The Tyndarite Frequency
There is so much more that we do not know that we do not know.
"The study of resonance, both as a tonal phenomenon and as a theoretical substratum of reality, has long eluded the confines of orthodox scripture. While the Eternal Hymn has been the cornerstone of our religious and spiritual foundation for generations, little has been said — let alone written — about the source of its frequency, or whether deeper strata of that tone might exist beyond our reach."
Silien Daro stared at the closing paragraph of the treatise he had read through time and time again. The copy he had in his hands was the only remaining one, the rest having been destroyed by the church, which would have been the fate of this copy too had the Sonorous Brotherhood, his own order, not managed to acquire it.
The flap of his tent suddenly blew open as a gust of frigid mountain air blew in, bringing with it a slight dusting of snow. Silien grabbed his coat and wrapped it tightly around himself before pocketing the small book and exiting the warmth of the tent.
The chill wind blew from the open canyons and rocky valleys in the distance, the Tyndarite Escarpment stretching out before him. He had been sent here as a part of an expedition, consisting of himself and two assistants. Said assistants were situated in a tent not far from his, and one of them was fiddling with equipment outside the tent.
Silien approached the assistants tent, and it was during this short walk that he gazed at the subject of their research, the whole reason for this expedition. There, hovering maybe 20 feet above the general area of the assistants tent was a humongous, blue crystalline creature. It was shaped like a diamond, and in its center glowed a singular eye that seemed to be looking down upon the miniscule people bustling about underneath it. This creature was known to the world as a Resonant, and Silien's expedition had been tasked with learning more about its enigmatic kind.
Silien narrowed his eyes against the wind as it howled between the jagged rocks like a distant lament. The snow, fine and floating like ash, caught in the folds of his coat and in the creases of his brow. Every movement echoed in the brittle silence; the crunch of boots on frost-hardened earth, the faint metallic rattle of instruments from the assistants’ tent, the low hum that vibrated faintly in the air, ever present.
The Resonant hovered in its stillness, yet it felt anything but passive. There was a density to the silence around it, as if the very air was folded inward in contemplation. No words passed between Silien and the being, but he swore that it could feel him watching. He certainly felt it watching him. When he arrived to the tent, his assistant, Orven, adjusted a tuning frame, coaxing it into alignment with fingers trembling from the cold. The wind made the frame hum faintly, not in a melodic tone, but in something... adjacent to music. Silien paused, head cocked. Was that interference... or response? He stepped closer. "Has it shifted at all?" he asked, nearly shouting to be heard over the winds. Orven glanced up, teeth chattering slightly. "Not since sunrise. Still aligned on the same harmonic." He tapped a chart pinned to the tent pole, its ink smudged from melted snow.
"It’s still echoing the same sequence we logged yesterday. We think it’s mimicking us." "Mimicking..." Silien repeated, more to himself than as a question. He looked again at the floating monolith, its glowing eye placid and unblinking. "Let's play the hymn to it again." He commanded. His assistants looked at him for a passing moment before they began the preparations.
The hollow in the rock was cold, still and windless for once, as if the mountains themselves had quieted to listen. Silien stood at the center, flanked by Maela and Orven, each bundled in wool and layered leathers, their instruments arrayed on stone outcroppings. Tuning forks, resonance bowls, a bowed wooden psaltery, and a pipe organ powered by a set of bellows. Every element had been designed to replicate the Eternal Hymn as faithfully as possible, as it had been passed down not just as music, but as a sacred defense against the Adversary. The Resonant hovered above them, its blue crystalline form casting refracted light across the snow like shattered stained glass. Its eye, unblinking, watched in total stillness. Silien gave a quiet nod. Orven began to turn the crank that powered the bellows, and Maela’s bow began to slide against the strings of the psaltery. Silien himself raised a spiral-shaped horn to his lips and played the first notes. Clear and pure, resonant with something deeper than the stones surrounding them. The others joined in, slowly, until the Hymn formed in the air like breath visible in cold. It was beautiful. Not just music, but intention made audible. A lattice of tonality and meaning. The old verses, passed down through parchment and oral tradition, woven together into something far larger than the instruments or the people playing them.
