If there’s an element that inspired music, I think it was water.
Okay, maybe I’m biased. But while air can be musical, and fire is musical if you listen right, and earth can be used to make music, but water is always music: loud and roaring, quiet and trilling, plinking, whispering against the shore. It can really be just about anything.
Once the Superior sent me out to a world covered in ice and snow, looking for hearts or princesses or ideas or something. He’d given me a list so I’d remember what to get, like I was going down to the item shop for bread and potions, but I’d left the list somewhere and anyway it wasn’t bread or potions he wanted.
He should have sent Vexen. Vexen is like ice, cold and silent and full of pressure that doesn’t have anywhere to go and eventually the loud, violent crack. The Superior really should have sent him because I’m no good at this stuff, but Vexen was busy because Vexen’s always busy and too good for field work and Xigbar said snow and ice are the same thing as water anyway so I’d be fine.
In school they taught me that ice and water are the same thing too, but they lied. Water is like a person. Ice is like… like a dusk, a nobody of water, water that’s lost it’s heart. It gets frustrated because it can’t express itself, because everything it wants to say and do is bottled up inside it.
But that doesn’t mean it can’t feel or it isn’t real, you know? It’s just kind of forgotten how.
It was really cold out there and for someone who can’t feel anything I could sure as hell feel that. I could feel the water all around me, too, but it was under or in the ice and it couldn’t hear me, so I kept walking and I wondered if maybe this was another inititation test or something stupid, and if I could freeze even though it didn’t seem like I could die, and if I did freeze would they just leave me out here forever, and would I end up with some stupid song stuck in my head? Because Axel’d been humming “It’s a Small World” every time he came up behind me in the hallway and I couldn’t stop thinking about it and it’d really really suck if that was stuck in my head forever.
I didn’t freeze and I didn’t bring back whatever I was supposed to find, but I did find out that the sun rises eventually, even up there. I watched it, standing with a bear who used to be a human (I used to be human too, I told him) and when the sun came up over the ice it all glowed with colors like life.
The bear told me to shush, and I heard something low and keening and it grew. The ice sang like an organ.
I smiled at the bear with his hidden human heart, and thought it was a shame that I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to be finding, but wasn’t it great that I was there to hear that? Because if ice had a song hidden down inside it, then maybe I still had one too.
