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The music of the heron nation, despite its veritable stranglehold on the popular imagination over the last four centuries, remains a mysterious body of repertoire. Perhaps it is this air of mystery that lends it such perennial intrigue in the first place. However, the primary reason for its mystery is most likely mundane: heron songs, or “galdrar”, were largely transmitted orally. Several examples of hymnody remain available at the library in Sienne, accompanied by apparent musical notation; but the notation system most commonly used is so laconic that current scholarship has been unable to reconstruct its performance practice with any confidence. There are no comprehensive codices, manuscripts, or even hymnals to use as reference. Any reconstruction is, in large part, guesswork.
Contemporary written accounts1 of heron culture - discovered primarily in Phoenicis, Kilvas, and Begnion - all agree that heron music was performed from memory, with their children participating essentially from the cradle (or the nest, as it were). These descriptions all agree on the singular beauty and complexity of this music; but none find the vocabulary to offer clues about the exact practices, let alone to transcribe the notes. Many, in fact, expressly proclaim that the music is indescribable - that it must be experienced firsthand, and that to approximate a verbal description would be tantamount to profanity. The existence of the written examples in Sienne would seem to dispute this, but it is possible - even probable - that they are beorc in origin, and therefore unreliable as definitive sources. The other possibility is that heronic musical tradition was indeed partially literate, if only for archival or mnemonic purposes, but that all other would-be sources were destroyed in the Serenes Massacre of 625.
“The Dirge of Ruin”, commonly called only “the Dirge”, is unique in several ways, not the least of which is that it survives in written form at all. It does share some superficial similarities with the other extant pieces: first, it is handwritten; second, the text is in the Ancient Tongue; and third, it is a fragment, a single piece of paper with no markings or other evidence to indicate that it was ever bound in a larger work. In all other respects, it is singular. The firsthand account of the singing of the Dirge, penned by Leanne of Kilvas (née Serenes), has partially enabled this reconstruction, and makes for powerful supplemental reading.
The fragment was discovered in the year 942, nearly eighty years ago, in a library within the erstwhile raven stronghold of Castle Kilvas. The castle had been deserted for almost two hundred years by this time: in the late 600s or early 700s, the raven nation was annihilated by a sudden and aggressive plague, a disaster at the time only observed by the neighboring country of Phoenicis. Kilvas had enjoyed unusually positive status with the Begnion Empire for some time, but abruptly severed all ties with the continent during the Mad King’s War - supposedly due to events connected with the singing of the Dirge. Thus the ravens quietly went extinct, with little notice from beorckind; and for some time thereafter, the hawks declined to allow any continental researchers to enter the avian archipelago at all.2 Access was negotiated only some decades later, and due to the level of clutter and decay within the building, the discovery of the Dirge fragment was essentially accidental. How Kilvas came to possess the fragment is questionable. It is well-documented that the ravens accumulated items quite indiscriminately, from worthless ephemera to priceless one-of-a-kind artifacts. But some scholars argue that Kilvas’s possession of the fragment was purposeful, seeing as Kilvas is also the source of the sole eyewitness account of the Dirge.
The Dirge has been a fixture of southern Tellius legend since the day it was sung. Unlike the Serenes Massacre, there are no detailed accounts recorded in any contemporary government documentation. Its effects are observable to this day, but the exact nature of its performance and power has certainly been subject to exaggeration, embellishment, and outright invention.
The objective recorded history is thus: in the year 625, the Apostle was assassinated in Sienne. House Serenes was framed for her murder, and was slaughtered in its entirety by a largely-civilian mob, which also torched Serenes Forest. Only Prince Reyson, the third heir to House Serenes, escaped to Phoenicis, where he lived in hiding for two decades. During the Mad King’s War, he returned to Serenes Forest. For reasons that remain opaque, he was pursued therein by three parties: heavily-armed soldiers of unknown employ; mercenaries in the employ of Princess Elincia Crimea; and hawks, his own apparent allies from Phoenicis, likely seeking his safe retrieval.
