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Shrill, irreflective, unrestrain’d,
Rapt, ringing, on the jet sustain’d
Without a break, without a fall,
Sweet-silvery, sheer lyrical,
Perennial, quavering up the chord
if asked, spoke would say he didn’t play any instrument of any kind. Maybe he'd lie and say kazoo, or something along those lines. Some kind of joke answer. Or he'd turn the question around and twist it until he got whatever information he really wanted from it. And it would be forgotten, easily swept away in the flurry of words and questions that came from his mouth. It's what he was good at, turning things around. Pulling on words and syllables like puppet strings, Spoke was a great puppeteer if nothing else.
Truth is though, He played violin.
Even he could laugh at the irony of that. And it was part of the reason he continued to practice it. It was different then what was expected of him, it changed up the formula of what they thought of him. It was different from him, and yet it made sense. Every part of spoke was designed to confuse, to take what someone might know and understand and change it. Challenge expectations, that's what spoke did. That's what he was good at.
He figured he was pretty good at violin, too. He was getting skilled at making them, one created for every season left an imprint of the design in his brain. It was memorization at this point. Like notes and sheet music.
(Maybe he liked the violin so much because it was just like lying, twisting notes into beauty was just as easy as manipulating, he played the strings like puppets.)
He put love into crafting the instrument he didn't put into much anything else. Careful carvings, stained wood. Every season a new design, the same craftsmanship. He kept it away from harm. Tucked into his ender chest far away from the harm of the outside world and from his own stupid actions. If not it would've broken much sooner.
(and it did break, Spoke was sure he was winning an award for the dumbest ways to destroy a musical instrument.)
He had all the time to practice, even a server like lifesteal had a bedtime. or, hours that no one would bother hunting for hearts, or dragging others into traps. in lulls of server activity spoke thrived. He could find himself in an isolated cave, or a field. Able to pluck out notes and melodies with no fear of alerting an enemy.
The world had music ingrained in it's core, every fiber, the wind rustling grass, insects singing in the night, thunder cracking in the sky, it created a symphony. A song.
It was the universe speaking, gods and ancient beings he could never understand sharing their stories and secrets to him, to anyone who would listen.
Through his violin, spoke talked back. He continued the conversation through measures and accents. It was a duet, in the easiest way to describe it. He couldn't understand their lyrics but he could tell them his stories back. He hoped they would listen as he did. He hoped anyone would listen.
He hoped he wasn't standing out there alone, he hoped his songs meant something to someone out there.
Spoke was never a composer, none of his songs were ever his own. bits and pieces taken from the sheet music that had been given to him once, mashed together in a heap of what 'sounds best'. He couldn't call what he did composing. He couldn't pick out what note something was by hearing it once.
The Wormhole sang too. Differently, through distortion, the sound was stretched and pulled through worlds, through universes. He could count the times and decades the music was sapped and stolen from. He could hum along to some of them too. If you asked him to describe it he couldn't answer you. he'd stare and smile and tell you it was a beautiful cacophony. Something powerful something to be afraid of.
(Sometimes, spoke thought that it sounded like screams. Sometimes, the sound haunted him. It made him wonder just what he'd gotten himself into
Sometimes, it scared him.)
His world had split into two pieces, After the Wormhole and Before.
Before the wormhole when he was learning, they were rough, scratchy but beautiful.
Staccato.
He could spend hours, plucking notes. Making heinously loud sound to get a reaction from parrot. breaking down into giggles at his reaction, being bapped with a wing.
He didn't hear the music ingrained in the fabric of reality, he played what made him happy. songs that Parrot liked, That he could play along with on, that he could dance to.
it was warm, it was safe. It was what he turned do. After every respawn, the sickening embrace of death, through fingers stiffened with rigor mortis he played. he played and played over and over until it was memorization.
.
After was different.
His music was fractured, broken into pieces into a semblance of a whole.
