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ladyhoneydee · 5 months

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30 Day Song(fic) Challenge: Day 22

Hi folks! I took a break yesterday, since I wasn't feeling it, but I'm back today! This Song(fic) Challenge prompt was "A song that describes how you're feeling right now", and because I had just finished a lovely yoga session that left me feeling particularly calm, floaty, and spiritual, I chose the choral piece "Flight Song", by composer Kim Andre Arnesen. This is one of my favorite pieces I've ever sung for choir, and I do hope you choose to listen to it!

At Break of Dawn

Game: Tears of the Kingdom

Pairing: Amali/Kass

Word Count: 2106

Keywords: rito worldbuilding, grief/mourning, angst with a happy ending

Amali had always found herself drawn to the bow and the breeze. Her blood quickened and sparked hot when given the opportunity to prove herself or provide for others. She loved music best when it flowed in the wind on her back, propelling her to further heights. What a blessing, then, that she had found her match in Kass, whose life could not have been more deeply entwined with song and story if he’d been born with sheet music in beak and accordion in hand. And what a curse, that somehow his music stole him further from the roost than the most far-ranging of her hunts ever did.

Read the fic on Ao3, or under the cut!

Nights always fell quickly over Medlir. Known as “Rito Village” to those who couldn’t say its name properly or didn’t know any better, the little village’s location as the northernmost settlement in Hyrule meant sunsets cast the stone in ochre and amber sooner, and dawns finger-painted rose on the eastern horizon later, than in the majority of Hyrule. When winter began to sink its talons into the nests of Medlir’s denizens, the rito people saw daylight for only seven hours of the day.

It only made them appreciate the dawn further.

For the rito, night was danger. Night meant darkness thick in the air, made more intense by their people’s terrible night vision. It meant increased activity by large land predators, like the maurado wolves to the south and cold-footed wolves to the north, which with a concerted pack effort could down a lone, grounded rito on a hunting trip. It meant the worry of parents whose chicks had not yet learned to fear the dark, and might wander from the nest to seek a midnight snack, and find instead the yawning cliffside over Lake Totori. It meant the shivering ache of memories of those lost and never again found.

But yet, the dawn. The time of day when the warbles of songbirds would begin to echo around the nests. When the stillness of night began to break, from the softest, earliest breezes of morning. When the people of Medlir would wake, rise, and begin to sing.

More than the salmon they caught, the wheat they farmed, the waters of their lake below, or perhaps even the wind beneath their wings, music was the lifeblood of the rito. It mattered not if they couldn’t hold a tune; they could tap a toe, play an instrument, or sing regardless of melodic clarity. Even the lack of verbal speech, whether by loss, choice, or any other reason, could be overcome with gesture: hands and wings could shape the calling of a voice just as beautifully as any reverberation of vocal cord through beak.

Their people were fierce. Compassionate. Determined. These were people who admired their warriors for the swiftness and sharpness of their arrows and flight feathers, and their musicians for their unshaking bravery in answering the very condition of life, even if their voices were to break. Life and death. One could not survive without the violence of the hunt, nor without the healing of the song.

What a blessing, then, that she had found her match in Kass, whose life could not have been more deeply entwined with song and story if he’d been born with sheet music in beak and accordion in hand.

And what a curse, that somehow his music stole him further from the roost than the most far-ranging of her hunts ever did.

The first trip had been a foregone conclusion. She had known of his apprenticeship to the sheikah bard long before her heart ever sought his. His absence had been an ache in her heart like a pine beetle boring through a Tabanthan evergreen, but she sunk her roots in deep, held tight to her chicks, and weathered it. The second, however, when the blizzards lashed their people to their homes more tightly than any rope, and only children’s stories seemed to hold any hope for their survival…Amali had never experienced a darker, longer night.

He was only supposed to be gone for a few weeks. A moon, perhaps, he’d assured her, in their nest in the dark of night, surrounded by their sleeping children. Just a jaunt to the mountains on the other side of the Hyrulean border, where legends sung of thriving offshoots of their own rito people. He would only stay long enough to ascertain if any there knew of how to repair his beloved accordion, which had gone silent not three years after the defeat of Calamity Ganon and refused to sing again, no matter how he tinkered.

Amali could not deny him his voice, not when he had never begrudged her her flight. She saw him off on a fir-scented morning in late autumn, beneath the shining sun.

She should’ve known better. The wind that had fluttered his turquoise feathers so handsomely unsheathed teeth of ice and snow and bitter cold that very night, and winter froze Medlir solid.

Those endless nights of uncertain fear. Those meager days of desperate hope. The sight of her children losing the weight they needed to be able to fly properly as they ran the village the adults forsook for the sake of survival. The deepening of the hollows around their eyes with each snowbank. The ravenous beast of hunger carving out slices of her own stomach to feed itself. The uncontrollable trembling of her wings with every flight to find supplies, even when the gales quieted.

Lake Totori rang with funeral elegies to their ever-approaching end, mourning doves crying to the heartless wind.

It was Link who brought the thaw. Of course it was. If the ritos’ suffering was acute, his was eternal. Amali had never felt such a tangled thicket of shame and gratitude before in her life, seeing the snowquill-clad adventurer descend from the heavens alongside Tulin—a mere child, where was the dignity of the world, of its goddesses?—and knowing that they would finally be free.

And yet Kass did not return.

The sun emerged from behind the perpetual storm clouds. The snow that choked the village began to recede.

Kass did not return.