Upon locating the sacred high altar of House Serenes within the heart of the forest, the heron prince sang the Dirge of Ruin. This resulted firstly in the deaths of nearly all his pursuers,3 and secondly in the reduction of Serenes Forest to its current state.
If this description is frustratingly vague, then so be it. Almost none of the people in the forest that day survived to tell the tale: many popular details, although repeated as fact and solidified as legend, were ostensibly the products of speculation and rumor. Lurid reenactments detail the transformation of the heron prince into a warped bird-monster, the gruesome slaying of all beorc in the forest, and the forest itself as an accomplice which trapped living victims in its very roots and vines. These are nothing more than inventions, which have been allowed to propagate unchecked over the years. Perhaps the unearthing of the written Dirge, and of Princess Leanne’s account of it, will lay them to rest.
Scholars have been able to verify that the fragment dates to the 7th century, roughly contemporary with the singing of the Dirge. However, scholarship remains fiercely divided in many other respects. It is possible, of course, that it is entirely forged - that it is merely the product of the imagination of a third party who may or may not have even been in the vicinity of the forest when the Dirge was sung. If, for the sake of this performance, we assume that it is authentic, questions still remain. First and foremost: all accounts of heron culture indicate that Serenes was a nation of pacifists, who lived their lives in pious seclusion and prayer. Why, then, would they develop a galdr so apocalyptic in nature?
Some scholars suggest that they did not - that Prince Reyson penned the Dirge himself, following the slaughter of his people, intending to use it for vengeance. Others contend that the herons, while peaceful, were not so naive as to think that they would never be threatened. We need not presume that they would have gone quietly to their deaths. They were pacifists not merely by ideology, but by biology: they were hollow-boned and too weak for combat, and furthermore they were said to be empaths. In the absence of any other option for self-defense, it is perfectly possible that such a people might devise a failsafe by which their sanctum might become their tomb, and inter their assailants with them. If this is the case, however, it does not explain why such a magic was not employed during the Serenes Massacre. Perhaps, even under great torture and suffering, they were kindhearted enough to hesitate; whereas Prince Reyson, by the time of his return to the forest, was not.
Another distinct possibility, given the fragment’s eventual resting place, is that Princess Leanne set the Dirge partially to paper after witnessing its performance. If this is the case, her motivations are unclear; but either way her firsthand account is the only such one that survives, likely the only one ever written, and must be mentioned. Of all documents discussed here, its authenticity is the most indubitable. The Serenesi hand is distinctive, and historiographers identify her Ancient script beyond a shadow of a doubt: it matches the style of other written artifacts from her father and older sister. Furthermore, Phoenicisian archivists affirm that the handwriting is an exact match for several other extant diary entries and correspondences from the princess herself - she lived to an unknown age, always unattainably reclusive and never seen by beorc eyes, but she wrote extensively, and many of her writings are preserved in Phoenicis for comparison. (The text of the fragment is also in Ancient, but in a hand so shaky that any stylistic markers have been rendered unidentifiable.) As such, Princess Leanne’s account of the Dirge may be one of the most important documents in Begnion history, perhaps even superseding the Dirge fragment itself. She wrote nearly always in the Ancient Script, regardless of the predominant tongue where she lived. Her description of the Dirge follows, translated to Modern:
The air was greening, not like song magic or spring magic, but like sickness, like the sky before a twister. I raced towards him but I was very tired. The air made me feel sick. Someone grabbed at me but I kept running. I tried to fly but I wasn’t strong. If I had flown maybe I had been fast enough. As I ran I heard an awful noise and the humans started to stop. By the time I came to the altar I saw him hovering without the use of his wings like an awful green eye and the forest was all awailing. There with him was the hawk king already, trying to drag my brother back down to the earth but even with all his strength he was roughed.
