A TALE OF CRESCENDO
Year Five
Restless, Arch Aedan still seeks answers about the beast that killed their tribesman in the mountains while his wife does not speak with him. Hoping to warn the easterners and to exchange information about the treks to the Nethermore, he makes his way alone to the only place to visually communicate across the Shendoa. However there is no one at its east bank, where the waypoint has been abandoned.
Determined, Aedan camps along the river’s west bank at Lepe Point, making a fire to signal the other side. Slumbering under the stars and new moon he is stirred by a ghost wind and an ariose voice emanating from the stilled river, melodious like a bird. Yet he sees no avians and no one at the other side.
In his riverbed, Aedan is awakened at sunrise by the same dulcet sound. Through the morning dew and fog, he barely peruses a vague figure. As the haze clears, on the river’s other side he spots a feminine persona cloaked in white robes. He calls out to them, however the only response is an alluring chorale by an unseen flock of seagulls, enticing him to cross over.
With the Shendoa unusually calm, Aedan wades into its narrowest point and swims earnestly across. Halfway to the other side its current suddenly surges upstream, creating one giant wave which overwhelms him and takes him along with the river. For what seems like a day he is helplessly carried downstream, using driftwood to barely keep afloat. As he swallows water and nearly drowns, he loses consciousness and hears a siren’s call drifting and dreaming down the river. Deprived of air, he imagines himself under her care under a large tree.
When Aedan fails to return to his village, the pathfinder Q’isann – now his trusted second-in-command – organizes a search party with Lyla to scour along the river. The following day, they find their Arch barely alive on the western riverbed towards the sea. While thy return him to Wescenda for medical care, Aedan mumbles unintelligibly while clinging to life. Before falling into a coma, his only comprehensible words are “dark magick.”
Shenandoah River south fork, Virginia
Year Eleven
As they commemorate their first decade in this new world, the western cave-dwelling and eastern tree-faring tribes have established modest Iron Age civilizations and cultures on both side of the mighty Shendoa segregating them. As time has passed with minimal communication between, the branched tribes have been forced to adopt new traditions into their principles to survive their various harsh environments.
On the river’s We’scend, their cave-dwelling warriors have been hardened by the murder of their pathfinder by the beast from the north. They hone their swordry and hunting skills while preparing to someday battle the abominable baerre. Their capital Wescenda, a cavernous village of trade, is built inside a natural network of caves with the Arch’s royal fortress at its center. With only torches to light the gloomy cavern, the shade of the western tribe’s complexion has gradually paled without melanin from natural sunlight.
Long awakened from his coma after being incapacitated in the sick bay for nine months, Aedan and Ivera reconciled and soon started a family. They now have three children, starting with a girl Juna born to a nearby birdsong. The following year her brother arrived, and another the next, already vying to someday succeed their father as Arch. Just to the north Q’yn, the hunters’ child, is free-spirited and strong-willed spending much of her time with her parents in the forest hills where she was born.
On the other side of the river the Escendants persevere in their arbor village, building as they go to protect them from predatory mammals nearby. While they can defend themselves with bows and arrows they continue relying on fresh fish and crustaceans, farmed vegetable gardens, and tropical tree-borne fruits for food rather than hunting. As their skin naturally tans under the bright sunlight they congregate under arbors with the most foliage, applying juice and oil from fallen coconuts as lotion for their skin.
However all is not well in Escenda, as the reclusive Arch Dilian has not been seen for several seasons. Amongst the tribe there are whispers that he succumbed to a hidden injury, or has embarked in search of a natural cure to heal him. While the tribe gradually constructed a grassy mound meandering to the shape of a serpentine Shendoa tributary, the budding tree village became a leaderless commune showing signs of decay. Mila, the tribe’s muse and medicine woman, has quietly been suggested as the next chief even as she mothers her eight-year-old twins.
One night, the Escenda villagers awaken to the sounds of screams and roars from the direction of the redwood. They discover that one or more pantheras had climbed into the tribeswoman’s family home and shredded its contents. Mila and her twins are missing along with all signs of the pantheras, excepting a trail of paw prints leading into untamed canyons.
Sho-lin – the tribe’s surviving tracker from the Nethermore – sets out east in search of the mother and children, taking his young prodigy with him. However the seasons turn and as winter approaches, the trackers have not returned to the arbor village or settled areas.
