"Valediction" is one of the most achingly beautiful words in my language. Yes, it was a fancy way of saying a "farewell", but, to me, there was more to it than that. Compared to all the other words we had for goodbye… it was like it was from another world altogether.

There were many ways to say goodbye. "Goodbye", itself, was a contracted version of "God be with ye". Perhaps because of that, it always felt plain to me. "Farewell", on the other hand, was a bit too literal. After all, saying "farewell" to someone is quite literally you wishing that they fare well—nothing more, nothing less. I never like the word "parting"; it was far too stark, perhaps even cruel. Unlike a goodbye, the kind of break the word "parting" signified was utterly definitive, without the slightest hint that it might ever come undone. Meanwhile—aside from being just too darn formal—"departure" made the whole affair seem so one-sided.

But "Valediction"? Valediction was noble. It didn't express the act of leaving, nor the pain and longing that came with it, both for those who departed, and those who stayed behind. Rather, "valediction" referred to the very act of saying farewell. Valedictions were the deep-felt words, the tender embraces, and the moments of half-stoppered regret, all combined into a single whole.

I got more than my fair share of stares as I slithered back through WeElMed's hallways. There were many candidates for why that might be: the slithering, my barely half-human appearance, and the fact that I'd used my powers to button up my coat. However, I suspect most of the stares had been drawn to the clarinet I held in my hand. My clarinet, fetched from Staff Lounge 3.

I'd told the garage-wyrms what I was going to do, and had invited all of them to come and listen. A kind nurse lingering near the hospital's underground entrance had sent a text to Ani to tell her about it. That same nurse had also helped me get my PortaCon out of my coat-pocket without ruining either. The book-sized device hovered beside me as I slithered ahead.

I'd need it for the accompaniment.

Ibrahim was already hard at work doing what I'd asked of him, sharing souls with Yuth, Larry, and many others, who were doing a spectacular job of helping him, Ani, and the others reunite spirits and wyrms. The result ended up moving me far more than I ever could have imagined.

After so much loss and heartbreak—after all the broken goodbyes—people were finally being brought together again: families reunited, parted loves rekindled.

It left me feeling so optimistic, I was genuinely looking forward to the recital. It was ironic; playing in front of crowds usually made me nervous.

I guessed I'd outgrown it, much like my pants. (Yes, that was a joke.)

I was barely halfway down Garden Court Drive when another announcement was heard over the hospital's PA. This time, though, instead of a "please report" message, it was the kind of announcement I usually only heard in my dreams.

"Dr. Howle will be playing a clarinet recital in the Hall of Echoes in a couple minutes," Ani said, speaking over the PA. "Everyone's invited." Feedback screeched through the microphone. "Knock it out of the park, Genneth," Ani added, in a weak-worded whisper.

I gave all my spirits access to my senses as I made my way to the Hall of Echoes. I wanted them to know what I was going to do; after all, they'd been invited, too.

Once I reached the Hall of Echoes, I picked up one of its fallen doors and reverently set it down on the floor, leaning against the wall, before I slithered inside. I looked up at the atrium's grand expanse, rearing myself up a little for the better view. Even with broken windows and the holes in its walls and roof, the sheer breadth of the space gave it more than adequate acoustics. The architecture channeled sound much like a clarinet did, directing it up from one floor to another.

For my audience's sake, I waited a while before beginning. Merritt, Ibrahim, and pretty much every other garage wyrm came out to watch. They slithered onto the street, and up the Undergreen Galleria's collapsed ceiling. I spent several minutes watching them settle into place. Larry and the Lizard Guy poked their now-massive heads up through the big hole in the ground, leaning against the galleria's collapsed ceiling like it was some kind of giant couch.

And I saw Brand, fully transformed: a noble, burnt-red wyrm with spiraled horns that would have rivaled a gazelle's. Brand coiled patiently on the sett-paved street, near enough to the Hall of Echoes' entrance to be able to easily hear me, but not so close that his body obstructed it.

Turning back to face the Hall, I was pleasantly surprised by the number of faces that had trickled in. I saw Ani, and Heggy. And…—

—Then, from within, I felt something odd, like dozens and dozens of clamoring knuckles drumming on the underside of the top half of my skull.

A lot of my spirits wanted to hear me play.

I let them all out: dozens and dozens of people, and then, hundreds. They filled up the ground level and the floors above. Honestly, it was hard for me to look at them all, not just because I felt bashful and embarrassed, but because it reminded me of what life and the world had been like only two weeks earlier. Seeing so many people standing next to one another, strong and tall—not brought low by the fungal plague… I wanted it to be a victory—a welcoming party for a return to normality—but it couldn't be that. It couldn't ever be.