The lake rose high with the meltwater of winter’s burden. Traditional spring fishing grounds were lost to the flood and rebuilt higher on the banks.

Kass did not return.

Kheel, Genli, and Cree took their belated flights of passage to the top of the spire that once housed Vah Medoh. Notts and Kotts complained endlessly about not being able to try themselves, even though their landmark age of twelve only lay a few moons abreast.

Kass did not return.

Summer saw the hills of Tabantha explode with green; growth nurtured by the uncommon amount of moisture in the soil. The wildberries had such a bumper crop that their people nearly ran out of ways to preserve and prepare them—a shock to the system after such recent scarcity.

Kass did not return.

Wheat gilded beneath the autumn sun. Cool breezes whispering of cooler days and colder mornings wandered back over Medlir, and an avalanche of anxiety—that it wasn’t over, that the horror would return to finish them off—crashed over the village.

Kass did not return.

The music of Medlir diversified once again. The chorus had swelled to include songs of growth, of pride, of dreams, of heartbreak, of strength, of first flights and first falls. Of the infinite palette of life and death. And yet, to Amali’s ear, it missed its most mellifluous of voices.

Trusting in her children’s ability to take care of one another, she took longer and longer flights, spiraling further afield from Medlir in the hopes of coming across her partner. She fought against innate claustrophobia to search in every cave and crevice. She spoke to every traveler that crossed her path, in hopes that just one had seen a rito with feathers of turquoise and a heart of gold.

Her search was more fruitless than the end-of-autumn apple trees. Fear that she would happen upon him too late, that the next crag or cavern would hold nothing the rumpled, decaying corpse of the man she loved spread along her resolve like chest-rotting mold. The flight path grew shorter and closer to home once again, until one day, it stopped completely.

Medlir heard her cries, and sang for her. They sat with her on nights when the silence pounded at her eardrums with deafening force. They held her with wings that pulsed with that same fierce compassion their people had always had, would always have, no matter the tribulations they faced and apocalypses they survived.

Dawn came every day, even the ones where the sky was clouded, or storming, or throwing down bolts of lightning as if from the goddesses’ displeasure. It was constant, if only she chose to seek it out, instead of hiding her head beneath her wing in the blackness.

So Amali flew into the dawn.

She was on a hunt on the morning that it happened. Cree, Kheel, Genli, Notts, and Kotts were all home, safely supervised by Teba and Saki, although they’d all argued that they were so independent and mature, come on, Mom! She had promised them a venison dinner for the eve of Notts and Kotts’ flight of passage, a mere two days away. No deer had offered itself to her on the first day, and so she had bedded down in the small grove of trees northeast of Talonto Peak, content to wait for a creature that would.

When dawn broke, she flew to the summit of Talonto Peak to watch the sunrise paint the eastern sky in rose and gold. The world below was charcoal stone and ivory snow, an expanse of chiaroscuro worthy of a thousand songs. It seemed to be holding its breath.

At first, she thought she had imagined it. The flash of turquoise, slowly making its way up the ridges to the north, visible only where the elevation was lower than her own. It wasn’t moving quickly by any means; nor was it particularly subtle. And yet it hid just well enough to make her second-guess her archer’s eye.

The sound, however, was unmistakable.

She had never heard the wooden flute before, never would have associated it with Kass. But the music—it was his. His exploratory melodies. His clipped staccato notes and embellishing trills, so obvious as to be overexaggerated compared to the rest of the piece. His clear tone that prided itself on a blemishless sound and a perfect pitch. It was the music that had haunted her dreams for a year.

She felt as fragile as a shard of ice, and as sharp. If the air merely resonated wrong, she might shatter.

When he finally emerged on the peak before her, her eyes were so blurry with tears that she couldn’t make out a single detail of his face. It didn’t matter. She would know him by the sound of his breath.

“Where is your accordion?” she asked.

Kass paused for a moment. “Gone,” he finally answered, and she nearly collapsed at the sound of his voice at long last. “The rito of Lomen were able to repair it just as I hoped. But I had to burn it when the blizzard downed me in the canyon. It was the only way to survive.” He held up the small wooden flute she’d heard piping. “I carved this out of the last remaining peg.”

“Oh, my darling, I’m sorry.” And she was. The accordion had been Kass’s child before they’d ever discussed hatchlings of their own. Her own pain at its hand in everything that had transpired could exist separately to her acknowledgement of his.

“No, Amali, I’m sorry.” Kass’s voice, that smooth baritone she had always adored, broke under the weight of an agony that matched her own. “I never want to leave you, and yet I always seem to do just that. I am…so…deeply sorry that I abandoned you, more than I can ever put to words. I would understand if…if you wished to move ahead without me.”

“Why would I ever do that when we both fought so hard to return to one another?” Her voice was sharper than any arrow in her hunting quiver. “Your daughters are waiting for you. I’ve been waiting for you. Don’t make us do it again.”

The tears finally blinked free from her eyes, and she stared at him in wonderment. His left wing hung awkwardly in a way that told her it had broken and never set correctly. His lovely curved beak was bent sideways and had a divot in it that hadn’t been present last fall. He was as painfully thin as their fledgelings had been in the thickest depths of winter.

She had never seen anything so beautiful.

“You’re alive,” she sobbed, and flung herself across the snow that separated them.

“Alive to love you,” he replied, and warm wings embraced her.

The mountains rang with their song, as the first snow began to fall.

#loz #tears of the kingdom #totk #kass #amali #kass totk #my fanfiction #30 day song(fic) challenge

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