Aruna woke up, but didn't particularly want to.
She shifted her feet onto the stone floor and took a brief survey of the small room. It was mostly empty, save for a few pieces of simple furniture, including a large camphorwood chest with ornate carvings of dragons and phoenixes lining its surface. Inside were her songbooks and mandolin. She earned her living as a street minstrel, but today she just felt... tired.
She put on a red saree, took her mandolin, opened the door and looked outside. Everything was bathed in that dim half-light from a sun that had grown old. Summer had just ended. Only for seven days in the middle of summer each year did the sun become truly bright and the sky a radiant sapphire-blue; for the rest of the year everything seemed pale, ashen and covered in brooding shadows, and from mid-autumn until the middle of the next spring all was plunged in near-darkness.
Aruna walked down the stairs and into the streets, thinking of purchasing some fruit. It was depressingly quiet. The sound of birds singing seemed to grow rarer with each passing year. Even the cicadas, crickets and katydids seemed to sing less as well. The trees looked barren, with but a few sparse leaves on their boughs. The people on the streets all had this sullen look on their faces. They rarely talked or greeted each other, and just went about their business.
Aruna had heard rumors that the world was dying very slowly. She had heard that this was the verdict of some of the mages living in this city, who with their powers of scrying could survey the whole world and observe its changes. They found that each year fewer babies were born, the sun grew dimmer, less crops could be harvested and a giant glacier far away in the southern oceans encroached upon their continent a little more.
She reflected: could the mages do nothing about this? Was there nothing anyone could do?
She sometimes fancied she might be able to do something. But always she brushed the thought aside as the height of presumptuousness. What could she do? She was no super-sorceress. She was just a peasant girl, albeit an exceptionally beautiful girl with an equally beautiful voice and superb skill with her mandolin -- an enchanted mandolin at that which her parents, themselves mages, had given her when she was twelve, and which enabled her when played to cast a few basic spells such as heal light wounds, candlelight, shield, lullaby and create food. And she did not do too badly as a dancer, either. But for all that she was barely able to make ends meet for herself, let alone save a world -- a task for which her gifts would have been of precious little relevance, assuming indeed such an enormous task could be handled by human beings at all in the first place.
Even just to survive a trip outside of the city's walls was a difficult task in its own right for humans. All sorts of evil creatures of the night -- werewolves, vampires, mummies, undead -- are now said to roam the wastes outside. That is why it was very rare indeed nowdays for any people, whether merchants or scholars or whatever, to travel from one city to another. Aruna's very own parents once went outside in search of special magical crystals -- and never returned. And their magical powers were much greater than that of her mandolin.
A tear trickled down Aruna's eye as she thought of her beloved father and mother. Perhaps the best she could hope for, the best anyone could hope for, was just to live life as best she could, in the hope that she would just complete her term of life in peace. Hopefully the end of the world would not come in her limetime...
Then she heard something. It was the warbling of a songbird. The song was lovely, but it was... different. She had never heard anything like it before.
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