The way I figured, either this would get through to Lark—and perhaps other holdovers among my roster of spirits—or it wouldn't. But, either way, I couldn't think of a better valediction to my old life than by sharing with everyone the music that meant more to me than anything.

With a sporey sigh, I cleared my throat, and then spoke. My voice was marvelously resonant.

"H-Hello, everybody. I…"

I moved my hand to fidget with my bowtie, only to remember that these hands weren't really made for that.

"For those of you who don't, I'm Dr. Genneth Howle. I… was a neuropsychiatrist here at WeElMed. And, before I say anything else, let me just say, it's been an honor serving alongside you for these past fifteen years. It's the best dang job I could have ever asked for. I imagine a lot of you are probably wondering what the big fuss is over. Well… not long ago, I learned that my wife and kids are still alive." I glanced through the open doorway over my shoulder. "They're out there, somewhere, and I'm going to find them. I'm going to find them if it's the last thing I do." I looked forward once more. "And that means I'm going to have to say goodbye, and… gosh, I really don't like goodbyes, and not just because I suck at them."

I looked down at the clarinet in my hand. I lifted it up for everyone to see.

I continued: "I've had this here clarinet for more than a quarter of a century—twenty-seven years. I started playing when I was ten, after hearing Gallstrom's G minor Clarinet Sonata for the first time. My Dad was a musician. He died recently and, though we weren't as close as either of us would have liked… at least we had music. We could connect through it, nothing else. He got my this clarinet as a birthday present." I had to fight not to choke up. "It was…" My voice cracked, I muttered "darn it" beneath my breath. I shuddered and sighed. "It was the best birthday present I ever got."

Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

I pursed my lips.

"Even before the Green Death, I'd lost people. My mom, my sister… my son." I chuckled softly. "It's funny… even though therapy is one of my specialties, I've always struggled with my grief. So… I turned to music. For more than seven years, now, I've been composing a Clarinet Sonata as a requiem for those I've lost. It's not finished yet, though I wish it was." I chuckled again. "I'm just really, really indecisive. But maybe someday…"

My words echoed.

Closing my eyes, I called up my force needles, swaddling them around my clarinet with them, hyperphantasizing the blues and golds as they settled into place around the instrument.

My fingers were simply too big to work my clarinet anymore, but, with the practice I'd gotten from all the fudging typing I'd had to do to help ALICE synthesize Vernon's voice for Heggy, I figured I had a better than average chance of successfully using my force needles to operate the valves and finger holes that made my clarinet make music.

I used the weaves to raise my clarinet up to my mouth. I held my claws around it closely, though without touching.

I smiled softly.

"This is the first movement of the Clarinet Sonata in A minor, by Genneth Howle," I said. "It's for my Mom. I wish I could have known her other than through pictures and videos and dreams."

Using my powers, I set my console on the floor, gently tapped open my composition app, and set the score to play just the piano accompaniment. Then I started the playback, put my mouth to the reed, and blew.

The piano and I were equal partners in a heartfelt conversation whose opening phrases filled the Hall of Echoes with a wistful, cantabile triple-meter.

My practice paid off. My weaves were becoming more and more a part of me, an extension of my muscle memory. No longer did my odd-fingered hand fumble in pressing my fingers down on the tabs. No; I had my thoughts do it for me. I'd woven a sleeve of psychokinetic macramé around the instrument that would press the tabs down with just the thought of a touch. I still used my left thumb (now thumb-claw) for the register key, though.

Some habits simply refused to go away.

Honestly, I'd improved so much with the force needles that the greatest challenge of my performance, by far, came not from them, but from my spores. After the lengths I'd gone to keep my clarinet clean and safe, there was no way in heck that I was going to let it melt into slag. Though my breath was rife with spores, with the help of my doppelgenneths, I marshaled enough of my power to confine the dry, green mist to a narrow, tube-shaped region inside my clarinet's barrel. As a result, a current of spores blossomed from the clarinet's bell, making my music visible. By extending the weave's reach, I could play with the current, whipping it into a virtuoso display of wild vortices and fractal whorls that I drew around myself in ribbons and aurorae.

To the audience, it must have looked like I was casting a spell.

Just yesterday, we'd entombed a whole room of people to prevent the spread of fatal plumes just like these. But now? No one bothered. We'd cared and worried so much, we'd been worn raw. We'd been worn down to the bone and then straight past it, to the point where the pain and the fear hardly mattered anymore.

My music began in a low melody that swayed over the accompaniment's somber broken chords and the pedal point anchored beneath them. Like Gallstrom's, my phrases were long. In a matter of breaths the music rose up like a wind-tossed petal, drifting down through a progression whose descending fourths gave a glimpse of light before sinking back to the twilight from whence it came. The opening ideas—the swaying motif, above all—were then passed through developing variations, growing more vigorous, but never losing their elegance or candor.