For several moments, nothing happened. Then, there was a shift. The air thickened. Snow on the ledges began to swirl gently upward, as if caught in a breeze that none of them could feel. The Resonant stirred. Its core began to glow, softly at first, then with increasing brilliance — not blinding, but suffused with a deep, internal light. And then it sang. It was a deep, bassy undertone to the Hymn that only enriched it further, empowering it beyond its already awe-inspiring heights. The three of them could not help but weep as they continued to play. Not from sorrow, but from the overwhelming sensation that they were standing at the edge of something eternal. The music had reached down into their marrow and tugged at something so very primal within them. "How does it know the melody?" Maela managed to ask, her voice trembling like the strings beneath her fingers. "I... I have no idea." Silien admitted, staring up at the Resonant with wide, wet eyes. He raised his hand and signaled for the others to stop playing. The last notes of the Hymn faded into the mountain air like breath dissipating into snow.
But the Resonant did not fall silent. Instead, it began a new verse. Not a refrain. A continuation. Notes none of them had ever heard before floated forth from the great crystal body. The sound was raw and haunting, yet without a doubt a part of the Hymn, like a hidden passage in the Hallowed Hymnal that had lain undiscovered since the Godfall. “Write that down! Hurry, before it stops!” Silien cried, his voice cracking. They scrambled, ink freezing at the tips of quills, parchment fluttering in shaking hands, some writing on the backs of old maps and the margins of scrap paper. Maela abandoned her gloves entirely to keep pace with the swelling cadence, uncaring of the real possibility of frostbite as she scratched out notes. The Resonant continued to sing. It felt like the creature was not merely reciting but revealing. That is what this was. A revelation. When it finally went quiet, the silence it left behind felt heavier than the song.
Silien stared down at the pages now heavy with notation. The verse was unlike anything they'd ever heard, but unmistakably a part of the Hymn. “Did it just…” Orven began, then faltered. “Yes.” Silien said, voice barely above a whisper. “It did.” And above them, the Resonant floated still, its great eye dimmed again, as though it had returned to slumber. Or perhaps contemplation. Silien swallowed hard and looked toward the ridge where they had placed the tonal recorders — curious, bulky mechanisms of brass and wood fitted with finely tensioned membranes, etched lovingly by hand. They were archaic, yes, but sensitive. "Check the recorders." he said, his voice still hoarse with reverence. Maela and Orven nodded and made their way to the instruments, half-tripping through the shallow snowdrifts. Silien remained near the center of the circle, his gaze never quite leaving the hovering giant, now still as ice, its great eye dimmed to a dull, sleeping blue. After a few minutes, Maela called out. "Silien... you need to see this!"
He rushed over, boots sinking in the snow, and looked down at the wax-toned scrolls being unwound from the recorder’s belly. Fine grooves scored the surface in delicate spirals, more intricate than anything they'd captured before. “This one started before we even began to play, Silien.” Maela said, pointing to a shallow, pulsing waveform at the beginning of the strip. “It’s as if it was responding to a silence we didn’t know we were keeping.” Silien blinked. The pattern was... orderly. Not like interference or feedback, but intentional. Rhythmic. He grabbed a magnifier and leaned in. And then he saw it; hidden beneath the primary groove was a secondary etching, so faint it could barely be seen without the tool. A modulation riding within the note, like a whisper concealed within a shout. “There’s another tone layered under the main frequency." he murmured. “A harmony?” Orven asked. “No... not quite. It’s something else.” Silien looked at the rest of the scroll. The deeper layer ran through the entire recording. Not just the new verse, but the one they had played. “The Resonant didn’t just respond.” He said. “It amplified... no... it modified what we played.” He paused, brows knitting. “It corrected it.” A long silence followed.
