Dear Bedivere,
I have been thinking deeply about our recent conversation as of late. Your struggle with finding “your place” deeply resonated with me. It seems to me your position mirrors the current consensus of the Church of Aesa – that all living things are arranged in a series of hierarchical relationships. This view is supported by what we observe in nature: squirrels scavenge the fields for nuts and fruits, and hawks hunt them in turn. According to Cambrian academics, the squirrel is subordinate to the hawk as its prey, and it is blasphemous to suggest that a squirrel is capable of more than its predator; while the hawk must hunt a sentient prey, the squirrel merely scavenges its next meal. It follows that creatures higher in the chain have a greater disposition to shape their world, and the Cambrian view rounds out this understanding of animals and beasts to explain why humanity stands at the pinnacle of all races – if we were not superior to ordinary bears, why don’t bears crown kings for their kingdoms, organize labor, and amass territories?
I understand why this perspective might resonate with you, someone who is neither fully human nor beast. The rigid hierarchies provide a semblance of order in a world where you feel out of place. However, I disagree with Cambria’s approach. I concede that I have neither a background in theology nor science – but I do understand music and song. In my classical training at the Camelot School of Music, I was taught that creativity comes from the heart, and that all living things create. Trees create lovely melodies when their leaves rustle, and kittens hiss and wheeze when you reach for their bellies. The croaks of frogs sound different before and after a full meal of crickets and worms. All these sounds come from the heart of these beings, and all sounds have their place in our world. Every being makes sounds, and therefore, are capable of song. No song is more or less beautiful than the song of another.
Everyone makes songs.
Birds are the most prolific songwriters in nature. They sing to speak. They sing when they are in distress. They sing to find mates. This is reflected in how we think about birds; for example, we call a group of song sparrows a “choir” or rocs a “band.” We refer to groups of our national bird as a “gospel.” Even in the halls of the Church of Aesa, our earliest depictions of birds feature visual motifs representing joyful songs in the wind.
The Cambrian understanding of birdsongs reduces it to something rooted in survival instinct. Singing is expensive, after all – time spent singing is time not spent gathering food, and time spent singing is time alerting predators to your location. Why should birds sing unless absolutely necessary? This implies that birdsong is not a creative act.
However, this view deeply disregards just how deeply rooted birds are in the cyclical and seasonal nature of our world. Roosters crow every morning; owls hoot every night. At evenings, pigeons gather in town squares, knowing the best time and place to beg passerby for food. In winter, I see geese migrating south; those same geese return north in the summer.
Nature presents its own proof in the form of the phoenix. Cambria has had the privilege of studying the incarnations of Arima, our own guardian phoenix, and has discovered that the physiology of the phoenix is adapted for its unique take on the cycle of life. Aside from all its usual avian features, each phoenix houses a sort of magma-stone in its gullet, and biologists believe this stone is the source of the phoenix’s mythical powers to breathe fire. Yet like all birds, the phoenix too sings. In life, the phoenix sings ferociously, wildly, and continuously. Every victory and hardship is recounted in a blazing concert; each experience is etched into their stone through song.
The only period when a phoenix is silent is at the moment of its death. The reincarnation process begins with the phoenix literally “burning out” by bathing itself in flame. As it does so, its body contracts around its stone at high pressure and temperature. What results is the old life becomes a diamond shell surrounding the stone, which becomes the next incarnation of the phoenix. In doing so, the phoenix passes the experiences of one cycle to its next through song.
If you listen carefully to the forest, you’ll hear the cycles in the birds’ songs. And in their rounds, you can hear specific motifs unique to each species of bird. Their songs are echoic: all about repeats and rebirth. For the birds, singing is a daily aspect of their lives through which they are part of a much larger cycle in the world.
The beasts do not believe that thinking and singing are different at all. In the predator-prey relationships of the forest, there is a specific order in which each beast belongs and behaves relative to one another. Do not mistake this with the Cambrian understanding of things, however. The beasts treat their relationships as a ballad that is respected by all the creatures in the wild; fish eat insects, bears eat fish. This rhythm is an unspoken agreement upheld by each creature in the forest.
These relationships are canonized by the sphinxes. As Prime Judge of the Cambrian Forests, Vertus enforces the natural laws of his territory. He ensures the forest remains in harmony through psalms; it could be said that Vertus (and his sphinxes) think in the form of song. It’s as if the melodies of the world have weaved itself into the way sphinxes think.
To understand how sphinxes sing, one must look at their unique physiology. Sphinxes possess a vocal apparatus comparable to that of humans. However, their vocal cords are structured in such a way that they are deeply connected to their cognitive processes. A sphinx does not separate its thoughts from speech and song; instead, its thoughts naturally manifest as musical expressions.
When Vertus speaks his riddles to trespassers and travelers in his territory, it is a test of their understanding of natural harmony. These riddles are woven into the very fabric of the forest’s music. Only those that understand the harmony of nature are able to discern his questions and respond appropriately; those who can match his melody and solve his riddles are granted safe passage, while those who cannot are hunted down. In this way, sphinxes demonstrate how beasts live their lives through song and maintain the balance of the forest.
Unlike the beasts, dragonkind has a complicated relationship with song. For a long time, they distrusted song making. Music stirs up emotions; with emotion, feeling; with feeling, empathy; with empathy, compassion; with compassion, peace. For a conquering race, this was deemed antithetical to the singular goal of dragonkind: complete dominion over Cambria.
Over a millennium ago, Kraal led his dragons in war against humankind and the beasts. While human accounts mythologize dragonkind’s triumphs, this downplays dragonkind’s superior physiology and strategic doctrine.