Canyonlands National Park, Utah
Year Thirteen
On the summer solstice in the shaken tree village, a chorale of ravens hearken the abrupt return of Dilian! Fully recovered during his two years in eastern mountains, the resilient chief returns with renewed vigor and an unexpected surprise. Traveling with him is his eight-year old son who was unknown by the tribe. The Arch introduces him as Tilian and shares his vision that one day his son and heir would rule the lands of both east and west of the Shendoa River as its future king.
In recent years the Escenda village had become aimless without its Arch, and interim leaders Mila and master Sho-lin. The peaceful easterners had been terrified of the panthera packs which now constantly encroach on their village from the canyons, and have never forgotten the kindred trackers presumably murdered by prowlers or western warriors. Arriving to deliver their salvation Arch Dilian promises to lead the frightened Escendants into a new era of strength and prosperity, and rescue their missing kin from the canyonlands.
Casting aside their communal traditions, the Arch instills in the tribe a warrior ethos. Now a resolute leader identified by a black glove on one hand, he pledges to defend them against predator tigres, baerres and wolves to the north, the lethal jungle towards the sea and territorial incursions from the west. As the villagers are overjoyed at the return of their chief, it goes unnoticed that the shape of his face and form have subtly changed in the years since they last lay sight of him.
Autumn arrives and Sho-lin’s apprentice returns to Escenda with the missing twins, who are physically unharmed but traumatized and no longer speak. The prodigyPai-san explains that he and the wise master tracked them to an otherwise empty panthera den in the eastern canyons, but without their mother. Sho-lin had continued searching in search of Mila, while sending Pai-san to return home with the children. As Arch Dilian takes the trembling twins Zenn andTai-cha into his care they are now mute but can communicate non-verbally with each other, forming their own unique unspoken language over the years that follow.
Qagyuhl wedding party aboard canoes – Edward S Curtis circa 1914
Year Twenty-Three
Another decade has passed, and it has been twenty-two years since the arrival of the Crescendants to the now-colonized lands. Over time both tribes have become militarized and aggressive, neither signaling nor feuding across the river. As the cave-dwelling warriors to the west have paled without natural sunlight, the eastern tribe has tanner complexions from the brightening sun while using coconut lotion and trees for shade. No longer resembling the tribespeople on the river’s other side, trust and communication has withered. Distantly viewing the other’s advancements in weaponry, both tribes have armed their trained warriors and fortified their lands in defense of a looming attack from the other side.
From a hidden compound on the outskirts of Escenda, the transformed Arch Dilian now rules with an iron fist while grooming his teenage son for future leadership. The tribes’ attention turns to the first generation born on Crescendo approaching adulthood including Dilian’s son and heir, and the telepathic twins who the Arch has raised as his own children. Now aged eighteen, Tilian is drawn westward to the river while resisting the pressure to follow in his father’s footsteps as Arch-in-waiting and future would-be king.
Along the river’s We’scend the twenty-year-old Q’yn lives with her pathfinder parents in a woodland hillside cranny – but not a filthy hole in the ground as one might expect. She often joins their expeditions, charting the unexplored reaches to the west. In its capital Wescenda, Aedan and Ivera’s three offspring are now budding warriors of the age of seventeen, sixteen and fifteen pining to prove their qualities to their Archfather.
While the two brothers Kaedan and Paedan hone their warrior skills and compete for their father’s favor, over the years their older sister Juna has formed a long-distanced friendship with Tilian from E’scend. On clear days they meet at Lepe Point, signaling across the river. As their tribes and Archfathers no longer communicate with each other, Juna and Tilian gradually rebuild the only bond between the two worlds.
Unbeknownst to them all, a mystic impetus gradually constitutes in the darkness and prepares to strike.
The Great Serpent Mound, Peebles, Ohio
CHAPTER FOUR ~ The First Crescendo
Musical accompaniment for context
Ambient Instrumental Score: “Tabula Rasa” ~ Part 1 of 7
“Crescendo Chapter 3 Score ~ v1” (03:40)
Containing segments of ” Tabula Rasa”
Part I : Cryptic
“Tabula Rasa” ~ A musical representation of the past, present and future of life on planet Earth
Composed & Recorded 2010 © William Kurzenberger
Released on the album Solitary Road
Created and written by Bill Kurzenberger, December 2025 ~ All Rights Reserved