Nucifera - the first spinner

Nucifera’s song opens with a disclaimer,   "For those who listen, you might believe me mad, but I swear it, these songs are real, and so is the magic that weaves through them. For everyone who listens, I hope that you’re inspired to think about the way you’re tangled into the lives of everyone around you, and how your smallest acts of kindness and compassion can shift the course of a person’s life."  

And for one special listener, for the farm girl Empress, this song is the weaving I leave to you.

  The singer is the daughter of a shepherd, she grew up wandering the wild areas with her mother, collecting the plants used to dye the wool they spun. These days, she tells listeners, are treasures. She sings of her mother, and the joy her mother had in teaching her craft to her children. She speaks of her father and his pride in providing for not just his family but the families around him. It is from them, she says, that she learned to see how one person's actions could tug at the fate of others.   As she came of age, she began to see magic woven between people. Loose and disorganized fibres in a jumble of happenstance, waiting for a spinner or a weaver to make something of them.   And then, one day, things came together all at once. Her father brought her to a village meeting where an important issue was being debated. Looking back, she can't recall what the issue was, only that when one of the elders began to speak out stridently, she felt a sense of impending dread. He was wrong, but he wouldn't listen to the men shouting against him. She felt desperate, the jumbled threads around her quivered at the edges of her vision. She saw bright threads gathering around an old woman that she didn't know but felt could surely make things right. So Nucifera spoke, jumping out of her sear and interrupting the elder. It shocked everyone and when they asked what she had to say, she could only respond with "nothing, but I think this honored elder has words that should be heard." The old woman was surprised: "I had thought to hold my tongue - I am old and would have few years to live with the consequences of my words of I'm wrong. I thought younger voices should be heard, but since you've asked…"   It changed things. It really changed things. The old woman wasn't wrong. She sings of the wonder she felt at magic that helped her make a difference. Here, she says, she made her own decision to change her life. To learn to use this magic she felt she should go to places where decisions were made, to have a chance to see things shift.   She went to the city, following the magic until it led her to a job as a maid to a lord. For a few years, she watched, until she saw magic swirling around one of the lord’s guests - a magistrate. She saw her future there but it was so very far away… Her path was long. She asked her lord how she could become a magistrate and stumbled at the first step - she could neither read nor write. Here, she did something that she questioned for many years. She leaves it to the listener to judge her in the end but only once her song has finished. She used her magic to encourage her lord to let her learn. For two years she traded work for lessons and meagre living expenses. Whenever the lord began to doubt her, every time she struggled, she tugged on her magic so the lord wouldn't give up on her.   Two years later, she followed her magic again, this time taking a job as a scribe to the magistrate she'd met by chance years ago. For a century she worked, as scribe, as councillor, as advocate and finally, a hundred years after leaving home, she became a travelling magistrate - spending a few weeks at a time in outlying villages, mediating disputes and pronouncing justice.   Here too, she faced a challenge. "We wish," she says, "for the morally right or legally just thing to be the thing that produces the best results. But the world isn't like that when you can see the larger tapestry." A murderer stood before her, his guilt or innocence unclear to the court. To her eyes, however, his next victim was already clear - a soldier whose negligence would doom a village. She could let the man go free and the village would be saved. She could convict the man and doom the village. She asked herself: what should a magistrate do? And then she asked herself: what should I do? Her decision made it clear, she could no longer be a magistrate. She did her final duty as a magistrate - she pronounced the murderer guilty. Then she did her first duty as something else - she killed the soldier herself.   The murderer convicted, the soldier dead and the village saved… and her hands stained in the process.  

Dear listener, did I do the right thing?

  She leaves the question as though she knows the answer. From there, she fled to Avan'Nal, to ask the Dragons about magic and to see if she had fate with them. First Avan'Nal, then Deepest Refractions, then the Grove of Endless Sky and the City at Rivers' End. She wandered as an observer, mediator, truth seer and advisor. She returned home two centuries after she left - now a diplomat and ambassador.   Underneath it all, however, a part of herself she hid. Who would believe, she asks, that the renowned Silver Speaker was also Shimmer - an Overseer in an Osyr Underworld?   Here her song changes, the verses sharper as her accent takes on slow rolling vowels recognizable in both Kaide and Kadia's speech. She sings of gambling dens, damp dark rooms that smelled of ocean brine and cheap sugary liquor.   Fate, she says, taught her to gamble. Gambling taught her even more and opened the door to a darker world. Here again, she spent her time learning things she felt she'd need - to slip between shadows like a whisper of a breeze, to defeat locks with thin threads of magic and to erase the traces of her presence, cloaking herself in a shimmering veil of magic.   Here you see, she tells the listener, she learned that elvish survival would depend on Osyr strength, that a union of the two was as inevitable as the tide.  

Was I right, dear listener?

  But Fate, she said, is never kind. For elves to survive as themselves, they'd have to leave the Fae behind. Already, fate had placed many of the best of elven kind in the claws of Dragons. It was a fate she couldn't stop with the strongest threads in Avan'Nal competing to twine themselves around dragon hearts.   Only the Osyr would stand with Elves against the Burning Mountain Gods who destroyed our ancestral home. To join them will mean leaving our songs behind but one day, we'll return to them. One day, we'll fly again.   The song stone flickers for a moment, then continues.   This verse is for your ears alone. If this song stone has survived then my treachery has gone undiscovered.   I cannot sing the songs I have stolen. Twelve from Avan'Nal, Eight from Drifting Songs, and Five from Ur'Na'Low. These songs are both among the oldest, and the rarest of those we've managed to preserve. They tell tales of Treeborn, of the Burning Ones, of the Desecrators and the lands beyond the mountains.   By the time you hear this song, the crypt I've hidden them in will long be empty. If my hand has reached far enough, they'll have found their way to a different sort of weaver. You'll need a weaver of your own to retrieve them - I'm going to wait for him in the place between dreams. Tell him - he mustn't search for me until the claws of madness claim the one who unravels. Then, madness will point the way.   Perhaps we'll speak one day. I hope to hear your song.