Besides their ability to fly and exhale fire, dragons possess longevity paired with high cognitive function. The average human lifespan back then was roughly 40 years old; most dragons mature into adulthood at 300 years and live as long as 2000 years. This meant that lessons dragonkind learned from their defeats were retained by their leadership far longer than their human contemporaries, whose young kings would inevitably repeat the mishaps of their fathers every quarter-century.
Dragonkind also employed military strategies that humankind would eventually adopt (and ban). Dragons’ imposing presence and fire breath were used to instill fear and panic among humans and beasts, shattering the morale of their enemies before battles even started. They also pillaged, took hostages, and killed non-combatants to disturb their enemies. Dragonkind were also masters of their environment, leveraging their intimate knowledge of Cambria’s terrain to secure victories at terrible odds. Most famous is the Fall of Ember Valley (present-day Varuck), where Kraal destroyed half of Cambria’s forces by activating a dormant volcano nearby by breathing flame into its core.
This unique attunement with the earth also enabled dragonkind to seamlessly communicate across Cambria. When a dragon thumps its tail against the ground, it creates seismic waves that propagate through the earth. Dragons have evolved both specialized tail structures that function like percussion instruments, capable of varying the pitch and intensity of the thump, and sensory adaptations in their lower bodies attuned to detecting minute vibrations in the ground. By repeatedly thumping their tail against the ground, a dragon creates ground-borne vibrations which transmit encoded messages through rhythmic patterns. This allowed dragonkind to relay information and coordinate battles with an ease that humankind has only recently replicated with telephones.
Ironically, this adaptation unique to dragonkind is what ultimately led them to end the war on their own. Dragons are a proud race, and as dragonkind kept winning and history went on, they started using the tail signals to recount their history. These signals became rhythms, rhythms became beats, and beats became the foundation for melodies. And as they created songs to recount their history, they gradually lost the will to continue the war and agreed to a permanent ceasefire. Their music became a means of preserving their stories and wisdom, and through this artistic expression, they found a new purpose.
Song making has a civilizing influence, and much to the relief of their neighbors, dragonkind civilized themselves through song.
Even slimekind make songs. Slimes are mysteriously adaptive creatures; for a long time, scholars at the Monastery were not sure if slimes could even be considered “living”. The behavior of slimes are so opaque that it’s difficult to apply concepts like “ego” and “intentionality” to them. However, two recent discoveries changed the way we think about them:
1) we have discovered they have a Slime King they worship, and
2) slimes engage in complex bartering networks in the forests of Cambria.
As slimes primarily subsist on water and decomposing matter, they end up accidentally collecting and preserving materials that are worthless to them but valuable to others. Because their own needs are so low, when solicited by other races, slimes generally exchange what they have for whatever the other party is offering with one caveat – the Slime King has forbidden trading away items they have received from prior trades.
What’s odd, however, is that despite their passive nature, slimekind is adept at understanding the innate “truth” of the items they are traded. Slimekind once traded Arima a fantastical feather they had collected from a slime that had wandered into Cambria from a faraway land (Azoth). Arima demanded the slimes trade the feather so it could be burned – Arima could not stand the thought that there could be another bird as beautiful as herself. In exchange, Arima traded an ordinary stick to the slimes under the pretense that this stick was infused with magic.
Slimekind also once traded Vertus medicinal herbs that their water slimes had ingested and preserved inside their bodies. Vertus offered the Slime King a mysterious relic he claimed was an ancient slime artifact, but was in actuality a portion of a stone pillar he had looted from the ruins of a pre-Cambrian era dragon temple.
When news that the sphinxes had desecrated a dragon temple reached Kraal, he sent several dragonlings to the Slime King to retrieve the pillar. Believing the slimes were clumsy creatures that would mishandle their historic artifact, the delegation was surprised to see that the pillar had been repurposed into a slime totem. This was guarded by the Slime King, wielding a verdant scepter infused with its subjects’ faith. Recognizing that slimekind revered and protected the leftovers of their temple more than dragonkind ever had, the delegates left without retrieving the pillar, feeling that everything was as it should be.
This feeling that the delegates felt lies at the heart of slime song making. Twice a year, slimes make a mission to the slime totem and worship the Slime King through song. Last summer, my herd accompanied a green slime on its pilgrimage and we were welcomed by the Slime King itself, who served us key slime pudding and guided us through its territory within the forest. When my party arrived at the slime totem, several flavors of slimes were already present and singing songs in harsh disharmony – when one slime became quiet in its song, another would become louder; when one slime became slower in its song, another would become faster. Slimekind understands the truth of what they are as anomalous discrepancies, and they fully embrace this aspect of themselves through song.
Bedivere, I imagine you feel tremendous distress regarding your place in our world. Being a hybrid must be very hard for you – too human to belong fully to the wilds, yet not human enough for Cambrians to fully embrace you. Yet you’ve internalized the Cambrian view of things – this must be exhausting. You have told me before that you feel you aren’t worthy to belong in Cambrian society, yet you insist that the only appropriate relationship a tamer can have with their herd is that of superior and subordinate. Your beasts are not your employees, Bedivere, and Cambria is not your master, either. Though I admire your sense of duty to be the vanguard of your herd, I think this diminishes all that I see in you.
Life is not a series of day-to-day performances. It’s a symphony, and as all things make songs, we all play our own roles in creating harmony. As a bard, I’ve come to understand that all things share equally in this larger composition of life. Every being has a place and purpose, not defined by its place on the food chain, but by the melodies of their heart. One day, when you’ve come to understand yourself better, I hope to hear your song.
As a fellow tamer, I recognize your accomplishments in defending Cambria’s forests. However, as your friend, I’d like to ask you this: rather than stand in front of your herd as its guardian, why not stand beside your beasts?
Yours truly,
Allen
Esperanto Writes is not officially affiliated with either Grand Archive TCG or its creators, Weebs of the Shore.
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