A TALE OF CRESCENDO
CHAPTER SIX
The Great Hall
Gawking up at Crescendo’s tall turquoise peak Nether Mount, Q’isann takes pause as he recognizes the jagged path ahead. Recalling it had been his older kin who had led that trio’s futile mission, the hunter avows revenge on his brother’s bestial assassin. Carefully ascending up the mountainside, Q’isann leads the guild up the switchback path from their first expedition north.
Beneath the cold moon they revisit the arctic silver lake, waterfall and sparkling spring forming the Shendoa River to the south. Finally they reach the icy cavern leading directly into the highest mountain. This time, they are prepared. Two noble patrician swordsmen instigate and bait the baerre out of the cave using salted caribou meat.
As a hulking beast rumbles from the cavern towards them, Lyla the huntress recognizes its charred paw. She and Q’yn subdue it with netting from just above the cave opening while it thrashes at them. Q’isann and his partisans quickly attack it from all sides with their swords, axes and lit torches, slaying the brute and avenging his elder brother.
The Guild of 7 (‘Fellowship of the Ring’ by Decoraxis; edited for context)
Approaching the mountain cave, a baerre pair from the same sloth clamber from within and assault the seven of them, smaller than the slain brute but still massive. The male swipes Q’isann with its claw and slashes him before the warriors bludgeon it to death. While Lyla tends to her injured husband, Q’yn and the avengers clash with the woolly ogres.
As they rush the encroaching creatures, the swordsmen are halted by a sudden sound. Behind them Q’yn’s harmonic inflection rings out and with a jingle, she melodically implores to the female baerre to retreat. As it hesitates, she orders the swordsmen to lay down their arms and they comply. The group makes way for the ogress to pass the direction they came, soon followed by three fuzzy offspring they had been protecting within the cave.
Rushing to Q’isann’s aid, they see that he has been critically injured. Although Lyla pleads to return her husband to Wescenda for medical care, it is a long journey home that he cannot withstand. Despite his severe gut wound, the noble hunter insists that for as long as he lives he will carry on his Arch’s wishes and command. Downtrodden by Q’isann’s demise, the champions are also impressed that Q’yn can sing as a soloist. Additionally as she matured in the wilderness during adolescence, the hunters’ daughter is learning to influence the creatures she encounters. They ask her how she is able to do so, however she and her mother do not speak of it.
Finally able to breach Nether Mount unabated the guild ventures inside and down a dim walkway lit by their torches, with Lyla and Q’yn assisting Q’isann to walk. Continuing on, the corridor opens up into a massive natural cathedral fifty meters high and several times that wide and long. To their amazement the splendorous domed hall contains lush trees, vegetable gardens, and steamy waterpools. Dwelling within are an ebony bird, a tanager and falcons above; a wolfling and baerre cub scrapping freely; and a plethora of peculiar creatures resembling a bouscat hare, terrapin, racoon, antelop, zebra, kangera, penguin, tegu lizard, lynxes and nocturnal omnivores they cannot describe.
As the western warriors pass into the mountain hall apprehensively, their reactions resemble the butterflies around them. The feathered birds and furry beasts watch them intently, but are complacent and non-aggressive. From a raised platform above them, an acute voice rings out above them. Peering up at the dais, the group immediately recognizes the orator. It is Dilian in the flesh – not the conjuring impostor who dueled and captured Aedan – but the true Dilian, rightful Arch of E’scend.
“Welcome,” he nasally intones, his ivory hair and complexion resembling the snowy mountains. “I have been awaiting you.”
While Dilian makes their acquaintances Lyla interrupts him with a shout, as her husband has been maimed and is near death. Calling out to two others who join him on the dais, Dilian points them to pale Q’isann. As they provide sparkling water to drink from the Shendoa Spring, aloe plant leaves for his wound and an effluvious flower none of which they had ever seen, his injuries are slowly cured by his empathic assistants.
Directing him to mend in a warm whirlpool, Dilian offers the others to savor the plentiful surroundings. While offering them dinner served on a wooden table, the guild beseeches their host to explain himself. As he pauses to collect his thoughts, Dilian divulges his logic for disregarding his tribe and seeking solace in this zoo-like winter wonderland. As he treats the guild to their finest meal since leaving home, they are seated to dine in the hall named Wynterlyn and hear Dilian’s tale in poetic verse.
The Great Hall of Wynterlyn
In rooted cellars beneath a giant tree, the captive Aedan has lost himself in the passage of time having not seen the sun, the sky or the outside world for years. During the first year, the chameleon had tormented his mind, body and loins before shedding its skin and vanishing. Applying shades of blush and padded by layers of garments, the conjurer had altered its appearance to suit its sinister plans. However for the past year or perhaps two the dominatrix has not reappeared to him, and he has been in solitary confinement.
Broken, gaunt and sleeping for days on end, for a time he dreamt of his wife Ivera, daughter Juna, and sons Kaedan and Paedan as he desperately wished to reunite with them. With no knowledge of whether they are alive or dead, memories of Aedan’s family have faded as they no longer visit his infrequent dreams. Deeply regretting his forced estrangement from his spouse, he cries Ivera’s name until he is no longer able to. Enduring eternal seclusion, in time he forgets his own name. When he awakens he occasionally finds fresh water and apples, left for him by an unseen benefactor.
After three-and-a-half years in the Archess’ cell a radiant, beauteous belle materializes during the winter solstice and is now held prisoner with him. As she calls Aedan by name, he stands to face his cellmate and recognizes her as his first lover during their tribe’s voyage to Crescendo. Appearing seraphic before him in ivory robes and long ebony hair, she beckons Aedan by name. Embracing beneath the trees under an arcane cold moon, the sweethearts are experiencing their first kiss whilst swiftly transported through time thirty years past to the starlit deck of The Minuet…
As the stern-mounted ruddered boat carried the tribe’s remnant band of sixty over the sea through a myriad of lunar and solar cycles, young Aedan and his rosette were engaged in their own primordial pursuit growing into adulthood. Endlessly tailing and pining after the other around the deck, they soundlessly hand-signaled each other when their mothers affably detached the two. After adolescence the incendiary dynamic dyad discovered each other under the stars in a furtive danse de l’amour on the ship’s bow, worming for warmth under a brisk spring moon while their elders slept below.
Back within the Archess’s lair Aedan and his rosette are locked in embrace for days in their first Minuet sonata moondance, discovering l’amour together nearly three decades past. Appearing spritely to him as she once did, his ravenous paramour confesses that she has loved him all her life and nibbles his ear. Whispering to Aedan she reveals that the dyad of the two had been eternally pre-destined, and that they were always meant to be together. Starstruck and delusional, Aedan pledges to mate with her while slowly pronouncing her name.
“Lily.”
Chinesische Dschunke by Michael Rosskothen (AS#702210331 purchased & used with permission)
CHAPTER SEVEN ~ The Flashback
Musical accompaniment for context
Ambient Instrumental Score: “Tabula Rasa” ~ Part 5 of 7
“Crescendo Chapters 5 & 6 Score ~ v1” (03:40)
Containing segments of ” Tabula Rasa”
Part V : Holocene
“Tabula Rasa” ~ A musical representation of the past, present and future of life on planet Earth
Composed & recorded 2010 by William Kurzenberger; Released on the album Solitary Road © 2010
Created and written by Bill Kurzenberger, December 2025 ~ All Rights Reserved