“Do you think… do you think we’ve been performing it wrong?” Maela asked quietly. "All this time?" "No use discussing this in the cold. Come." Silien said and gestured for his assistants to follow. Before long, they sat huddled around the main table in Silien’s tent, the lamp casting long, flickering shadows across their weary faces. The freshly annotated scroll lay unspooled across the surface, pinned at the corners with stones to keep the wind from lifting it. No one had spoken for a while. The only sound was the soft scribbling of Maela’s quill as she transcribed the additional markings from the recorder strip onto proper notation. “We could be wrong.” Orven finally said, his voice quiet, as though afraid the creature outside might hear. “M-Maybe it was just echoing us. Maybe this wasn’t intentional.” “No.” Silien replied immediately, almost too quickly. “It continued the Hymn, Orven. Brand new notation. You think that's a simple mistake or happenstance?” “And improved it.” Maela interjected, finishing the last stroke of ink before setting the quill down. “That new verse, Silien. It fits perfectly. Like a key turning in a lock.” Silien leaned back in his chair, folding his arms. The firelight caught the fine lines in his face; tired, weatherworn lines that spoke of years spent chasing half-truths through dusty archives and hollow repositories. But there was something else in his eyes now. Something alight. “If this really is part of the original Hymn...” he began, the attention of his assistants rapt. “...then the Progenitor only gave us a fraction of it. Enough to seal the Adversary, yes, but…” He gestured vaguely, toward the snow-blown opening of the tent. “My working theory is that the Resonant are somehow tuned to its frequency, and so are familiar with the entire Hymn. But if all this is true then..." “Then we’ve been playing with a single note of an entire symphony.” Maela whispered. Silien nodded.
“And if that’s true…” Orven’s voice trailed off, but his meaning was clear. They all sat in silence again, the gravity of their realization pressing down like a cloak of lead on their shoulders. “What do we do with this?” Maela finally asked. “If we take this back... if the church learns of it-” "They won't." Silien snapped. "We need to understand what it means before we do anything else. We can’t afford blind reverence. That’s what got humanity into this situation to begin with, faith without comprehension.” "So... what do we do?" Orven asked meekly. "We send back a preliminary report to the Brotherhood, omitting a few key details until we can be sure of what it is we are reporting on. We will tell them only that we have discovered an anomalous frequency in the voices of the Resonant." Silien stated with confidence that seemed to embolden his assistants as well, who began to assemble a report. "What do we call the frequency in the reports?" Maela inquired. Silien looked outside, at the floating crystalline being and the Tyndarite Escarpment that expanded into the horizon. He closed the flap of the tent and turned towards his assistants. "Henceforth, we shall refer to this phenomenon as the Tyndarite Frequency." He proclaimed. Maela and Orven began to write in earnest, while Silien sat back down, his eyes glued to the waveforms etched onto the membranous vellum laid on the table. He shuddered, but it was not due to the cold.
Silien Daro stared at the closing paragraph of the treatise he had read through time and time again. The copy he had in his hands was the only remaining one, the rest having been destroyed by the church, which would have been the fate of this copy too had the Sonorous Brotherhood, his own order, not managed to acquire it.
The flap of his tent suddenly blew open as a gust of frigid mountain air blew in, bringing with it a slight dusting of snow. Silien grabbed his coat and wrapped it tightly around himself before pocketing the small book and exiting the warmth of the tent.
The chill wind blew from the open canyons and rocky valleys in the distance, the Tyndarite Escarpment stretching out before him. He had been sent here as a part of an expedition, consisting of himself and two assistants. Said assistants were situated in a tent not far from his, and one of them was fiddling with equipment outside the tent.
Silien approached the assistants tent, and it was during this short walk that he gazed at the subject of their research, the whole reason for this expedition. There, hovering maybe 20 feet above the general area of the assistants tent was a humongous, blue crystalline creature. It was shaped like a diamond, and in its center glowed a singular eye that seemed to be looking down upon the miniscule people bustling about underneath it. This creature was known to the world as a Resonant, and Silien's expedition had been tasked with learning more about its enigmatic kind.
Silien narrowed his eyes against the wind as it howled between the jagged rocks like a distant lament. The snow, fine and floating like ash, caught in the folds of his coat and in the creases of his brow. Every movement echoed in the brittle silence; the crunch of boots on frost-hardened earth, the faint metallic rattle of instruments from the assistants’ tent, the low hum that vibrated faintly in the air, ever present.
