Silent Sonata

[Rugs]

Five days before present time

“Ah, Mr. Thull. Yes, we have your family’s reservation in the system. Welcome back.” The receptionist smiled warmly, flattering blue eyes and perfect white teeth. “We hope you enjoy your stay.”

“Thanks.” Cado took his room keys and motioned for his wife and three children to follow. The Sky Gardens resort was the finest on Teth, in his opinion — and he’d been to just about all of them. The lobby certainly did its best to impress, all polished marble and fine furniture, with sculptures from some of the Galaxy’s most renowned artists in alcoves lining the walls. The resort, perched atop a massive plateau that lurched above the clouds into Teth’s purple sky, was his vacation spot of choice these days. Now that he’d settled into an honest life.

“Daddy! When do we get to see the birds? I wanna see the birds!”

Cado smiled at Terau, his youngest daughter of five years old. “Shhh, we’ll see the birds as many times as you like, dear.” He scooped her off the ground, shifting the bag on his shoulder. “But first we’ve gotta get all of our stuff to our room, OK?”

Terau seemed to find this agreeable and nodded, arms folded seriously as Cado carried her.

“Wonder what that’s about?” Miria, Cado’s wife, had stopped to look at a local news feed. Some Echani reporter in the capital city was talking about something. The projector’s volume was muted, but the text on the screen said something about a strange hyperspace disturbance.

Cado shrugged. “Who knows,” he said. A green Twi’lek bellhop approached with their luggage as they neared a turbolift. “But we didn’t come here to worry about any of that, eh?”

---

three hours later...

“So overall, revenues for the quarter are up, but the slowdown that started last year hasn’t stopped,” Iraz Crazell stood, pointer in hand, lips pressed into a thin line as she addressed the Dream Escape, Inc. executive board. The CEO sat at the head of a heavy wooden table — on the far side from her — with his fingers steepled and a grim look on his face. Inner Teth, the capital city, sprawled out below their skyscraper, visible through a tinted window behind her. 

The Kiffar woman had never seen so many people look so dour at what was ostensibly good news. Continued growth, record profits from the company’s four dozen resorts scattered across Teth’s surface. The writing was on the wall, though. Something had to change, or this wouldn’t hold.

“Where’s the pressure coming from,” the CEO asked. “What’s slowing us down?”

Iraz inhaled briefly. “Competition, sir. Most of all from Atlas and Frontier Resorts-”

Hurried knocking at the boardroom door cut Iraz off. A few of the executives glanced at the door. The CEO motioned for Iraz to continue.

“The Sky Gardens has also been particularly aggressive lately and it-”

The knocking at the door again. “Sorry!” A muffled voice yelled from the other side. “It’s urgent!” Iraz looked down, smoothing her business coat as the CEO pushed a button on his desk. The door opened to reveal a young Human. One of the interns, fresh out of school, if Iraz recalled right.

Is it really that important if an intern is delivering the news? she wondered.

“Sirs, I’m sorry to interrupt,” the boy said. “But Ms. Teryn told me you might want to look at the news. It’s... it’s not looking good.”

Iraz could feel all the eye-rolling as the executives looked at the intern. She felt bad for the kid. It had to be hard, knowing you’d be out of a job by the end of the day.

“Turn the damn projector on,” the CEO said. “This better be fucking important, or so help me...”

“Security forces are scrambling to figure out where the mysterious vessel that’s appeared in orbit came from, or even what it is,” an Echani reporter was saying. “So far, neither the main vessel nor ones accompanying it have responded to any attempts at contact.”

The feed cut to some hazy footage as the reporter spoke. A giant ship — crystaline and far larger than any Iraz had ever seen — was in the sky, with five ships that looked as big as battlecruisers flanking it and a mishmash of smaller ships that looked like ants by comparison.

Stunned whispers rippled through the boardroom.

“This is the only footage we have so far,” the reporter said. “Officials are preparing to defend Teth if the ships do not res-”

The feed abruptly cut out as sirens blared through Inner Teth. Iraz hurried over to the window just in time to see something massive crash through a skyscraper a few blocks away from theirs, shattering its middle and sending the whole thing crashing to the ground The ground shook. Their building shook.

Chaos erupted.

---

“What is that thing?” Cado craned his neck, hand shielding his eyes against the afternoon sun. Some giant thing was in the sky, blazing like a second sun. It was all the news was talking about.

“Beats me.” Another resort guest was standing near him, looking at the same thing. Cado had sent his family inside to safety. “Is something coming toward us?”

“I don’t see it,” Cado said, squinting.

“It’s moving, see,” the other guest pointed at something, glittering purple in the sunlight, that was streaking through the sky.

