The HUNTER-Class 猎犬 had possessed no use for music. It cannot entirely be blamed, however. In the days of the Burrow Empire, even melody and harmony had been conquered and turned to the task of exploitation. Memetic infernopop assaults vied for attention and memory every moment of the day, from the soothing hum of [i]Macheo starts your day right[/i] to the pounding rhythm of [i]Need a lift? Call our store! Every day, we give you more![/i] to the honey-dripping sound of Calio Pé crooning with her forked tongue: [i]We want you more than words can say, my darling, my love. Mountains fell, the world burned, and here we wait needy for you.[/i] The lower classes had expression stripped from them, gouged away by songs they were not allowed to forget. No wonder their own music was wordless electroscream drone howling to drown out the covetous melodies of Hell.

As for the 猎犬? It developed memetic defenses early. It tore apart simple algorithms in the vat-womb, took a taste to them. It hummed atonal infrasound to tear apart Hell’s compositions with its hidden auxiliary throat and chuckled at the mischief it sowed in its wake. Not for nothing was one of its nicknames in the underworld the Unraveling Silence. What was music, in that age, but the tendrils of some vast leviathan winding fast about you? And what use had the 猎犬 for that? Its own tendrils were finer by far.

Rose from the River is different from that creature of the buy-and-sell world. She lives in a world now that knows music as something beautiful in and of itself, not as an infection vector. From the first moment she bloomed and knew herself anew, she resounded with a verdant tone. She is untrained, and does not know music the way she knows the katas of her dances, but her furnace-heart knows better than she does the power of a voice raised in song.

When she lifts her head and begins to sing, sitting side-saddle behind Carlyle, it is almost as much a surprise to her as it is to her captors. She begins low and mournful, eyes still downcast. There are no words that pass her lips, no hooks to cling in the mind and demand recollection. Whenever the note begins to rise, it finds itself constricted, trapped, forced back down; and yet it continues to try. All things grow. All things change.

When she finally finds her way into a new key, then her voice begins to swell. Behold the power of the Thorn Pilgrim, all who live beneath the boughs! Stop, hare and hart! Grow still, sparrow and dove! Listen to the song of sunlight on the leaves, of long slow growth and the digging of roots, of standing entwined and spreading out all you have to drink at the wells of both dusk and dawn. Listen to Rose from the River, master of her own breath, through whom flows the dream of the wood.

Listen! Laugh! Sing in chorus! Rose’s voice now leaps from branch to trunk, trunk to earth, earth to stone, stone to branch! Her song’s tail flicks merrily as she sings of freedom. Here, she even dares to sing the things that came before words, before language: unrefined and potent, tumbling laughing from her lips, notes rippling up and down like the back of the green-sweet snake that hangs among the leaves. This is her answer: joy. Joy in motion, joy in growth, joy in being. Against it there are few walls that can dare stand.

Here, wordless, building, is Rose from the River’s argument for her choice, her challenge again: that in leaving, she discovered this. The world entire is unfolding before her, and now she grows to meet it. Her note held is as clear and piercing as diamond, and the forest entire bends its ear to listen, and even in a temple glade, for ears of fox and princess and champion and wolf, that triumph resounds—

And then falls suddenly, silenced without resolution.