The Resonant hovered in its stillness, yet it felt anything but passive. There was a density to the silence around it, as if the very air was folded inward in contemplation. No words passed between Silien and the being, but he swore that it could feel him watching. He certainly felt it watching him. When he arrived to the tent, his assistant, Orven, adjusted a tuning frame, coaxing it into alignment with fingers trembling from the cold. The wind made the frame hum faintly, not in a melodic tone, but in something... adjacent to music. Silien paused, head cocked. Was that interference... or response? He stepped closer. "Has it shifted at all?" he asked, nearly shouting to be heard over the winds. Orven glanced up, teeth chattering slightly. "Not since sunrise. Still aligned on the same harmonic." He tapped a chart pinned to the tent pole, its ink smudged from melted snow.
"It’s still echoing the same sequence we logged yesterday. We think it’s mimicking us." "Mimicking..." Silien repeated, more to himself than as a question. He looked again at the floating monolith, its glowing eye placid and unblinking. "Let's play the hymn to it again." He commanded. His assistants looked at him for a passing moment before they began the preparations.
The hollow in the rock was cold, still and windless for once, as if the mountains themselves had quieted to listen. Silien stood at the center, flanked by Maela and Orven, each bundled in wool and layered leathers, their instruments arrayed on stone outcroppings. Tuning forks, resonance bowls, a bowed wooden psaltery, and a pipe organ powered by a set of bellows. Every element had been designed to replicate the Eternal Hymn as faithfully as possible, as it had been passed down not just as music, but as a sacred defense against the Adversary. The Resonant hovered above them, its blue crystalline form casting refracted light across the snow like shattered stained glass. Its eye, unblinking, watched in total stillness. Silien gave a quiet nod. Orven began to turn the crank that powered the bellows, and Maela’s bow began to slide against the strings of the psaltery. Silien himself raised a spiral-shaped horn to his lips and played the first notes. Clear and pure, resonant with something deeper than the stones surrounding them. The others joined in, slowly, until the Hymn formed in the air like breath visible in cold. It was beautiful. Not just music, but intention made audible. A lattice of tonality and meaning. The old verses, passed down through parchment and oral tradition, woven together into something far larger than the instruments or the people playing them.
For several moments, nothing happened. Then, there was a shift. The air thickened. Snow on the ledges began to swirl gently upward, as if caught in a breeze that none of them could feel. The Resonant stirred. Its core began to glow, softly at first, then with increasing brilliance — not blinding, but suffused with a deep, internal light. And then it sang. It was a deep, bassy undertone to the Hymn that only enriched it further, empowering it beyond its already awe-inspiring heights. The three of them could not help but weep as they continued to play. Not from sorrow, but from the overwhelming sensation that they were standing at the edge of something eternal. The music had reached down into their marrow and tugged at something so very primal within them. "How does it know the melody?" Maela managed to ask, her voice trembling like the strings beneath her fingers. "I... I have no idea." Silien admitted, staring up at the Resonant with wide, wet eyes. He raised his hand and signaled for the others to stop playing. The last notes of the Hymn faded into the mountain air like breath dissipating into snow.
But the Resonant did not fall silent. Instead, it began a new verse. Not a refrain. A continuation. Notes none of them had ever heard before floated forth from the great crystal body. The sound was raw and haunting, yet without a doubt a part of the Hymn, like a hidden passage in the Hallowed Hymnal that had lain undiscovered since the Godfall. “Write that down! Hurry, before it stops!” Silien cried, his voice cracking. They scrambled, ink freezing at the tips of quills, parchment fluttering in shaking hands, some writing on the backs of old maps and the margins of scrap paper. Maela abandoned her gloves entirely to keep pace with the swelling cadence, uncaring of the real possibility of frostbite as she scratched out notes. The Resonant continued to sing. It felt like the creature was not merely reciting but revealing. That is what this was. A revelation. When it finally went quiet, the silence it left behind felt heavier than the song.
Silien stared down at the pages now heavy with notation. The verse was unlike anything they'd ever heard, but unmistakably a part of the Hymn. “Did it just…” Orven began, then faltered. “Yes.” Silien said, voice barely above a whisper. “It did.” And above them, the Resonant floated still, its great eye dimmed again, as though it had returned to slumber. Or perhaps contemplation. Silien swallowed hard and looked toward the ridge where they had placed the tonal recorders — curious, bulky mechanisms of brass and wood fitted with finely tensioned membranes, etched lovingly by hand. They were archaic, yes, but sensitive. "Check the recorders." he said, his voice still hoarse with reverence. Maela and Orven nodded and made their way to the instruments, half-tripping through the shallow snowdrifts. Silien remained near the center of the circle, his gaze never quite leaving the hovering giant, now still as ice, its great eye dimmed to a dull, sleeping blue. After a few minutes, Maela called out. "Silien... you need to see this!"