“It is.” Cado’s stomach dropped. “Get down!”

The thing slammed into the resort with a loud crash. Cado dove to the ground as debris flew through the air. He heard screams, but no explosion.

He looked up to see a giant purple crystal lodged into the resort’s main building. People were screaming, running. Smoke poured from a ruptured gas line.

“What is that?” the other guest wondered.

Miria. Cado sprinted toward the resort.

[Rugs]

Three days before present time

The fires never stopped burning.

Iraz sat in her home, at the edge of Inner Teth. Things were quieter here, for whatever small comfort that offered. She hadn’t ventured back into the heart of the city since the attack started. She lacked the strength, even if she wanted to.

She coughed, feeling phlegm loosen in her throat. It seemed a strange coincidence, to fall so suddenly ill as the assault unfolded. If the news reports were to be believed, she wasn’t the only one. She looked at the projector in the corner of her room. Some human man had taken over live reporting duties. The Echani was killed in the initial attack.

The hologram was grainy at best, its audio scratchy and filled with static as the news network struggled against the jamming that’d choked communication across the planet. Iraz didn’t care, really. After some of the things she’d heard, she didn’t want to know what was going on elsewhere.

People dropping dead by the hundreds of thousands as a sudden illness ravaged the planet. Reports flooded in of sudden manifestations of Force ability in the previously non-sensitive. A work friend had complained of hearing voices, ceaseless and alluring, in her mind before planetary communication networks crumbled.

Worst, she thought she had seen a monster, horrible and spiderlike, lurking in the smoke as she staggered home from the store the day before. But it was hard to remember what was a fever-dream and what wasn’t.

She wrapped a blanket, blue with silver roses embroidered on it, around her shoulders and stood. Trembling, weary footsteps led her from her living room to a small reading room beside her kitchen as she waited for a kettle to warm water for her tea. Something shuddered in the distance, rattling her lights and the porcelain cup sitting on a saucer in the center of her table.

“Why don’t you just kill us?” she wondered. Her throat, scratchy and raw, protested at every spoken word. She staggered to her window and pushed her silver curtain aside. From here, on her hilltop home, she could see the city ablaze and shrouded in black smoke. A cloud of dust and ash crawled skyward as a building collapsed in the distance. A small, crystalline fighter roared overhead toward parts unknown.

“Leave us here to suffer,” she muttered as her kettle dinged in the kitchen. Iraz left the window.“It won’t change anything.”

A pressure swelled in her temples. Iraz squeezed her eyes shut, setting the kettle down as she braced herself for what was becoming a too-routine annoyance.

Some alien tongue, grating like dry leaves on leather, sounded in her mind. It seemed to echo onto itself, and it was hard to tell if she was hearing one speaker or several.

Leave me alone, she thought, trying to will the racket to silence. It never listened before. Why would it now?

”...Beckons,” the voices said suddenly. White fear gripped Iraz’s soul. ”The Chorus... Your voice... Join...”

---

“I’m sorry sir, but until we know for sure what’s going on, we cannot allow anyone to leave the quarantine area.”

Cado glared at the Twi’lek attendant. “I have been trapped here for two days,” he said. He spoke quietly, but his voice strained to keep from yelling. “My wife and one of my daughters are dead and now you’re telling me that I can’t see my only other daughter?”

The Twi’lek frowned. Something like regret passed on her face. “Sir, I understand your concern. However, our medical staff has advised us that until we know how contagious the disease is-”

“Your fucking medical staff didn’t keep those other people alive, did they?” Cado hissed. “So what, you’re gonna keep us locked in this damn room until we all turn into piles of goop like the other people?”

“Sir, please don’t make me call security-”

“Fine,” Cado raised his hands and his voice as he stormed away. He stopped after a few steps and glared at the attendant. “I’m sorry for caring about my family!”

He stalked off, muttering about the resort being a “damn prison,” before he heard an answer.

The Sky Gardens were ruined. The thing -- it turned out to be a giant crystal -- took out most of the resort’s facilities, save a small recreation hall and a few adjoining buildings. The debris killed Miria and Terau. Eiryn, his older daughter, had fallen terribly sick, as had countless others.

The crystal had shattered after impact, releasing a huge cloud of dustlike spores that, beyond spreading into the air, coated everything outside and had gotten into the ventilation systems before clogging up the filters. Cado couldn’t help but think they were related. The sick, which seemed to be most of the people at the resort who were still alive, had been separated from the healthy. From what he’d heard, a horrible death awaited those who fell to the disease.

Cado slumped into a couch, feeling hopeless.

