The last of the autumn leaves spiraled down as Cordelia pressed her ear against the granite outcropping, listening for the frequency only she could hear. Her father’s maps had led her here, to this windswept hillside where the old stones hummed with memories older than the village below.
“Still chasing fairy tales?” Marcus called from the path, his voice carrying that familiar note of gentle mockery. He’d followed her again, abandoning his blacksmith’s forge to pursue her into the hills.
Cordelia didn’t lift her head from the stone. The singing was stronger today, almost urgent. “My father wasn’t mad, Marcus. These stones do sing.”
“Your father drew maps of places that don’t exist.” Marcus climbed up beside her, his boots crunching on frost-brittle grass. “The council burned half his charts as fantasy.”
“They burned them because they were afraid.” She traced the carved spiral etched into the stone’s surface, worn smooth by centuries of weather. “He mapped the places between places. The spaces that shift.”
The humming intensified, and suddenly Marcus went rigid. “Cordelia, do you—can you hear that?”
She smiled without looking up. “Finally.”
The stone beneath her palm grew warm, then hot. The carved spiral began to glow with soft amber light, and the humming rose to become a proper song—wordless but full of longing, like a lullaby sung to coax something to sleep, or perhaps to wake it up.
Around them, other stones began to answer. Scattered across the hillside, ancient markers that Cordelia had always assumed were boundary stones or old grave markers started to pulse with the same amber glow. The song grew richer, harmonizing with itself in impossible ways.
“This is what your father heard,” Marcus whispered.
“Every night for twenty years. It drove him half-mad, trying to map where the songs led.” Cordelia stood, pulling her father’s leather satchel from her shoulder. Inside, wrapped in oiled cloth, were his final charts—the ones the council hadn’t found. “But I think I understand now what he was really mapping.”
She unfolded the largest chart, spreading it across the singing stone. The map showed the hillside, but not as it appeared to normal eyes. Instead of a simple slope dotted with old markers, her father had drawn a vast spiral, with each stone marking a point along its curve. Lines of force connected them, creating a pattern that hurt to look at directly, as if it contained too many dimensions for the eye to properly process.
“It’s a map of the song itself,” she breathed.
The amber light pulsed brighter, and the air began to shimmer. Where the map touched the stone, reality grew thin. Through the translucent air, Cordelia could see another version of the hillside—one where the stones stood taller, unweathered, and people in strange clothing moved between them with purpose.
“The stones aren’t just singing,” she realized. “They’re calling across time.”
Marcus grabbed her hand as the shimmering intensified. “Cordelia, we need to leave. This isn’t safe.”
But she was already stepping forward, into the space between what was and what could be. The song wrapped around her like a current, carrying her deeper into the map her father had died trying to complete. Behind her, Marcus cursed and followed, because some forms of devotion transcend common sense.
The last thing the empty hillside heard before silence returned was the sound of two voices joining the eternal song of the stones, adding their harmony to the music that connects all places, all times, all possibilities that ever were or might yet be.
Leave a Reply