He rushed over, boots sinking in the snow, and looked down at the wax-toned scrolls being unwound from the recorder’s belly. Fine grooves scored the surface in delicate spirals, more intricate than anything they'd captured before. “This one started before we even began to play, Silien.” Maela said, pointing to a shallow, pulsing waveform at the beginning of the strip. “It’s as if it was responding to a silence we didn’t know we were keeping.” Silien blinked. The pattern was... orderly. Not like interference or feedback, but intentional. Rhythmic. He grabbed a magnifier and leaned in. And then he saw it; hidden beneath the primary groove was a secondary etching, so faint it could barely be seen without the tool. A modulation riding within the note, like a whisper concealed within a shout. “There’s another tone layered under the main frequency." he murmured. “A harmony?” Orven asked. “No... not quite. It’s something else.” Silien looked at the rest of the scroll. The deeper layer ran through the entire recording. Not just the new verse, but the one they had played. “The Resonant didn’t just respond.” He said. “It amplified... no... it modified what we played.” He paused, brows knitting. “It corrected it.” A long silence followed.
“Do you think… do you think we’ve been performing it wrong?” Maela asked quietly. "All this time?" "No use discussing this in the cold. Come." Silien said and gestured for his assistants to follow. Before long, they sat huddled around the main table in Silien’s tent, the lamp casting long, flickering shadows across their weary faces. The freshly annotated scroll lay unspooled across the surface, pinned at the corners with stones to keep the wind from lifting it. No one had spoken for a while. The only sound was the soft scribbling of Maela’s quill as she transcribed the additional markings from the recorder strip onto proper notation. “We could be wrong.” Orven finally said, his voice quiet, as though afraid the creature outside might hear. “M-Maybe it was just echoing us. Maybe this wasn’t intentional.” “No.” Silien replied immediately, almost too quickly. “It continued the Hymn, Orven. Brand new notation. You think that's a simple mistake or happenstance?” “And improved it.” Maela interjected, finishing the last stroke of ink before setting the quill down. “That new verse, Silien. It fits perfectly. Like a key turning in a lock.” Silien leaned back in his chair, folding his arms. The firelight caught the fine lines in his face; tired, weatherworn lines that spoke of years spent chasing half-truths through dusty archives and hollow repositories. But there was something else in his eyes now. Something alight. “If this really is part of the original Hymn...” he began, the attention of his assistants rapt. “...then the Progenitor only gave us a fraction of it. Enough to seal the Adversary, yes, but…” He gestured vaguely, toward the snow-blown opening of the tent. “My working theory is that the Resonant are somehow tuned to its frequency, and so are familiar with the entire Hymn. But if all this is true then..." “Then we’ve been playing with a single note of an entire symphony.” Maela whispered. Silien nodded.
“And if that’s true…” Orven’s voice trailed off, but his meaning was clear. They all sat in silence again, the gravity of their realization pressing down like a cloak of lead on their shoulders. “What do we do with this?” Maela finally asked. “If we take this back... if the church learns of it-” "They won't." Silien snapped. "We need to understand what it means before we do anything else. We can’t afford blind reverence. That’s what got humanity into this situation to begin with, faith without comprehension.” "So... what do we do?" Orven asked meekly. "We send back a preliminary report to the Brotherhood, omitting a few key details until we can be sure of what it is we are reporting on. We will tell them only that we have discovered an anomalous frequency in the voices of the Resonant." Silien stated with confidence that seemed to embolden his assistants as well, who began to assemble a report. "What do we call the frequency in the reports?" Maela inquired. Silien looked outside, at the floating crystalline being and the Tyndarite Escarpment that expanded into the horizon. He closed the flap of the tent and turned towards his assistants. "Henceforth, we shall refer to this phenomenon as the Tyndarite Frequency." He proclaimed. Maela and Orven began to write in earnest, while Silien sat back down, his eyes glued to the waveforms etched onto the membranous vellum laid on the table. He shuddered, but it was not due to the cold.
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