Chapter 72: Soil Singing
They rode out to the farmland in the early morning light, the three of them, Darion, Garren and Seren.
The ride was short and quiet. Seren had her leather pack across her back and the wrapped bundle of tools across her lap, holding it with care.
She hadn’t said much since coming downstairs, just followed when Garren indicated the horses and mounted up without comment.
Darion rode and looked at the land as they approached.
He had been out here once before, with Garren, in what felt like considerably longer ago than it actually was.
He had crouched and picked up the soil and felt it crumble to nothing between his fingers, pale and dry and stripped of whatever quality made soil worth farming. The furrow lines still visible in it like a memory the ground was keeping of what it used to be.
It looked the same now as it had then. Flat and pale and deeply unimpressive in the early morning light, like the landscape communicated its own exhaustion.
This is what she’s supposed to fix, he thought, looking at it.
They stopped at the field’s edge. Seren dismounted before Darion had fully pulled his horse to a halt, dropping down. Having this focused energy, he had clearly been anticipating since he found out she was a soil singer.
She walked to the edge of the field and stood there, looking at it. Not the way Darion had looked at it, not assessing the problem, but instead reading something he couldn’t read.
He dismounted and came to stand a few feet behind her.
"You don’t mind if we watch?" he asked.
"Not at all," she said, without turning around.
She crouched and picked up a handful of the pale soil, the same thing Darion had done on his first visit.
She let it run through her fingers slowly, rubbing it between her thumb and palm, feeling something in the texture that his fingers hadn’t been able to find. Then she stood, wiped her hand on her side, and opened the leather pack.
Darion watched.
He had been expecting something that looked like what magic was supposed to look like, y’know hands raised, light, some visible gathering of power that announced what was about to happen.
He had his own ability as a reference point and his ability had green light and black mist and the distinct visual quality of something supernatural occurring.
What came out of Seren’s pack was a collection of small containers. Clay pots sealed with wax, a few glass bottles stopped with cork, one flat wooden box that she opened to check before closing again.
Each container was labeled in a things he couldn’t read from where he stood. The substances inside were visible through the glass, powders and fine dusts in different colors. A deep purple in one bottle. Something red and granular in a clay pot. A fine gold dust that caught the morning light differently from the others. Blue, almost grey, in a wider container that she seemingly handled more carefully than the rest.
Darion stared at them.
"Not what I expected," he said.
Seren glanced back at him. "What did you expect?"
"Less... organization."
She almost smiled. "Soilsinging isn’t raw power. The dusts are prepared. Each one addresses a different deficiency in the soil. Acidity, mineral content, biological activity and structure. You don’t just sing at dead earth and hope. You diagnose first, then treat, then sing." She looked back at the field. "This soil has been burned and stripped and left alone for years. It’s not one problem. It’s several."
"Hmm, I see... I see," Darion said softly.
She picked up the pack and walked out onto the field.
Darion and Garren followed to the edge and stopped there, watching her move through the pale earth.
She worked slowly and with complete deliberateness: opening one container, taking a small pinch of the content between two fingers, placing it at a specific point in the field.
Then moving. Another point, another pinch, different container. The spacing between placements wasn’t random. She was covering ground in a pattern that only became legible after watching for a while, a grid of sorts, but not mechanical, adjusted at each point based on something she was reading in the soil itself.
Crouching occasionally to examine the ground before deciding where the next placement went.
"She’s mapping it," Garren said quietly, beside Darion.
"Yes," Darion said.
They watched her work across the field for a while, the colored dusts barely visible against the pale earth from this distance, small marks in a pattern that was becoming clearer the more of it she completed.
Purple in the northern section, heaviest concentration. Red distributed more evenly through the center. The gold dust placed sparingly, single points at what seemed like significant intervals.
The blue-grey handled last, moved across the far southern edge with the most care of anything she had placed.
When she reached the far end of the field she stopped, looked back across the whole of it, made one adjustment — walking back to move a placement of the gold dust by about two feet — and then walked to the center of the field and stood still.
Darion watched.
For a moment nothing happened. She was just standing in a pale field in the morning light, a young woman in a tattered gown, looking at the ground.
Then she began to hum.
"This is where the soil singing begins?" Darion asked, but he already knew the answer.
Garren might have wanted to reply with "Obviously" but then, that would be disrespectful so he went with:
"Yes."
The humming was soft at first, controlled, a single sustained note that she held and then moved from, not a song in the sense of words or melody exactly, more like a vocal tone that shifted in pitch and quality in a way that seemed to be responding to something rather than leading it.
Darion felt it in his chest slightly, the way certain low frequencies registered physically rather than just through the ears.
The dust moved.
Not dramatically, a small thing first. The purple dust at the northern end of the field lifted slightly, a centimeter off the ground, and fell again.
Then the red in the center shifted, the individual granules rolling without wind to roll them. The gold points caught the light differently, as though something in them had activated.
"It’s responding," Darion said, barely above a whisper.
Garren said nothing. He was watching... focused.
Seren’s humming shifted upward in pitch. The movement in the dust became more definite: lifting further, the purple cloud at the north end rising a foot off the ground and hanging there.
The red granules in the center began moving toward each other, slow lines of red drawing across the pale soil.
The gold points remained fixed but glowed with each change in her tone.
Then the blue-grey at the southern edge rose all at once, a soft cloud of it, and began moving toward the center without wind, drifting inward with a movement that had nothing to do with air current.
Seren’s voice changed quality, something tighter in it, more focused. Her posture shifted, her shoulders dropping, her weight settling, the stance of someone committing the whole of their attention to a single thing.
"Step back," she said.
Not loud, but she needed them to do it ASAP.
Darion and Garren stepped back from the field’s edgequickly.
The dust from all four sections of the field was rising now, lifting off the ground in streams that converged toward the center where Seren stood.
She moved away from the center point herself, walking backward with measured steps, keeping her humming continuous as she retreated toward the field’s edge where Darion and Garren were standing.
She reached them and stopped, still humming, eyes on the center of the field.
They watched.
The streams of colored dust met at the center and the mixing of them produced a color that wasn’t quite any of the four contributing to it.
It was something between purple and gold with the red running through it, rising in a spiral that turned slowly as it rose.
The soil beneath it began to move, the pale dry earth lifting in a thin layer and feeding into the base of the rotating mass, mixing with the dust, the two combining into something different from either.
The rotation accelerated.
The mass became a whirlwind, tight and controlled, not violent, spinning like it knew exactly what it was doing.
The soil that fed into it came back down changed and darker, falling in a ring around the base of the whirlwind and spreading outward as more came through.
The color of the field at the center had already shifted from the pale exhausted grey Darion had ridden out to look at twice, to something darker and denser, the soil visibly different in the light.
The whirlwind moved.
It wasn’t random, instead it tracked outward from the center in a slow expanding spiral, carrying the transformation with it, the dark soil spreading in its wake, the pale ground ahead of it waiting.
Wherever it passed, what it left behind was not the same as what it had found.
Darion stood at the field’s edge and watched the field change color in front of him.