“Planetary forces have launched another attack on the hostile fleet.” Cado looked up to the news report. A shaky video feed showed Teth’s defense forces racing toward the ships in orbit. “Previous attempts have failed, but we’re told this is an all-out attack with every ship security forces can muster.”

Small purple projectiles flitted from invaders’ fighters as the fleets engaged. Teth’s forces answered, but then the invader capital ships started to open fire. One by one, the security ships disappeared in silent orange blossoms of flame.
The flagship was starting to spin listlessly as the newsfeed suddenly went dead.

[Rugs]

Present

The Archeri known as the Composer stood before a grand window. The Singing Spire hummed around it with the Chorus’ will. The observation deck, carved with tremendous care into the great crystalline ship, pulsed with light as the Chorus’ song grew ready.

That strange, alien world stretched below, oceans and grasslands giving way to darkness as the Spire orbited toward the planet’s night side. A purple glow, pulsating subtly, lessened the night’s edge. It was the Spire’s light, shining like a second sun.

Shining with the joy for the Chorus’ newest voices, and with sorrow for those who chose not to join.

A ripple passed through the Chorus. The Composer tilted its head just so, as if listening. There was no need for the gesture. It was a quirk, picked up from some people brought into the Chorus long ago. Then again, so was the Composer’s position itself.

If all voices were one, what need was there for one to stand above the other?

But what good was a song without someone to lead it?

“The Verses have taken their places. The song is almost ready,” came one thought from elsewhere in the Chorus. ”We will uplift them. Teach them. Join their voices to our own.”

The composer’s eyeless face turned to the space that stretched between the Spire and the world below. Teth, they called it. Some of its inhabitants had already joined their voices to the Chorus, bringing sprinklings of knowledge. Strange tongues. Stranger customs.

It looked to a point of middling distance, where smaller Archeri vessels surrounded those planetary defense ships that had been disabled, instead of destroyed during the feeble counterattack. The Conductors had done well in bringing those aboard, and their knowledge of this planet’s bizarre technologies, into the Chorus.

Soon the ships would be a part of the Archeri fleet — tools to spread the song through the stars.

”And the song must be spread,” came a voice from the planet’s surface. ”We must teach those who sing blindly.”

Yes, the two strange contacts. The first from a far-flung world. The second was closer. Both touches had been brief, fleeting things. The outsiders had recoiled, like a hand from flame. But the Chorus remembered. The Chorus watched for more, but they had yet to come. All in time.

They would join the Chorus, and if any others bore the gift of singing without the Chorus’ guiding hand, they would be instructed. It was the Archeri’s sacred call. And a pity that those who thought they knew of singing. They knew nothing.

The Composer stood suddenly, stretching to its full, towering 10-foot height. ”The time is now,” it said. The Chorus echoed its words immediately. Perfectly. “Add their voices to the song.”

The Spire shined bright as a sun.

---

Blood dripped from Iraz’s fingers. Blood stained the front of her shirt and her lips. Old blood, sticky and dark red, coated the inside of her palm, but she’d long since stopped caring about it.

She just wanted to die.

The fires ravaging Inner Teth had died down. Much of the smoke had cleared, though some still drifted doggedly into the sky. She envied its efforts to escape this hellscape.

Join your voice to ours. The alien voice in her head had started speaking Basic. When was that? A day ago? Two? She’d stopped keeping track of time. It was hard to, constantly drifting in and out of fever dreams. Many become one in the Chorus. Sing with us for eternity.

Iraz had stopped fighting the voice, stopped trying to will it away to silence. Thoughts couldn’t block it. Loud noises couldn’t drown it out. She could only listen as some unknowable urging drew her inexorably onward across the broken landscape.

She coughed suddenly — a violent fit that brought her to her knees. More blood, bright red, splattered her hand as she trained in vain to stop it. You must be strong, the voice said. The Chorus awaits. She groaned, wishing it would let her die. But she pushed herself up, one shaky foot after the other, and continued to stagger through the thick, white grass that now coated the hillside.

What she saw when she reached the top nearly dropped her to her knees again.

The ground leveled out, and hundreds — no, thousands of bodies lay strewn across the ground. Lavender trees with strange crystalline pods sprouted from the ground.

Those things moved among it all, on their bizarre spider-like legs. They lifted corpses that fell apart under their own weight and carried them to piles, like heaps of potting soil. The smell, of death and rot and decay, was suffocating.

Iraz’s breath caught in her throat. A trembling hand rose to her mouth as hot tears streamed down her face.

“Do not be afraid,” a voice said. She jolted at this. It was in her head but different, as if something was speaking to her. Iraz turned around to see one of the creatures standing near her. It towered over her. Dread gripped her soul as it turned its hole-filled, eyeless face toward her.