My brother was singing. He was making that awful noise that was like a high broken-glass tumbling of sounds, and it was part with his voice but most of with his heart. It was a twisted thing for song was not meant to destroy. I felt it would take me apart. But he was in pain, terrible pain, so great dreadful that it made me want to cry out and rend my skin even to the bone. He did not know what all anything was going on around him. The green light unsighted him and the song stopped up his ears. He was using his own heart to feed it and it was undoing him. I felt it in mine too. It made me feel sick again and dizzy. I cried out beseeching and he did not hear me. I cried out with my heart with song magic and I think he heard me then but it was too late. The song bewreathed him like so many tangling vines. I felt in my heart that he and I were the only two left and now he ruined himself before my eyes. The hawk king fell. Near me were beorc who were bloodshot-eyed maddened and crying. The very forest stretched itself upon the rack of the song and then snapped.
My brother burst into light like a star. There was a great gust of wind and it struck his hair and undid his skin. Everything was full ringing loud like a thousand shrieking songs, dreadful unholy calling down justice and then it swept outward, over and past me and out to the ends of the wood. Suddenly everything was all silent. For several minutes I could not see and there was no sound but a high ringing in my ears. I was on my hands and knees and could hardly breathe. It was stifling silent and I could feel that all the life in the forest had been crushed dead. I should not say dead. Rather it was stopped. It was an awful stopping like freezing or stone. I could hear nothing growing not even dormant, all silent. And even he was gone and now I was the only one left. That was the worst of all that he had shoved me into empty space and left me alone again and there was nothing at all to feel not even pain. I felt my own heartbeat and my own blood and breath but I was the only thing alive and I choked on that nothing. I was afraid it would swallow me too. I wanted to tell him to stop playing unfair and come out of his hiding but he was gone.
When I could hear again I heard humans calling in the distance. When my sight came back everything was gray as it had been but nothing moved and even the ashes drifted too still in the air as if the wind itself was frozen. I touched the ground and it was too hard and gave too easily and I couldn’t tell when I was touching it or not. The beorc were dead and the hawks too. I saw their flesh but my brother was whole gone. Everything was a ghost. There was nothing like it in nature or in the celestial sphere. There were a great many things torn open in me and a great empty hole torn in the world. I couldn’t bear the emptiness. I went away weeping and did not know myself for a long time. But now I am thinking and feeling and have come back to myself. I tell you I am myself again, you can let me out now, I am myself again. (trans. Aera Persiska.)
Following the singing of the Dirge, the princess fled the forest. The remainder of her account details her instinctive orientation toward Kilvas, a place she had frequented in her adolescence. She took sanctuary there, and remained until the unknown plague destroyed the raven population; whereupon she relocated to Phoenicis. The hawks and their new king - successor’s name unknown, since the nation became even more reclusive than before - protected her fiercely.
But there was no fixing Serenes Forest, which had experienced a breakage beyond fire. Begnion attempted to retrieve the bodies of its own people from within its perimeters, but were unsuccessful. Afterwards they attempted to limit interference as much as possible, declaring the forest forbidden to all due to safety concerns. Of course some attempted entry anyway - the loved ones of the deceased, or unwise children on dares - but all intruders vanished, not to be recovered.
After some decades had passed, and the disastrous event was not so vivid in memory, Begnion sent mage-scholars to survey the forest. With research groups in teams, tethered to each other and with a rope to lead them back to the perimeter, they tried to gather information about the exact nature of the damage to the forest, as well as the whereabouts of the abandoned bodies. Preliminary expeditions were unsuccessful, and again Begnion shelved the issue of the forest for another several decades. But in time, they went on trying, with what we might now understand to be unreasonable optimism. Nothing in the forest’s appearance would ever change, but occasionally various officials would wonder if the effects of the Heron’s Curse - as many now called it - had waned naturally over time. The results were always the same.
