#v long snippet bc i doubt i'll ever finish/post this!!!

[baladric]

In re: "iana whump": What have you Done to him?!?

nothing that kaddison hadn't already done :')

The prelude to the Trio of the Sprites swirled to life with a breathy trilling of flutes in concert, settling into a mischievous dancing of violins and viols as Iäna opened his mouth.

Out came the barest beginning of his bird-bright voice, and then a jarring crack that split the sound in two and proceeded into a breathless silence from which he did not recover for two measures altogether. From behind him came a susurrus of tittering children’s voices and he felt his ears heating.

The conductor cut the orchestra off and raised his eyebrows at Iäna.

“Once more, Mer Pel-Thenhior,” he said, and Iäna nodded, leveling his ears. He cleared his throat—a nervous habit for which he had been often censured—and tried to sink again into the swell of the orchestra beneath his feet.

He breathed and began, and found the crack worse the second time. He pushed through it, flushing as irrational tears pricked at his eyes, and by the time the Second Sprite joined him, his breath had moved too high in his chest, his tone going thready and sharp with panic.

Because as sudden as this felt in the moment, everything had been off already. The entire past week, his voice had felt strangely thick in his ears, and he could barely manage twenty minutes of practice before he could no longer fight off a terrible tension in the muscles of his throat. His teacher had posited that he was developing a cold and had prescribed daily trips to the municipal baths to partake of the steam room, and the methodical ingestion of far too much garlic, about which his mother had grumbled even as she crushed three extra cloves into his dinner and roasted a whole head in the oven. While he wasn’t overly fond of reeking interminably of garlic, any singer worth their salt knew the healing magic of a surfeit of garlic, and so he wore the unfortunate perfume as proudly as a war veteran wears his medals.

Apparently, the magic had failed him.

The conductor released the cast to a half-hour break after the final strains of the Trio of the Sprites—the end of Act I—and Iäna made every attempt to slink away before anyone could speak to him. He clutched his water glass between both hands as he passed into the wings, sights set on the stairwell and the thought of the dressing room he had been assigned and its novel luxury of a locking door—and nearly jumped out of his skin when someone slapped his shoulder.

“Bad timing, Iän,” said Malu Vessavar, a sixteen year-old who had recently graduated to the adult chorus. His smile was warm and sympathetic, but his eyes were bright with a mismatched mirth; over the last six months, Iäna had been possessed of the idea that Malu was the height of earthbound beauty, but something about his expression made him so uncomfortable that he was tempted to rethink that stance. “A week out from opening and a month left of runs after that, and here is thy voice dropping at last.”

Iäna swallowed, his eyes widening. Voice dropping. And here he had been convincing himself of a bout of sessiva—and in sooth, he would prefer a plague to this.

“But hey!” Malu continued, his grin widening to something sharp and coy. “Wilt have hair on thy balls at last!”

A chorus of laughter followed, the older boys of the Children’s Chorus having gathered without his notice, and it was all Iäna could do to escape without bursting into tears.