http://www.myth-weavers.com/sheet.html#id=1032311
Uses the Weird Musician and Rubato archetypes.
-o-
You don't want to hear about me. I'm not very interesting. I can do interesting things and say interesting things, but listening to me talk about me isn't very interesting. The interesting person you want to hear about is my mother.
You may know here. Well, not personally. But you might know her name. Amelia Grace, the Lady Scarlet, singer, mage, musician, magician, muse-gician. One of the most sought after performers in… in… I'm not sure. I don't do well with names and places. Some big, important… thingy.
Maybe the city. Maybe an empire. It's hard to remember, as I was very small at the time, so I would be unlikely to fully recall even if I hadn't had my head cut apart and put back together two or three or twenty five times.
It's very tingly. Kind of refreshing to feel the fresh air blowing over your thoughts.
Mother was not one to cling to fame and fortune with every fiber of her being like some people would. Her life was music and her life was magic, and sometimes when she had time her life was me.
She was always looking into new things, and old things, and old things that were so old that they had been forgotten about and thus had become new again. And one of these things was what would come to be called the Song of Life.
Said to be sung by the very gods themselves when they brought the world into being, through manipulation of the song one could change the growth of crops, affect the breeding of animals, make creatures grow faster, make them stronger, make them faster, make them tougher, make them different.
Make them never die.
Mother traced the echoes of the song, heard them in her dreams. Followed them to a temple in the middle of wilderness, buried beneath sand and soil of the centuries in a place where even the oldest writings say nothing about anyone ever having lived there.
And deep down in the dark, in that unspeakably ancient temple to an unspeakable being of unspeakable power who was unspeakably ancient when the gods were born, she drilled a teeny, tiny hole in reality and for a few brief moments heard something singing the Song itself. Not merely an echo.
She made the hole go away and fled the temple, never to return. Knowing to what extent the Song could be put to use.
But people were listening. Always listening. Trying to understand the echoes of the Song of Life.
So when they heard a few moments of actual singing they took advantage.
Just a little school of magic and music out in the countryside. Not particularly important. Not until they found that could keep things alive, keep them healthy, keep them from dying from old age indefinitely.
Learn how to Sing, learn the notes, the chords, the tones, the tempos to the Song of Life. Sing the right words in the right ways in the right keys and live forever. Sing it loud enough, sing it long enough, and no part of you dies.
There's a term for that. When bits of you that are supposed to die don't, when they keep on living when they shouldn't. It's called cancer. It is not a fun way to die. It is an even less way to remain alive.
And they couldn't stop. They had bettered themselves such that their bodies always sang the songs, forever to life, never to die.
And soon the song spread beyond them. Their mere presence making things grow, making things live, making things never die.
Illnesses are alive. Diseases are alive. Plagues are alive. The places in the world that are crammed to the brim with life, the grand cities, the fertile rainforests, they are places where contagions thrive.
Those who sought to never die screamed and wailed in their agonies as their bodies were consumed by virulent sickness. Healing, infecting, rotting, and healing again in an endless cycle of consumption.
Not even the slightest bit of them was allowed to die, not even one hair made to fall away from their heads. They grew, bloated, warped, twisted, becoming less beings and more locations, livings rooms, buildings, factories of flesh and bone, belching forth abominations.
It was to this landscape of carnal horror that Mother returned to. And she purged it with fire. Purged it until the valley was glass.
Father was having troubles with the… king? Emperor? Duke? Count? Well, the thing pretending to be him. Some creature was wearing the old king's skin and hiding inside it. Father stayed behind, while Mother took me and we went away.
Away to a pretty little valley filled with simple farmers, remote wilderness, and narrow, easily watched canyons on either side as the sole entrance where she could place guardian beasts just in case the agents of the Skinmask King came calling.
And then one day they did. Once again in search of the Song of Life and its power. Wanting to make perfect soldiers. Immortal soldiers. Undying soldiers.
The King sent his blackest of knights, who slew my mother's dragon, came to the town, burned the town when Mother would not give them what they wanted.
And then Mother did.
Mother sang the Song of Life for them, and then the misty valley was no more.
It was no longer part of the world.
It was where She dwells. Not the composer of the song, but the singer. It's loudest, longest singer who has grown a world's chorus worth of voices in the eternities she has spent, cast between worlds. She was not supposed to live, but she could not die. So she simply was.
In an eternal emptiness there is infinite room to grow, where years are like seconds and seconds are like years.
She gave them what they wanted.
And they killed her for it.
Mother fought them, of course. And they died. And Mother died.
But She brought them back. To watch them. To study them. To experiment with them. Everyone, everything, animal, vegetable, and mineral in that valley.
She cut us apart, put us back together, saw how we worked with other parts. She was curious, wanting to learn. She didn't get new things to experiment on very often, and certainly not in such large numbers.
She found Mother the most interesting, and the most malleable. Mother was already filled with Her song, after all, and She could manipulate her almost as well as She could warp and twist Herself.
She could cut cut cut away the bad parts, keep us normal, make sure that we remained fully functional and intact even as she hacked us to pieces and put us back together.
After a few seconds and a few decades Mother had a moment of lucid clarity where her mind was her own and not merely an extension of She Who Thrives Between. Her body, however, was another story. She lifted me up, drilled a bigger hole in reality, and pushed me through, closing it upon the part of herself that was carrying me.
I left yesterday a little girl, and came back this morning as a grown… mmm, with all the changes, all the bestial alterations, would I still be classified as a woman, do you think? Perhaps if I had a few more scales and a bit more snout I would be called a grown dragoness.
I don't have my mother's gift for magic. I cannot cast spells, summon beasts, and bind creatures to my will as she did. And for this I am thankful, as it means that I cannot truly sing the Song of Life that can cause such horrors upon the world. I don't know the words.
I think Mother cut the words out of my head when she was taking me apart and putting me back together, made to act as a puppet with Her hand inside.
I can make living things listen to me, I can change them. I can make them dance to my tune.
Music can only suggest a mood, it takes words to state the way that something truly is.
I can't do that. I don't want to do that. I won't do that.
I will use the tune, but I'll be using my own lyrics, thank you very much.
Have you ever realized that you'd be really, really cute with a tail, by the way?
Here, let me show you...
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