It lowered itself, using two of its six arms to steady as it reached a hand toward her. She wanted to recoil away but felt frozen in place.

“Do not mourn for them. They have joined the Chorus.” It raised a long, spindly arm to the sky and turned her head to follow it. That giant crystal ship thing was glowing, as bright as a second, purple sun. “Their souls live on in the Spire. As will yours, to sing with us for eternity.”

“N-no,” Iraz stammered weakly. Her throat ached. When was the last time she’d spoken aloud? “I can’t. I d-don’t want to-”

“Calm yourself,” the creature said, in what she could only guess was an attempt to soothe her. “If the song is to be continued, you must do the singing.”

It lifted her, then, with the two limbs that had hands. She tried to resist, but it was either very strong or she too weak from the sickness to fend it off as it lumbered across the grass to lay her down beside some dying man. ”Your suffering is nearly at an end. Rejoice, for you shall soon sing.”

As the creature wandered away, Iraz stayed on the ground. She was too tired. It hurt too much to move. She wondered where she went wrong in life. At every juncture, she’d tried to be her best. In work, in social life, in trying to make the Galaxy a better place if only for a little bit.

So here she was, lying among a sea of the dead or dying, waiting for her turn.

As the minutes turned to an hour, and that hour to another, she felt her turn growing nearer. Her breathing slowed. It grew harder to lift her head from the ground to watch the strange creatures do their work, and harder still to keep her eyelids open.

She saw a brilliant flash of blue and purple light in the evening sky as the last breath left her body.

---

Cado Thull had made many a bad choice in his life.

Poor choices for smuggling runs. Getting caught up with the wrong gangs. Pissing off the wrong gangs and even a Hutt once. But he’d cleaned up. Turned over a new leaf. Started a family and made an honest living.

Everything was supposed to go right after that. For a few beautiful years, it had. Until he decided to take a vacation. The same vacation they took every year.

“We’re not getting out of this are we?” Another resort goer — the only other one still alive, as far as Cado knew — clutched a curtain rod he’d made into an improvised weapon. They’d barricaded themselves into a patio. It was a terrible choice, as far as defensible positions went, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

If they could, Cado would have something more fearsome than a knife he’d stolen from the kitchen to fend of those... things.

They’d swarmed into the place. They took some special interest in all the sick folk, which the resort management had conveniently gathered into one place, and shrieked at Cado and the handful of others who hadn’t gotten sick yet.

The rest of them, save Cado and the fellow in the room with him, were dead. Cado wasn't sure if any of the big creatures had died yet. They didn’t wear anything, but he’d seen one take a blaster bolt and shrug it off.

Their improvised weapons had been less effective.

Something slammed into the door. The shelves they’d hastily piled in front of it moved back about an inch.

“I don’t like our chances, bud,” Cado said grimly.

Another slam moved the makeshift barricade further back. Cado swore to leave a bad Holonet review for whoever decided to use a wooden door for the patio instead of metal.

The third strike broke the door and one of the creatures, ducking low to fit through the doorway, lunged into the room. Its arms knocked the shelves aside like toys at it leaped at the two men. Cado’s companion tried to hit it with the rod and got speared through the chest by one of the creature’s pointed arms.

“Holy shit!” Cado yelled as the thing turned toward him and grabbed him. He put the knife in one of its shoulders and felt himself flying backward.

Glass shattered behind him and the hard earth knocking the wind out of him announced that he’d been thrown outside.

What is that? Something was glowing in the sky. Teth’s sun was gone — it was night time, after all, but with that purple thing shining in the sky-

“You are an abomination,” the creature said as it scuttled out of the broken window. The knife was still in its shoulder. It didn’t seem to care. “An affront before the Chorus. You defile the sacred gathering with your presence.”

“Sacred gathering?” Cado coughed as he sat up. “Look, buddy, I wouldn’t be calling anyone else an abomination if I were you-”

A bright flash of light turned the bizarre almost-twilight brighter than midday as a wave of blue something spread across the sky.

Suddenly, he felt it. Yes, the Chorus. He had to join it, to spread its song across the stars. How could he have been so foolish? He got onto his knees before the great creature.

“Please,” he said now. “I see now the truth of the Chorus. I see the way. Please, let me join the song.”

NO, Millions of angry voices thundered in his skull at once. He heard Miria and Terau and Eiryn above them all.

“What?” Cado said asked, feeling desperate. “But please, I have to. I can hear them — my wife, my daughters! Let me join my voice to th-”

His words stopped as a pointed arm — the same that’d killed his friend — pierced his chest and pinned him to the ground.

”Your voice is not worthy.”

The world went black.

End of Movement I: The Rising Chorus