A Tale of Crescendo ~ Chapter 5: The War Begins; Chapter 6: The Great Hall
A Tale of Crescendo ~ Chapter 5: The War Begins; Chapter 6: The Great Hall
To their amazement the splendorous domed hall contains lush trees, vegetable gardens, and steamy waterpools. Dwelling within are an ebony bird, a tanager and falcons above; a wolfling and baerre cub scrapping freely; and a plethora of peculiar creatures resembling a bouscat hare, terrapin, racoon, antelop, zebra, kangera, tegu lizard, penguins, lynxes and nocturnal omnivores they cannot describe.
To their amazement the splendorous domed hall contains lush trees, vegetable gardens, and steamy waterpools. Dwelling within are an ebony bird, a tanager and falcons above; a wolfling and baerre cub scrapping freely; and a plethora of peculiar creatures resembling a bouscat hare, terrapin, racoon, antelop, zebra, kangera, tegu lizard, penguins, lynxes and nocturnal omnivores they cannot describe.
The two tribes of Crescendo and their chiefs collide in shocking conflicts of the mind, body and soul, while a covert guild discovers a great hall named Wynterlyn inside the highest peak. As the winter wonderland is unveiled and the decades wind back to an ill-fated Minuet sonata, the architect of calamity and misfortune is laid bare.
A fictional novella making its published debut in Psychedelic Scene Books, A Tale of Crescendo blends Earth’s evolutionary prehistory with an Aquarian motif, and literary allusions to Golden Age psychedelia as the enigmatic Dilian is revealed within the Wynterlyn hall.
(A Tale of Crescendo ~ Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4)
A Tale of Crescendo ~ A New World Created by Bill Kurzenberger
CHAPTER FIVE
The War Begins
Year Twenty-Five
It is a time of war. Nine months after the first crescendo and confrontation at the signaling point, the Wescendant and Escendant tribes continue bombarding the other’s armed forces with losses on both sides of the river. The slingshot fashioned by Juna to volley care packages has been duplicated along the west bank and weaponized for hurling stones towards E’scend. In response, the catapult once built with good intent by Tilian is now used by Arch Dilian’s cadre for fiery air attacks westward.
Inheriting the chieftain title of Arch of We’scend during his father’s captivity, Kaedan has organized bands of his finest warriors to invade the Escenda capital and rescue his father, some overtly and others not. However following the battle at Lepe Point the river’s water level has remained the highest in two decades, and is even more indomitable during the progressive storm.
During the dead of nights in an uninhabited area upriver, the western warriors have been stealthily building a rock bridge on which to cross the Shendoa. However as they reach the middle on the half-built catwalk they are fatally pierced by arrows from eastern archers hiding along the shore, preventing further incursions.
Timucula Tribe depicted at St. John River, Fort Matanzas, Florida 1591
Within the crimson woods to the east, the true architect of decades of dastardly mishaps oversees the war and begins to reveal themselves. Incarcerated within a rooted prison cell, Aedan has been tormented for nearly a year. A broken man, he has been visited only by three figures who physically and psychologically overwhelm his mind, body and soul with conflicting emotions.
Dilian appears dressed in black and offers orchard fruit, water and a libation made from the two as he attempts to reason with his opposing Arch. When Aedan requests to return home to Wescenda, the slender Dilian sarcastically replies that he already is home and leaves him be. Later, a stout dungeonmaster tortures him in stockades as Aedan curses at him. Occasionally in the dark he is cared for by a veiled mystic maiden, spurring his confused loins while offering wine mixed with eye of newt, absinthe, lead, and a hair plucked from Aedan’s head.
The Beaver Wars and The Mourning Wars circa 1600s (edited for context)
On Dilian’s birthday the summer solstice, he cheerily announces to Aedan that he will be permitted to return home to We’scend after one year. Wearing royal robes, a crocodile-skin chapeau and a Cheshire grin, Dilian presents a chalice and a smelly, salted herb to revive him in the dank cell. Before liberating his opponent, Dilian asks only one thing in return: that Aedan utter their name. Stumped and disoriented, his mind drifts to the past.
Through a mental fog, Aedan recollects his account to the Arch who has manipulated and gained his trust while offering freedom. When prompted he recalls his early encounter while estranged from Ivera with a cloaked seraph, beckoning him to cross the river with her siren’s call. As his memory is stirred, he relives the first time he was swept downstream before being found by his tribe the following day.