Begnion ceased all official activities less than a century later, and put an indefinite moratorium on Serenes Forest, ordering it sealed to outsiders for good. But by then the forest, and the Dirge, were items of folkloric and scholarly intrigue. With such a status come the thrill-seekers, the skeptics, and the intellectuals - amateur researchers wishing to study the effects for themselves, eager to prove themselves strong-minded enough to resist the deleterious ones. Unfortunately, Serenes Forest is too big of a mass to barricade entirely. Despite exhortations to better common sense, and warnings that they blaspheme the might of the goddess herself, these amateur expeditions persist periodically, with occasional casualties, to the present day.
If nothing else, they offer us a wealth of data points, and the surviving accounts are remarkably consistent even over the centuries. Most importantly, they seem to corroborate the meat of the princess’s description. With variations, they all report an eerie stasis, as if even the dust in the air hesitates to disturb itself; they report increasing difficulty in even moving forward, as if something in the environment is too thick to traverse. The level of daylight in the forest never seems to change; and it smells, not of leaves or decay or soil, but of nothing at all. Some explorers describe early headaches, stomachaches, fever, or general muscle pain. Before long, usually within an hour of entering the forest, they begin to show signs of madness, chiefly visual and tactile hallucinations. These often begin as brief glimpses of light or color, and progress to visions of brutality and phantom pain, which sometimes provoke the sufferers to harm their companions or themselves; or worse, to cut and run, losing themselves forever in the trees. Others report hearing voices, too garbled to understand; laughter; hints of music; and many describe an identical, astonishingly intimate sensation of being watched. Of course, this lends itself well to dramatic tales of ghosts. Hallucinations often seem to persist once the interloper leaves the forest, lingering for a few hours, days, or even weeks; but they do eventually fade. This is assuming that the explorers are able to extricate themselves from the forest at all. As said, there have been casualties.
And the effects are not all psychological. Intruders have often left the forest with contusions and lacerations beyond ordinary hiking injuries. Furthermore, despite the sense that the forest is frozen in time, manmade items seem to degrade in bizarre ways or at impossible speeds. Rivets and weapons rust; dye runs out of clothing. One man looked at the rope tether anchoring his party to the outside world, and saw it begin to fray before his eyes, as if something invisible were peeling it apart. He thought he was already going mad, but at this point they withdrew from the forest, and found that indeed the strands had been undoing themselves one at a time.
Writes one anonymous adventurer ca. 802, from a sealed record in the Sienne Library:
By my pocketwatch it was twenty-two minutes and scarcely a mile and a half in before I began to see strange things. I saw first a green light out of the corner of my eye, like a spark of magic. I looked, but there was nothing else, only the gray forest in its deep shadows. Then I saw another, toward my other side; again I looked and saw nothing. I thought maybe it was a will-o’-the-wisp, as they call it in Gallia, and that we ought to avoid such things. I alerted my companion to this, and he claimed he had noticed nothing of the sort. Then I felt a prickle up my spine and swore I felt something touch my hair. I must have jumped a foot. My companion cursed at me and called me a fool, to which I cursed at him and called him a fool. He said that a branch or a breeze had touched me. I said I knew a branch or a breeze when I felt one. We kept walking for a while longer but everything looked the same - I was afraid of getting lost and kept touching the rope to make sure it was still intact. Then, presently, my companion stopped dead in his tracks. I asked him what he had stopped for - he did not answer. I looked at his face and found him waxen and slack-jawed and staring. I followed his gaze and saw nothing but the forest tunneling away into darkness. I shook him by the shoulder and he nearly hit me, and I will own that I was glad of it because I was afraid he had seen something that had scared him all the way to death, and I would have rather had a black eye than been alone with a corpse in the depths of that place.
At that moment I heard something strange, a stuttering musical sound like a laugh. I looked around, and at the base of a tree thought I saw a body, naked and ghost-white except for the blood covering it. I stumbled back, and when I looked again it was gone; only I looked elsewhere, just to have somewhere else to look, and saw two children one on top of the other, cut open messily. I cried out in horror, not only because it was a horror of a sight but because somehow in that moment I felt that these were my children, even though I had never had any children. Then my companion slapped me silly and I came back to myself, and those pale bodies were gone. My companion’s face was bloodless but he reassured me that it was all imaginary, just like the things we had encountered in our preparations for the journey. We had taken essences of Gallian mushrooms on several occasions to acquaint ourselves with hallucinations, had read the writings of those who had gone before, had even studied madmen in the asylum in Daein. We were educated men and knew what was real or not.
