Even after walking for a few hours, having left the harpies far behind, Corvus still felt a sense of unease creeping over her. Their view had returned to miles of ruins once more, and the hush that had settled over the land made her skin crawl. She found herself actually wanting to talk, just to fill the silence, which was completely unlike her.

As such, she was quick to jump at the first opportunity for conversation. The corridor they’d been following opened up into another wide field, the silence having settled like a heavy fog here, too. The plains ahead of them were peppered with more strange rubble, not like the stone ruins from earlier. “What happened here?” she found herself asking, watching as Moritz bent their neck to sniff at some kind of flimsy wooden frame.

“I thought perhaps this was just another battlefield,” they rumbled, “but these aren’t weapons and armor. They’re… instruments.”

Corvus took a few steps closer so she could investigate the strange object, too. “Instruments forrr… what, exactly?” she asked, her tone somewhat clipped. The word initially brought to mind a laboratory she’d found in the dungeons once, its tables lined with various “instruments” that had once been used for various procedures. This object in front of her – the similar ones scattered in a wide radius around them, looked nothing like those sorts of instruments.

They fixed her with a look of mild disbelief before finally murmuring, “They’re musical instruments. Drums, to be specific, if I’m not mistaken.”

Corvus frowned slightly as she considered this information, wracking her brain before ultimately deciding the term “drums” meant nothing to her. She’d heard music before, but it was primarily in the form of verbal song (though certainly not from her own throat). She’d also met a few coursers in the past who had played these massive stringed devices (instruments) – she was pretty sure they’d called them harps.

Apparently, the confusion she studied the drum with was obvious, and Moritz tilted the frame so that it was a bit more upright. “Wouldn’t make much music now. The skin’s been torn from the frame; that’s what generated the sound.” They nudged something in the dirt, hidden by the tall grass until now. It looked like a pale sheet of leather, but it was brittle now, and nearly crumbled beneath Moritz’s hoof. “This would’ve been stretched across those thin pieces of wood at one point.” They were doing their best to paint an image in Corvus’s brain, but even still, she had some difficulty visualizing it.

However, she decided that she should at least appear grateful for their efforts, and she nodded, pricking her ears towards him. “Right, thanks for the history lesson,” she said, hoping it didn’t sound nearly as sardonic to them as it did to her.