At long last Aedan remembers the enigmatic enchantress, who cared for him for a day after he nearly drowned in the lilies. Sharing a pungent plant that eased him to sleep, he had hazily dreamt that the cloaked maiden philandered with him in the night. As the enchantment is lifted, he realizes that his firstborn was born as Aedan’s child with the veiled temptress and speaks their son’s name, “Tilian.”
Triumphant, his captor’s robes drift to the ground and the pointed-hatted chameleon stands proudly bare before him. As the Arch metamorphoses before his captive eyes, he stares agape at the alluring female figure and now recognizes her. She is the harpy who had twice lured him into the river and ensnared him. It was she who charmed him into a dream-like state and bore his first manchild without him knowing.
Changing her appearance the pretender disguised as Dilian in his absence, assuming his identity to control the land. It was she whom he had sparred with at Lepe Point, not Dilian. Later masquerading as burly dungeonmaster Fed`ryk, she had whipped him for hours until he stopped cursing her. This witchy woman was the same mountebank who nursed and aroused him with sour apple spirits sub-rosa during his year in bondage. Unbeknownst to both tribes it was an archess – not Arch Dilian – who had secretly orchestrated the tumultuous events throughout their lands.
The Archess is ecstatic and exultant as her true self is exposed to Aedan alone, along with long-hidden truths. Tapping his chin with the chalice, she repeats her taunting demand that he pronounce her given name. Although he now knows who she is, his weakened state of mind cannot recall her actual name after all these years. Cackling as she seductively redresses, she refuses to set Aedan free since he will not speak her name. She vows to keep him imprisoned in her subterranean stockade as long as he lives, while she rules the lands and obliterates R’Nesto’s bloodline and his tribe.
Caged within desolation row, Aedan is a dejected hostage of his own despair in the Archess’ lair. He cannot reconcile nor declare what they had once called his peer while their voyage brought them here. In the depths of his fractured soul he identifies his tormentor, who has destroyed him and his family to avenge her own and take control of Crescendo. However he cannot remember her first name, nor even Ivera’s. Aedan is defeated, his distanced family and tribe decimated.
Aedan's Rooted Dungeon
Year Twenty-Six
Two years after Juna’s spontaneous aria and the ensuing confrontation, the dreadful war continues while tribes are at a stalemate. Having improved the distance of their projectile attacks, neither side can approach the river amid aerial assaults from the other, and the fortified beachheads are now abandoned. Their platoons of warriors have been depleted with heavy losses on both sides, as the Wescendant tribe suffered greater casualties while attempting to enter E’scend to liberate Arch Aedan.
A world away to the north, a resolute troupe has been embarking on a secret crusade. After the western tribe’s failed attempt to cross the river by way of the half-built rockbridge, Kaedan – now their Arch – has sent a guild of their seven most daring and skilled warriors on a covert mission to rescue his imprisoned father in the east.
Leading the quest is pathfinder Q’isann who was Aedan’s second-in-command, along with his wife the huntress Lyla, and their adult daughter Q’yn who is their most skilled tracker. Joining them are four noble swordsmen who are distant kin of R’Nesto, steeled for any clash. Along their journey, the group is attacked by a feral pack of coyotes which they easily dispatch in self-defense. They are also harassed by a gigantic avian predator as large as any of them, repeatedly swooping upon them as they venture further north.
At the foothills of the northern mountains, the hiking group is besieged by a blizzard that storms and howls for a week, impeding their progress and chilling them to the bone. Before frostbite sets in, Q’yn quickly guides them into a small crevice constructed in the hillside like an igloo. As the seven ride out the storm, Lyla shares a secret and a smile with her daughter while cuddling and huddling with Q’isann for warmth, proud of her little eskimo who has saved the group from freezing to death.
As the hunter’s moon signaled autumn, the team of seven reached the untamed Nethermore Mountains. The only Wescendants to have ever explored these perilous peaks and lived to tell about it, Lyla and Q’isann have prepared their companions of the dangers that await. Neither of them have ever forgotten the abominable baerre that killed his brother before their eyes twenty years past.
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CHAPTER SIX
The Great Hall
Gawking up at Crescendo’s tall turquoise peak Nether Mount, Q’isann takes pause as he recognizes the jagged path ahead. Recalling it had been his older kin who had led that trio’s futile mission, the hunter avows revenge on his brother’s bestial assassin. Carefully ascending up the mountainside, Q’isann leads the guild up the switchback path from their first expedition north.
