Song of the Star

Sorina shivered. This moonless night was her escape. She needed to get away, not from sweeping the hearth, feeding the fire, or caring for her brother, but because she needed to hear something. Sorina knew that there was a melody hiding somewhere, too shy to reveal itself to her in the broad daylight of an occupied consciousness.

Sorina was not the most talented musician in the village, but word had spread far and wide that her simple fiddle tunes carried more exquisite beauty than her stubby fingers had any right to play. And in turbulent times, she knew any humble aesthetic spark was the best she could hope for in the brief moment the cold universe would give her. Eventually, barbarians would attack, and it would all be over. She shivered again.

With each step she took towards a purer tune, the more she could notice her mind’s bustle blocking her from hearing the next. But tonight, Sorina could see the her best symphony darting at the edge of the void, beckoning her dazed psyche to follow. And so, in the demand for total silence, she had rushed to the darkened hillside. But with the breeze, the grass, the insects… it was still too much.

Suddenly, the crickets stopped chirping. She could hear herself begin to think, and leaned back in appreciation. In a moment, she heard a mellifluous orchestra dancing in the darkness, slowly gathering volume to the point where she could just begin to make out the notes. But the moment she turned upward to notice the night sky, it was over. Bright stars wrought an onslaught of intensity. A glaring violence rang down with each speck of light upon her innocent eyes.

Sorina lurched upward, jarred from potential reverie, cursing the shimmering night for robbing her of a moment alone. In horror, she now watched the twinkles above echoed across the Earth beneath her, as faint flickers approached from the horizon. Each little orange star began to birth others. The land became a burning mirror of the burning darkness above.

The invaders had arrived.

The next morning, upon waking, Sorina wandered into the smoking village square. Muscular men in fur coats loitered there, and eyed her suspiciously as she approached. The largest stood to greet her.

“We want to hear the music.”

Sorina paused. “I have nothing to play for you.”

Dissent had clearly not been considered as an option by the man in front of her, whose discombobulation granted Sorina a few merciful seconds to reconsider. She noticed her little brother, pleading with his eyes.

She capitulated. “I need a night to think.”

Demand for entertainment. Unspoken threat of death. But nevertheless, a willingness to compromise. Were the attackers only here to hear her play? Sorina could see something soften in the eyes of the barbarian. Her reputation had preceded her.

“We give you until midnight.”

“And what if I cannot find the song?”

“We burn everything.”

Darkness descended again. This evening seemed even more promising than the last. It was cloudy. Sorina sat on the ground, parchment beside her, ready to write what she heard. The sun had long faded behind the horizon, and now the insects of the night began to grow tired of their own incessant babble. Finally, silence. Finally, the symphony started to emerge from the recesses in her mind. But behind it, an atonal ringing began. It threatened to subsume the more delicate compositions approaching the front of her mind.

Sorina glanced upward. A single star pierced the muffling barrier of the clouds, the source of her discomfort. She could feel its tinnitic wail. Chaotic pounding. She could sense time passing, her brother growing old, sunset becoming midnight. And there in a distant reach of the universe that stubborn star would remain, boldly flauting its existence with a declaration against her small isolation. An eternal yell of light, launched across millions of miles with the force of a million explosions. This was song of all existence. The sparkling symphony that could never be silenced. Sorina scrambled for a pen.

At midnight, the town square simmered with anticipation. Even after dining and libations, a tension had befallen the invaders as their musical demands dallied in the dark. The townsfolk had gathered as well, in anxious consideration of the possibility that their fate depended on an artful performance.

Finally, an ugly girl emerged from the darkness with grass stains on her knees, and a fiddle tucked under her arm.

“This is my song,” she stated, simply. She stood in patient generosity, granting her audience a moment to coalesce and prepare for what they were about to hear.

It was loud, and raw. Sorina wrought the infinite beauty of chaos in a series of escalating percussive rasps. There was no order in the melody. That would have been an injustice. As she sang, she could feel it pulsate aryhthmically within her. She felt a dawning awareness of something looming. Life and death, and not just for her, but for all her listeners as well, and for all the insects and creatures of the night. Time was passing, and all there was, was the song.

The barbarians joined in the music, groaning beautifully with all the mustered strength of their shared lungs. Euphoria. The largest darted towards her. Only then did Sorina realize. Though their mouths were shouting along, their ears were covered. The pained townsfolk, though paralyzed in fear, also were failing to share in her rapture.

The conquerors did not want it. No one did. They could hear, but they did not listen. The stochastic arrangement of sound connected too purely with the universal truths they all feared too much to see. Their iconoclasm was a rapacious compulsion to blind themselves to the fundamental truth. Sorina saddened. Everyone had only wanted her as an accomplice in their unholy quest, expected in art a cheap attempt at contrived distraction. But Sorina sang the song of the sky, and continued singing as they carried her away.

She could hear it crackling all around her now. A fire beneath her, the barbarians’ faces lit only dimly as they nervously watched from a safe distance. In the blaze, the wood of her instrument warped elegantly with a whirlingly developing char. The heat sent wind whooshing up past her ears to the brightening sky, and she watched through the smoke as the clouds began to part. Twigs cracked, fiddlestrings snapped, feet sizzled. The chaotic chorale of life and death surrounded her. With a joyous shriek, she gave her last piercing notes to the great cacophonous song.