2025 Star Festival Prompt
The Calling (10) : A beautiful melody drifts on the air from somewhere far away. The vocals are in a language you don't quite recognize, but feel somehow familiar to you. Something about the song calls to you, but no matter where you go, the song seems to sound the same distance away. The longer it goes on, the more emotional the song becomes--and the more emotional you become. Something about the song is possessive and consuming, like it's all you can think of. Something resonates in you as the song crescendos, and the feeling is at its strongest--be they good, bad, anything, but suddenly the song fades, and there's only an emptiness inside of you. The feeling of loss is strong, and can leave someone feeling emotionally numb. Someone out there was calling to you, and you couldn't find them.
The first time Roka heard the mysterious melody, he was mesmerized. As someone who composed music as his favorite hobby, the college student immediately grabbed a pencil and a paper with musical staff lines printed on it in order to attempt to jot down the notes. As he continued to listen, he found he was reminded of the voice that called out to Elsa at the beginning of the movie, Frozen 2. More than wanting to write down the enchanting song and decipher its lyrics as much as its notes, however, he wanted to follow the tune to its source.
Was the song a call or cry for help? Of longing and sorrow? He couldn’t understand the words as hard as he tried to make them out. They weren’t English or Japanese, the two languages he could speak fluently, but the song still seemed familiar somehow. It was so odd; like its familiarity transcended languages altogether. Roka couldn’t for the life of him figure out why, though.
Curious, Roka waited until his college classes were over for the day before attempting to follow the song to the source. The problem was it was harder to pinpoint than he’d thought. Was it coming from the park? A lot of strange happenings had been said to have been going on around there recently. If he went there, he decided, the plants were also more likely to block out the extra sounds of the city that made it difficult to hear the mysterious melody. It might have been easier to tell where it was coming from even if not from the park itself, especially because no matter where else he went, it didn’t seem to be getting closer or farther away. Therefore, he figured, the park was just as good a place to start looking as any.
The music-lover noticed the sun was setting as he entered the park. It added to the atmosphere along with the beautiful tune that seemed to wrap itself about Roka, enveloping him in its embrace. It felt and sounded both loving and lonely at the same time and he longed to understand what the lyrics meant. If only there was some way he could record it…but when he tried to do so with his phone, nothing of the strange song would register. Eventually, he simply sat down in the grass and tried to frantically write the notes as he heard them, singing along a little wordlessly while trying to record his own voice if not the sound that only he seemed to hear.
Gradually, the music began to build and Roka felt a blossom of pure passion bloom in him along with it. It began to move him to tears, so badly that he soon failed to keep up wiping his eyes fast enough to be able to see the paper he was trying to write music on and eventually had to give up. His paper had become soaked and delicate with his tears anyway, so he set it aside and lay back in the grass, gazing up at the multicolored sky. The emotional intensity at that moment in time felt like too much for him to do anything else. Tears still streaming down the sides of his face, he closed his emerald eyes, clutching his hands to his chest as if he feared his heart would beat out of his chest if he did not.
At some point, he must have slipped into unconsciousness, because when he woke, only the stars directly above him and the far away lights of the city gave him any indication his eyes were open. He sat up slowly and realized he couldn’t hear the moving music from before. A final tear fell from the tip of his nose to fall on his hands, one of which he discovered was holding something: an Emerald Star Charm.
What a shame he hadn’t been able to find the singer of the song; the creator of that wonderful melody. It was enough to leave him numb for the rest of the night as he slowly gathered his things, got to his feet, and slowly made his way home in the dark.