Beneath the cold moon they revisit the arctic silver lake, waterfall and sparkling spring forming the Shendoa River to the south. Finally they reach the icy cavern leading directly into the highest mountain. This time, they are prepared. Two noble patrician swordsmen instigate and bait the baerre out of the cave using salted caribou meat.
As a hulking beast rumbles from the cavern towards them, Lyla the huntress recognizes its charred paw. She and Q’yn subdue it with netting from just above the cave opening while it thrashes at them. Q’isann and his partisans quickly attack it from all sides with their swords, axes and lit torches, slaying the brute and avenging his elder brother.
The Guild of 7 ('Fellowship of the Ring' by Decoraxis; purchased; edited for context)
Approaching the mountain cave, a baerre pair from the same sloth clamber from within and assault the seven of them, smaller than the slain brute but still massive. The male swipes Q’isann with its claw and slashes him before the warriors bludgeon it to death. While Lyla tends to her injured husband, Q’yn and the avengers clash with the woolly ogres.
As they rush the encroaching creatures, the swordsmen are halted by a sudden sound. Behind them Q’yn’s harmonic inflection rings out and with a jingle, she melodically implores to the female baerre to retreat. As it hesitates, she orders the swordsmen to lay down their arms and they comply. The group makes way for the ogress to pass the direction they came, soon followed by three fuzzy offspring they had been protecting within the cave.
Rushing to Q’isann’s aid, they see that he has been critically injured. Although Lyla pleads to return her husband to Wescenda for medical care, it is a long journey home that he cannot withstand. Despite his severe gut wound, the noble hunter insists that for as long as he lives he will carry on his Arch’s wishes and command. Downtrodden by Q’isann’s demise, the champions are also impressed that Q’yn can sing as a soloist. Additionally as she matured in the wilderness during adolescence, the hunters’ daughter is learning to influence the creatures she encounters. They ask her how she is able to do so, however she and her mother do not speak of it.
Finally able to breach Nether Mount unabated the guild ventures inside and down a dim walkway lit by their torches, with Lyla and Q’yn assisting Q’isann to walk. Continuing on, the corridor opens up into a massive natural cathedral fifty meters high and several times that wide and long. To their amazement the splendorous domed hall contains lush trees, vegetable gardens, and steamy waterpools. Dwelling within are an ebony bird, a tanager and falcons above; a wolfling and baerre cub scrapping freely; and a plethora of peculiar creatures resembling a bouscat hare, terrapin, racoon, antelop, zebra, kangera, tegu lizard, penguins, lynxes and nocturnal omnivores they cannot describe.
As the western warriors pass into the mountain hall apprehensively, their reactions resemble the butterflies around them. The feathered birds and furry beasts watch them intently, but are complacent and non-aggressive. From a raised platform above them, an acute voice rings out above them. Peering up at the dais, the group immediately recognizes the orator. It is Dilian in the flesh – not the conjuring impostor who dueled and captured Aedan – but the true Dilian, rightful Arch of E’scend.
“Welcome,” he nasally intones, his ivory hair and complexion resembling the snowy mountains. “I have been awaiting you.”
While Dilian makes their acquaintances Lyla interrupts him with a shout, as her husband has been maimed and is near death. Calling out to two others who join him on the dais, Dilian points them to pale Q’isann. As they provide sparkling water to drink from the Shendoa Spring, aloe plant leaves for his wound and an effluvious flower none of which they had ever seen, his injuries are slowly cured by his empathic assistants.
Directing him to mend in a warm whirlpool, Dilian offers the others to savor the plentiful surroundings. While offering them dinner served on a wooden table, the guild beseeches their host to explain himself. As he pauses to collect his thoughts, Dilian divulges his logic for disregarding his tribe and seeking solace in this zoo-like winter wonderland. As he treats the guild to their finest meal since leaving home, they are seated to dine in the hall named Wynterlyn and hear Dilian’s tale in poetic verse.
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The Great Hall of Wynterlyn
In rooted cellars beneath a giant tree, the captive Aedan has lost himself in the passage of time having not seen the sun, the sky or the outside world for years. During the first year, the chameleon had tormented his mind, body and loins before shedding its skin and vanishing. Applying shades of blush and padded by layers of garments, the conjurer had altered its appearance to suit its sinister plans. However for the past year or perhaps two the dominatrix has not reappeared to him, and he has been in solitary confinement.