I took heart at this and we made to continue. But at one point I felt an odd dizzying sensation, like the ground was unsteady beneath me, and then heard a voice cry out. I asked my companion if he had heard it and he said he hadn’t. Then suddenly someone grabbed my arm and I felt something ice cold needle into my spine, which made me drop to my knees. I felt rough hands seize my wings - I thought in that moment that I had wings - and I heard a voice shout laughter deafeningly direct in my ear, and then a serrated blade was sawing my wings from my shoulders cleaving sinew and bone and I was screaming. I felt my companion shaking me but I didn’t know him anymore; he horrified me as much as everything else. I only came to my senses when the twofold process was over, when the nightmare had succeeded in parting my dream-wings from my body. Then I was human again.
I was badly shaken after that. I had been prepared for strangeness but not for physical torture, and I tell you this was real pain, as real as anything. I shuddered to think that it could happen again at any moment and I would be defenseless to stop it. My companion’s eyes were darting and I knew he was seeing things too. At that point I determined that we should leave. I went to check my pocketwatch and realized that the gears had all rusted together. I turned us back to get us out, leading my companion along the rope toward the edge of the forest. I saw the hairs of the rope begin to undo themselves bit by bit, floating apart in the air. I clutched them to keep them together. I felt things like hands touching me and tried to ignore them; I saw green lights sparkling at the edges of my eyes and was determined not to look at them. I saw humanoid forms in my peripheral vision, saw naked flesh writhing and hurling over itself to follow us, and then the flesh was pale flame. I felt it licking at my boots and moved faster; the heat was real - I sweated with it, no matter how much I tried to believe it wasn’t real.
So focused was I on the rope and on ignoring everything else that I ignored my companion right into his grave. When I spied the treeline and full daylight beyond, I turned to tell him that we were home free, but I saw the rope that had tied us together trailing on the ground, sawn clean through, and him gone. When I peered back through the trees, hoping to catch him still in sight, I saw a person - but it was not my companion. It was a hunched and shadowy thing, scarecrow-thin, standing like a puppet held up on strings. It had more limbs than it ought - two extra ones sticking out of its back. It raised its head, and spied me, and its eyes were luminous in the gloom, pinpricks as green as springtime. I turned tail and ran.
The effects seem fairly consistent whether the explorers are beorc or laguz - perhaps herons would be entirely immune, but there are no herons to test, and so this must remain conjecture. Peculiarly, as it is, it seems that the individuals most resistant to the effects of Serenes Forest are the Branded. Such people often find themselves outcast in proper society owing to their taboo beorc-laguz parentage; and yet, within Serenes, they seem to last longer without mental deterioration, and rarely report being subject to anything so extreme as phantom torture. The nature of their Brand or the species of their laguz ancestor(s) seems to matter not at all. Why would this be? One can only guess - perhaps, being perpetually caught in the center of beorc-laguz conflict, the Dirge did not account for their existence; or perhaps they represent a different kind of balance, offer an empathy that Serenes Forest enjoys. Per one account, again anonymous:
I wouldn’t call it friendly. But I went in on my own - I didn’t want the influence of another psyche nearby. I walked for some time on my own. It was so quiet. By the time I started seeing and hearing things, little footsteps, little sparks of light, I decided to sit down for a while. Things were whispering around me. I closed my eyes and said, It must be awfully boring, to be the same for all time. I said, It must be terribly lonely, to be empty forever. And then I heard weeping, plain as day, the kind of sobbing cries that sound like they hurt. I didn’t say anything else. I sat until it stopped, and then I got up and went on my way.
