Theme Song #47

C

Celest

Guest
Original poster
Music touches people in different ways. Many people enjoy listening to music for inspiration, and others simply listen to it to relax. Some songs tell stories while others allow you to make your own story.


Your challenge:

Listen to the song above then take a minute or two to think about it.

Write out a scene to this song; make this song your scenes theme song.

Let me know what you see when you listen to this music.
 
Fourteen days passed quickly, but painfully, for the geisha. She spent every waking moment, and even those treasured moments of sleep in the distrusting service of the Komodo. She tended to his armour, his heart, and his soul. She performed a multitude of dances, served a thousand blend of tea, and engaged in a hundred philosophical discussions; any form of entertainment or distraction he wanted, she had been levied to supply. Her code, and his oath, prevented either from falling out of favour with the traditions of their mutual home. Though the Komodo made many attempts to flatter her cold heart beyond the remit of her station, she chose to simply accept the compliments gracefully, and to move swiftly onto the next pressing matter.


This lack of reciprocation irked the Oni greatly. With each subsequent rejection his ire grew, and his wrath returned. Each time brought about repercussions for the other occupants of the Pagoda. In the night, meiko, artisan, and serving girl alike began to disappear. Guards on the north wall began to whisper of shadow ghosts, until they too became fewer in number with each passing day. Something was afoot in the autumnal mountains, and paranoia and hatred began to breed contempt for their unruly tyrant master. This, according to the plan designed by Lillith and her brother, was exactly as was intended.


Kneeling on her prayer mat in the small confines of her meagre quarters, the geisha bowed her head to the array of incense and jade statues that rested on a small shrine at the foot of the paper-thin door. The ubiquitous and traditional nature of the Komodo’s residence had amused her greatly. For someone bent on undoing the very fabric of Akashima’s cultural past, he was a creature bent on observing the very ways he was seeking to undo. The paper panelling that divided her from the other geisha was adorned with black oil scenes of teas houses, kami spires, and sprawling markets in summer bloom. Each was a picture to incite a memory of anchorage for Lillith, who used them to remember who she was, and why she was here.


“<May my mother smile on my fortunes and my heart kindle the flames of tradition,>” she whispered meekly, so as not to wake the other attendants up before the rooster called them to duty. As the Komodo’s principal geisha, she was expected to awaken long before the castle rose from its slumber to discourse with the dragon over breakfast. They had, for two weeks now, met atop the pagoda on the Jade adorned balcony to address whatever strange and tedious malady the creature had contemplated overnight. She was, by now, quite bored, but comfortable with the process.


She leant towards the shrine’s solitary candle, and blew on it gently. The flame danced, then waned, then snuffed itself before her virtue. She gave one final thought to the Karyukai, before she pushed herself upright and slid on the forefront of her feet to the chamber’s door. The delicate jewellery and flower adornments in her hair identified her as a geisha of the Tokyun region of Akashima, a simple jade pin with a wreath of gold and yellow shells on ribbons. Her kimono was sparse, a compromise she had earned with the Komodo’s insistence on her being naked as a form of punishment and enslavement. It was little more than a blood red nagajuban, or ‘under kimono’, but Lillith felt empowered wearing it.


Any step she could take towards achieving her much sought after victory was a mighty one indeed. This was especially true as so much resting on the success of her insurrection. Her trials here would lead to the conflict she had sought for centuries and the ultimate arrival of her allies to decimate the Komodo’s palace and his army. Before that final, testing, and deadly confrontation, however, she had much to do. She had much more suffering to endure, and much loneliness to craft into the jade dart that would slay the last True enemy of her home.


“<Morning to the lotus and the straw,>” she said, finishing her blessing with a traditional rural colloquialism, which in Tokyun meant ‘welcome to a new season’.


She bowed to no-one in particular, slid the panel to the left, and then silently, she swept herself away up the corridor, to the foot of the dark, and perilous stairwell that rose upwards through the core of the Pagoda. As the rooster began to crow, the Qui Lu Jin, the Dragon’s Guide, made her way upwards.