"If it lives, we can slay it. And then burn it, just to make sure it doesn't come back from the dead," she said.
"...does that happen often?" he asked.
"Slaying? Yeah, duh? It's what we're here to do in the first place, dummy."
"I meant the coming...
Aisa had a song inside her. It didn't dwell in her head, where melodies and words dance as quiet thoughts. It bubbled up from somewhere deep within, deeper than her heart, where passions burn or melancholies drift. It was in her soul, filling her very being with its cadences. It was becoming her.
Or perhaps, she was becoming the song.
She didn't know, and right now, in front of an audience of hundreds, she didn't want to think about it. She sang the song, her voice ringing through its endless verses before a sea of awed eyes and hands raised in beatific praise. But she knew the souls listening to her song weren't worshipping her. Their bliss belonged to the song, and the song didn't belong to her.
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The song was the forest's. From somewhere within its deep, dark depths, the forest had sent its melodic tendrils out, and Aisa had been the one they'd caught.
And so, she now sang, giving voice to the forest's secrets, sharing them with any who would hear them, so that their hearts might rejoice in its beauty, so that their souls might, too, harbor its song.
And many had listened. The first were those in her village. Many of them left, then, to elsewhere, where they spread word of the forest's song and the one who sang it. More came to listen to her, and she'd sung to them every evening, at the end of the day's toil, when weary feet trudged from fields and ploughs, shovels, axes, and picks were put away.
But the forest's song had grown stronger, and those who wanted to listen to it had become so many her village's square could no longer hold them all.
So she'd called them all to the forest, where they could sit amidst boughs of cool greenness, lounge beneath mossy overhangs, and rest against ancient bark as they listened to her.
There, she'd climbed atop the massive stump of what was once an ancient tree, and she'd begun to sing. With every passing note, she'd felt the song filling her soul even more fully. Within the forest, so close to its birthplace, she'd never been so grasped by its melodies before.
And it was the same for her audience. It was almost as if she could see them being filled by the song, too, by its crescendos of joy and valleys of dark delights, by its whisperings of feelings ancient and unknown, that called for dance and revel.
And her listeners did. Some threw their hands up, man and woman, young and old, and gyrated their bodies to the rhythms falling from her lips. Others sang along.
But one didn't.
Her song nearly faltered in her throat as her gaze fell over him, a large man amidst the crowd, towering over those around him. He wore a ragged traveling robe of somber blue, and one of its sleeves had been torn off, revealing an upper arm swollen with muscle and lined with old scars. Beneath an unkempt mess of black hair, a surprisingly youthful face sat upon his thick, muscular neck, and it wore an open, appreciative smile and dark, delighted eyes.
