Melody Resonance's Arc

Chapter 6 of 9

Melody followed the tall rabbit into the next branch and stopped at the first shell. It sat in a shallow scrape in the wall, wax black, no bigger than a plum. The theremin's needle sank hard beside it. Melody reached, then pulled their hand back. One crack in the pack, against a stone, against a stumble, and the shell would drink the air from their lungs before either of them could name it. The tall rabbit watched. He would not carry them. He had already said so with his silence. "I need something to hold these," Melody said. "Something the sound cannot chew through." The tall rabbit tipped his ears back the way they had come. "Two turns behind us. A door in the wall. She trades. You have paid her once. She remembers." Melody left the shell in its scrape and went back. Two turns, and the passage widened around a squat mushroom hut set into the tunnel wall, its cap dark red, its door carved with knots. Melody knocked with the flat of their hand, softly. The door opened on its own. Inside, a low room. A rune-marked turntable sat on a shelf. A black record rested on its plate, a rabbit shape cut into the label. On the floor stood a shadow with long ears and no face, tall as a man, waiting. "Toll," the shadow said. Its voice came from the record, not the mouth it did not have. "You cracked one of his shells above my roof. You owe." Melody set the drum down and thought. They had a carrot left, half a loaf, the theremin, the drum. They needed all of it. "I have a song," they said. "The last true note of my forest. I can pour it into your record. One turn only. Then I keep the rest." The shadow tilted its head. The turntable clicked. "Pour it, and I lend you a box that eats what leaks. Shells inside will not speak until you break them. Return the box when the tyrant is thin. Fail, and the box eats you instead." Melody lifted the theremin and drew the note out of the jar at their hip. It rose thin and green, a wren's morning call from a year gone. The record drank it. The label's rabbit turned once and stilled. The shadow bent and lifted a small iron box from the floor, hinged, lined in black felt, and set it in Melody's hands. It weighed like a stone but hummed against nothing. Melody fit the first plum-shell inside on the walk back. The lid closed. The theremin's needle went flat. The tall rabbit sniffed the box once and started forward again, deeper, and Melody followed with a container that would hold the tyrant's whole hoard, one shell at a time, and a debt now ticking behind them.