The transition was a quasi-cadenza, a momentary passage where I played alone, neither fast nor slow. I breathed in deep, pressing the register key with my claw to overblow my way down the arpeggiated chords. Both my melody and the modulation landed onto a pianistic chorale, opening the way to the second subject, in the relative major.

I used to beat myself up over the fact that the first three notes of the second subject's four note motif had the same rhythm and melodic contour as the first: up to dotted, then down, and then down again in a playful leap. The gentle, see-sawing theme strengthened into graceful, swelling leaps that danced through the sequence passages—descending fourths once more. The music's noble yearning grew vibrant, until it glowed with a memory of sunshine.

Even now, the sound still moves me to tears.

The theme captured what I imagined it might be like to have a Mom: warmth, and a sense possibility and care. That would have done much to liven up my childhood's many unsmiling corners.

To my delight, the crowed grew as I played.

There were so many of them: soldiers of healthcare, beaten and bruised by the hardships of a war they could not win. They leaned against the railing or sat on the floor with their backs to the wall, wearing clothes stained with ick and death that there'd been neither time nor care to wash away. Tired eyes listened from behind PPE visors. Tears trickled down their fungus-shadowed cheeks.

More spirits emerged from me, to take their place in the crowd.

It meant more to me than they could ever know.

Joy comes with sorrow; that was what the first movement meant. How much more precious are the lights of our lives because of the long-reaching shadows cast upon it by our pain! Though that light didn't justify those shadows—and, truly, nothing could ever justify them—at least it showed that there was more to our suffering than met the eye.

My mother had taught me that lesson, and I might never have learned it if she hadn't spirited herself away in a suicidal opioid overdose. I lived because she'd given birth to me, and yet, that same act was also at the root of the postpartum depression that took her life. The wisdom and kindness that come from something as unfair as what happened to her will never justify those cruel fates, but, in them, we can, at the very least, find the strength we need to keep going.

Sometimes, I think it was only the knowledge of my mom's suicide that kept me from following in her footsteps after Rale died.

The second subject faded away in serene comfort. I could have ended the movement there, but I didn't. An interval of a sole minor third entered on the piano in the paucity of the second subject's release, steering the music back into the dark.

It was the calm before the development that followed, and the development was the storm. It raged in all its contrapuntal fury. Sequence progressions broke across the texture like ocean waves, beating the music into despair, cutting it down to size until, in a dark reflection of the second subject's serenity, until there was nothing except the spare, long notes I played above the emptiness, in a slow chromatic descent—diminuendo steps—that melted into sweetness. The clouds cleared, and the music letting in a sliver sunlight that strengthened and depend, carrying us back to our joy: the second subject, recapitulated before the first.

At that moment, I noticed a certain ghost standing by the balustrade on the ground floor, at the bottom of the grand staircase. His eyes were fixed on me, and I played a wrong note.

Mr. Himichi had that effect on me.

In that moment, time stretched. My thoughts went long, but I quickly snapped back to the present and turned my mistake into a grace note, and went on in spite of it—just like my mother had taught me.

For a second time, the second subject died away in its serene comfort, and for a second time, the minor third entered. But this time, there was no storm, just a return to the mournful, rocking melody with which we began. The movement ended softly—slow, and meditative—with its long, low notes vacillating up and down. A B, A B, A B, coming to a rest on the dominant chord of the home key, where it ended, like a question mark.

Then, silence. The green swirls petered out, and everything was still.

Holy silence. Holy stillness.

Everyone applauded. My praises were sung by both the living and the dead.

The last gout of spores flowed out from my clarinet. The trails of spores swirling around me fell to the floor as I lost my grip on my powers. I grasped at my clarinet gingerly in my claws, keeping it from hitting the floor.

Their praise totally overwhelmed me, and in all the best ways. My lips trembled as I stared at them. The Hall of Echoes rumbled with their acclaim. The sound was like rain.

And in the middle of it all, Mr. Himichi walked up to me and put his hand on my shoulder, and I felt his touch, as real as flesh.

"Bravo, Genneth," he said, "bravo." Tears ran down the wrinkles beside his eyes. "You have done good work," he added. "You should be proud of it." He smiled. "I know I am."

I just about lost it right then and there.

Mr. Himichi looked past me, his eyes widening in surprise.

"It seems you have company," he said.

Turning around, I found myself face to face with Lark's weeping face.

But before the singer could even open her mouth to speak, the sky bellowed with wyrmsong.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.