Such resilience would potentially make the Branded useful research partners. However, as a group, they seem largely disinclined to pursue research on behalf of either beorc or laguz institutions. They seem to agree, one way or another, that it does not feel “correct” to remain long in Serenes Forest, and suggest that others take this to heart.
In all accounts, it is difficult to ascertain the real from the imaginary; but possibly there is no such division when it comes to Serenes Forest, and if so, perhaps this is an aspect of the Heron’s Curse. Leanne’s account clarifies several things: first, her brother was no storybook monster, but a young man driven to unspeakable acts by the brutality of his enemies. Perhaps he was even cognizant to the end; either way it seems he would have been unable to stop what he had set in motion, had he even wanted to. Second, the consistency of the interlopers’ accounts, cross-referenced with Leanne’s description, point to Leanne as a trustworthy authority on the aural nature of the Dirge - indeed, the only authority. From there, by comparing Leanne’s account with the fragment, we endeavor to reconstruct the soundworld of the piece from a purely mundane, physical perspective. The Dirge most likely had the properties of funerary wailing, a common custom among bird laguz and still practiced among hawks, amplified to cataclysmic degree by the heron’s innate seidr. Taking in mind the inherent limitations of all notation, the system used in the fragment is rudimentary but intuitive: written over each line of text, it ostensibly describes a building wall of sound, atonal and seemingly utilizing multiple intertwining voices. It is an orchestration which transcends the bounds of mundane overtone singing, but which, per Leanne’s telling and other contemporary sources, a heron might have been able to perform solo, perhaps via extralaryngeal sympathetic vibration or even by acoustic manipulation of the surrounding air itself. Both the fragment and the princess’s account describe this rising action building to an explosive, destructive climax, followed by an abrupt and encompassing silence. It evokes a picture of outpouring grief, so powerful as to bring total devastation. In this way, perhaps, he both destroyed Serenes Forest and preserved it - immortalized it in both eternal deathlessness and lifelessness, rebuking forever the violent interference of the outside world. It is a cruel irony that such interference has, for some, taken on the aspect of a challenge.
Rest assured: galdrar, to the extent that recreations have been attempted, carry little to no power among the non-heronic. By default, recreations are an exercise in imagination, with musicians often inventing the music itself nearly whole-cloth with input from primary sources. Even if we did happen into a perfect recreation of the music, it would not be true galdr. Writings concerning the herons are quite confident that the tunes and texts alone are not sufficient for magical purposes: the true magical cornerstone died with the herons themselves. A singer or listener to a mundane, non-heronic iteration may experience vivid flashes of pathos or joy, but experience no lasting effects. Therefore, as with all reconstruction, full authenticity is not intended - nor is it possible. Rather, we put ourselves in the mind of one who has seen horror and pain such that he would visit these things on trespassers: we offer empathy to one often reduced to a malevolent ghoul, and cry out with him in kind. In reconstructing the Dirge, we hope not to create another Serenes Forest, but a remembrance of a people unjustly removed from our world. In time, perhaps one day even the altar will be made clean.
1 “A Memorial in Song: records of the life and death of the heron culture, from the 4th to 7th centuries.” 915. Tirese, Perisan, et al.
2 Phoenicis’s fierce protectiveness of the raven homeland is unusual: historically, despite being neighbors, the two nations showed no great camaraderie towards each other. Historians speculate that Phoenicis was primarily motivated by the desire to protect state secrets - namely, the obfuscation of the existence of a second Serenesi survivor.
3 Among those slain by the Dirge were several key players in Princess Elincia Crimea’s resistance against the Mad King Ashnard. Although the princess herself was not affected, being that she did not enter the forest with her guardians, she experienced considerable setbacks in her negotiations with Begnion; and at this point Phoenicis and Kilvas both withdrew from the conflict for the good. Local legend asserts that some of Princess Crimea’s retinue escaped the forest, but this is likely a fabrication, since there is no reason why any of them should have been able to withstand the effects of the Dirge. If they did escape, and if they then spoke about what they experienced in the forest, their accounts have not survived.