Once, in a land called Chelci, there lived a community of deaf people. As they could not hear, they used a type of sign language that utilized the art of dance. But their written language was what interested scholars the most, for they wrote in the language of music: a staff of five lines with all the notes in between, meant to complement the meaning of their dance. The only people who could understand their literature were musicians, and even they had trouble translating without the help of a choreographer. The musicians who tried to "play" their literature were utterly baffled by how a people that couldn't even hear produced the most beautiful music in the world.
Until one day an able-eared outsider made love to one of their women, and the woman had a baby. Though the man left without knowing he'd become a father, the woman liked to think he would have stayed had he known. The child grew up hearing everything, learning their invisible language with a natural perception unbefitting to outsiders. As such, he grew to interpret the "words" choreographed in perfect harmony like no one else; when everyone around him could only imagine their spiritual significance, he heard it in full force. The child never spoke, since there was nobody to talk with, but he did learn to make the sounds of his language with a fife that a traveler had given him.
One day a learned woman heard him playing it, on a hill outside the village. The sound reached far and wide, encompassing the land, diluting it with an eternal presence that exists just beyond the veil. He was dancing like the notes possessed him, hallucinogenic magic exuded from a junior wizard, while the land painted scenes that matched his melodies. The awestruck woman revered the specimen, surely a demigod of some sort, nothing short of a miracle, until she learned of the villagers, their communication system, and put it all together. She fell in love that day, convincing him to travel back to the city with her, where he could showcase his talents.
When he got there he found many pushy people trying to take advantage of him. They all wanted to hear his astounding music, so he was pursued relentlessly for the profits he might bring. Yet he never signed a contract, never played in front of a large audience. The woman tried to teach him her language, but he could not quite grasp the art of talking, just as the musicians had failed to grasp his. He left her for the mountains beyond the city, wanting to return home but going in the wrong direction. Which was all the same, since he found much pleasure being a recluse at the roof of the world, where he came to appreciate wind as the only music to be imitated, as it was the most delicate sound on earth, those stray wispy arias frisking the trees reminding him of catatonic youth, a sound he would probably meditate on again as he neared death when he became old. That music is the language of ghosts, traveling far and wide over the earth, a most familiar sound often ignored as background fodder.
And that's how he spent many days, lying on a mountain with that primordial sound, until a hiker came upon him and asked the best way to get back down. The hiker looked strangely familiar, like he'd always known him, perhaps from a previous life or the one that was coming. Receiving no response, the hiker asked who his father was, since he looked so familiar, but all that came out were the guttural sounds of a barbarian. Halfway back down the mountain, it dawned on the hiker just who he might have been. And that's when he heard the music, nostalgic sounds from a different life, a life when he'd traveled to the village of deafness, sheets of symphonic jottings tearing through his mind, a rosy smile from the woman he'd laid with. It was the same music that had seduced him into laying with her. My son, he whispered, my beautiful son.
He went back up the mountain to be with his son, if not forever then at least for a day. Settling into the soil, he buried him with his eyes, eyes that seemed to know who he was. And his son started writing in a notebook he kept, an exquisite cursive delicacy he found utterly alien. The son was composing a story, in his language, of how he'd come so far and how it might end. But the father could not understand it, not explicitly, though he at least divined it with his eyes, a strong intuition that only fathers know. That's when he decided to lead his son back to his people, to find his mother and spend the rest of his days with the family he never knew he had.
When they arrived, they found the woman who'd taken him to the city studying his people and their language. She'd become the first person to successfully translate their sheet music into words. As she read the son's story, it moved her to tears, for the resilience he'd shown being alone and the mistake she'd made. She translated the story to his father and together they formed a plan. They would stay in the village with his son, only leaving to bring their stories to the rest of the world, along with the music and dance they transcribed, so that the art-form of the village became an entirely new one for the rest of the world to indulge. Its mind-enhancing abilities were so revolutionary that people started finding less interest in capital gains and more interest in the seeds of culture: serenity, enchantment, and understanding.
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