The wormhole opened an understanding he didn't have before, He was so much more aware than he used to be. So different.
He wonders if it's age. If something was taken from him by the wormhole that he will never get back if he tried. The songs he used to play sound hollow to his ears, the memories he associated with them feel fake. He wonders if they were ever real in the first place.
It left him with a buzzing in his chest, that got worse and worse and worse until it reached a fever pitch and he found himself holding the violin again. Playing sonatas until they taper off into nothing, until his fingers bled from strings cutting into the calloused pads. They sounded pathetic, they were broken and squeaked and screamed. but they were his. They were his to play. His scream into nothingness.
Something to remind him that he wasn't completely changed by the wormhole, he was the same person. He was the same boy who picked up a violin all those years ago and learned.
he was the same boy who destroyed an entire server.
again.
again.
and again.
That maybe, maybe he was worth being called a person, worth redemption that he craved.
Spoke sat above the server and he saw it all, He saw the perspective of the beings he played to at night. and he weeped because there was nothing beyond. This server was all he knew, maybe the wormhole was his bid for a place beyond. To see where the music came from.
and it was an echo chamber. He had screamed for answers and his own voice answered him back.
it's hard for him to describe what exactly it was like. The power he held cupped in his hands, pinched between his fingers. He could never find the words, the music fell apart under his hands.
That's a story he would play to the beings beyond him. He isn't sure if they would play anything back to that. He wasn’t sure they were real.
he’d tell them a different story.
it’d start like this:
there’s two kids, a vulture and a parrot
They’re friends.
And you know the story. you wouldn’t have gotten this far if you didn’t.
the vulture destroys the parrot, pulls out feathers and tears him apart and eats him whole. The vulture kills the parrot. The vulture ruins him.
and the vulture lives on, and the parrot stays immortalized in the wreckage of a world left behind. A cage.
forever.
and the vulture lives on.
he destroyed everything he held onto, he dragged puppet strings like they were dolls. He picks them apart. And at the end of it all, wherein he stands triumphant. He was bored.
at the end of all things the vulture finds himself with nothing left to do but to destroy himself and relish in the music that he created.
and he has nothing left to do but start again.
and again
and again
With no end, no goal in sight but the ones he assigns to himself.
the vulture misses the parrot
he weighs in his songs and his voice and his chest.
He was once his song bird, his friend, torn apart by the vultures actions
you know who the vulture is. The beings would as well.
The song would be written in minor.
fragmented.
With the most unreliable narrator of all.
and when he is finished he would put his violin down. And he would leave it there, he would beg for a forgiveness he doesn’t believe in. a song he could not play. A piece left unfinished.
“Our wisdom speaks from failing blood,
Our passion is too full in flood,
We want the key of his wild note”
A creature made of shadow stares at a box, an instrument sits inside, strung carefully. Made of maple wood, stained a dark red. A book sits on top of it
”beginner’s violin”
the creature picks it up, holding it as though if he moved the slightest amount it would shatter. he looks up at his friend. Who waits with bated breath. Colorful wings drawn up.
”..what is it?” He asks,
”a violin, I thought you’d like it” the avian answers.
the creature picks up the ‘violin’. He mirrors the position of the person on the cover, he draws the odd stick over the strings. It admits an ear piercing sound.
the avian flinches and covers his ears, “ow, what the hell spoke- you didn’t have to deafen me”
laughter bubbles from the creatures chest. He finds his fingers fit perfectly on the instrument. It feels like home.
This feels like home.
he spends sleepless nights playing. Learning. He preforms his own concert for the avian by spring.
years later, the creature holds the violin, well practiced hands drag a bow over the strings, a sorrowful chord comes out.
hands so bloodied, called deadly, evil. Chaos in itself playing such a delicate things.
it could be called irony.
he plays what he remembers, improvises what he can’t until he can play no longer. And there, he starts again. And again
until he feels at peace.
and he starts to understand it all.