And I will be able to hear her soul once again, even if it’s just a whisper."

I moved to put my hand on his and hesitated, remembering how he didn’t like that.

“I miss her too.”

He turned away from me.

“I never got to tell her…”

I looked over the instruments.

“Oh, you silly man. She knew. She always saw you and all that you are.”

He smiled. It was the last time I ever saw him smile.

XIII. What Became of Them

The instruments passed into the world, and from there into legend. They were carried by musicians and lost by them, fought over and found again, taken to distant worlds and left there when their bearers did not return. For a time they were artifacts of myth. For a time after that they were simply old things whose provenance had been forgotten.

But they endured. Things made from the essence of a deity tend to. They are persistent in the way that music is persistent: it does not require anyone to be listening in order to exist. It simply waits.

Even though the music had died, a part of her continued on with them, allowing mortals and immortals alike to experience it.

And they were used, in the end, for exactly the purpose he had built them for, which is the purpose she built into everything she touched: to reshape the universe and to push back the darkness. The god of space fell to their tune wielded by mortals and paired with my own hand for the killing blow.

The legend says that after their use, they were taken to five separate corners of the Expanse by five separate hands, to be kept until they are needed again.

The Arcanium Symphonic is waiting. And it waits, endlessly.

A Final Note From the Compiler

If you have read this far, then you are exactly who was supposed to read it. I am never wrong about these things. I have, in fact, made something of a career out of being right about exactly this kind of thing, and I want absolutely no credit for it because the hours are terrible and my hourly rate is criminally high.

What I will tell you is this: Khirad wrote every word that mattered here, and she was not a woman who wasted words. Pay attention to what was written here and also the silence in between.

The music is waiting.

— K