Broken, gaunt and sleeping for days on end, for a time he dreamt of his wife Ivera, daughter Juna, and sons Kaedan and Paedan as he desperately wished to reunite with them. With no knowledge of whether they are alive or dead, memories of Aedan’s family have faded as they no longer visit his infrequent dreams. Deeply regretting his forced estrangement from his spouse, he cries Ivera’s name until he is no longer able to. Enduring eternal seclusion, in time he forgets his own name. When he awakens he occasionally finds fresh water and apples, left for him by an unseen benefactor.
After three-and-a-half years in the Archess’ cell a radiant, beauteous belle materializes during the winter solstice and is now held prisoner with him. As she calls Aedan by name, he stands to face his cellmate and recognizes her as his first lover during their tribe’s voyage to Crescendo. Appearing seraphic before him in ivory robes and long ebony hair, she beckons Aedan by name. Embracing beneath the trees under an arcane cold moon, the sweethearts are experiencing their first kiss whilst swiftly transported through time thirty years past to the starlit deck of The Minuet…
As the stern-mounted ruddered boat carried the tribe’s remnant band of sixty over the sea through a myriad of lunar and solar cycles, young Aedan and his rosette were engaged in their own primordial pursuit growing into adulthood. Endlessly tailing and pining after the other around the deck, they soundlessly hand-signaled each other when their mothers affably detached the two. After adolescence the incendiary dynamic dyad discovered each other under the stars in a furtive danse de l’amour on the ship’s bow, worming for warmth under a brisk spring moon while their elders slept below.
Back within the Archess’s lair Aedan and his first love are locked in embrace for days in their first Minuet sonata moondance, discovering l’amour together nearly three decades past. Appearing spritely to him as she once did, his ravenous paramour confesses that she has loved him all her life and nibbles his ear. Whispering to Aedan she reveals that the dyad of the two had been eternally pre-destined, and that they were always meant to be together. Starstruck and delusional, Aedan pledges to mate with her while slowly pronouncing her name.
“Lily.”
Chinesische Dschunke by Michael Rosskothen AS#702210331 purchased & used with permission
To Be Continued
Stay Tuned for the next weekly installment in Psychedelic Scene Books!
Chapter 1: The Arrival
Chapter 2: The Nethermore
Chapter 3: The West and The East
Chapter 4: The First Crescendo
A Tale of Crescendo ~ Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4 ~ eBook PDF download
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A Tale of Crescendo ~ Chapters 5 & 6 ~ eBook PDF download
Chapter 2: The Nethermore
Chapter 4: The First Crescendo
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Created and Written By William Kurzenberger ~ All Rights Reserved
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Musical Accompaniment for context
Ambient Instrumental Score: “Tabula Rasa” ~ Part 5 of 7
“Crescendo Chapters 5 & 6 Score ~ v1” (03:40)
Containing segments of ” Tabula Rasa”
Part V : Holocene
“Tabula Rasa” ~ A musical representation of the past, present and future of life on planet Earth
Composed & recorded 2010 by William Kurzenberger; Released on the album Solitary Road © 2010
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Vocal/group accompaniment for lyrical context
Chapter 5 – The War Begins:
“Venom Wine”
“Gypsy eyes, alligator hat, Cheshire grin and an attitude to match.
Everyone thinks you can do no wrong, but they haven’t known you for that long.
You keep saying everything’s fine while you sit there drinking your venom wine…
… Don’t ask her for the recipe, she brews it up in her home winery.
Eye of newt, absinthe and lead, and the hair that she plucked from her lover’s head.
Boy I sure feel sorry for you if you’re the next victim of her witch’s brew.
And if you’re lucky she’ll give you a taste, but you’ll wake up naked with a painted-on face.
You lost your hat sleeping out in the rain. That old venom wine has rotted your brain.
You thought you were queen of the town, but you ain’t talking very much now.
You keep saying everything’s fine while you sit there drinking your venom wine.
Ain’t it fine, ain’t it fine, ain’t it fine, ain’t it fine, sit there drinking your venom wine.
You’ll go blind, you’ll go blind, you’ll go blind, you’ll go blind, sit there drinking your venom wine.”
Written 2004-2005 by William Kurzenberger; Released on the album Suspending Disbelief © 2005
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A Tale of Crescendo
Chapter Seven: The Flashback
Chapter Eight: The Black Bird
Publication Date: Sunday January 11th, 2026
