The music box

"Amphy, I think those fish you brought for the birthday party might be a bit...off."
Amphy gives me one of her "I am the young mistress of this estate, hairy ape person" looks (not nearly as common as certain other, more primal expressions) and says, with a very faint trace of ancient remembered hauteur behind her usual faux-Louisiana diction "Smell don't mean anything, which I wouldn't have to explain if I wasn't stuck here on a world of (pause) humans."

Amphy the Amphibian Girl turns to you.

"When I was growing up, when I was the young mistress, in polite society you didn't actually eat the fish you got as gifts, if your family had any social standing at all. You displayed them nicely arranged on a table outside on the front lawn to show guests arriving how many good friends you had! Of course, folk who didn't own any land and mostly worked an' lived underwater couldn't do that and never bothered with it, but in the city it got fashionable to give and display little ceramic fish in the front of your store front or commercial enterprise." Amphy makes a faint but audible sniff of disdain.

Interestingly, I notice that her faux-Louisiana accent has diminished perceptibly

"But we was kind of traditionalist that way, not pretentious like them great families who were absentee owners of the big estates, putting on fireworks displays an' all. Our family was just as old an' established as any of that Ry'leh crowd, with their claims to be descended from Dagon himself, and we weren't no jumped-up noveaux-riche merchants neither, the kind who'd buy themselves a few hundred acres or so in the Lowlands and rent a summer home on R'yleh so they could attend the midsummer rites and act like they was just as good as the higher aristocracy because they could buy their way in with gold."

"My family didn't play them games; we stayed on our modest holdings an' worked alongside our human tenants. The honest countryside gentry one of them old regime ministers called people like us, an' you could hear the sneer in her voice when she said it, even if she called us in the same speech the backbone of Dagon's realm. Well, my mother and father never cared what some fool with a sash of office in the capital city thought, and they both used to say that the broad stream of history inevitably flows in the direction of progress and reason, whatever this or that individual did or said. That was my mother and father's - Gods below comfort them! - true religion an faith, an I believed it too. We all did. But after Bloody Ridge the broad stream of history swept into the Lowlands in the form of the human Commonwealth armies, an brought nothing but destruction an' death."

Amphy pauses for a moment.

"I never really found out what happened to my family I'd supposedly marched off to defend"

"My mother was on some local committees, nothing important but that might have entitled them both to to a place on them lists the Commonwealth later said they never had. I can almost see my dear mother, patient, reasonable to the end, complaining about our tenants being impressed into labor as virtual pack animals for their armies, trying to explain, thinking that somebody would understand ..."

"I hope it was quick, I hope they was together at the end. But I never found out the details, nor their bodies neither in the burned out garbage heap that had been my childhood home. Hate to think of them in those mass graves we found when we retook those lands... but really, it doesn't matter, I suppose."

"But I'm sorry. I shouldn't bring up such things. Now, long before that, when I was 13 or so, I remember the best birthday I ever had. A lot of my friends, showed up, even from a couple estates that were far enough away they hired a wagon to get to our place. I had a lot of friends in those days, an' I was so happy! My mother said to me, after I'd recited the old-fashioned family oath, that she and my father were proud of me because my tutor had said how well I'd done that year with my studies, and she said since I'd worked hard I deserved something special, and she brought out something in a little package, small but kind of heavy. I opened the package and I can't tell you how I felt when it turned out to be something I'd always wanted but never imagined anyone could actually own."

"It was a clockwork music box, a tiny one, intricate and shining like a piece of jewelry. I'd never seen one before. They was made thousands of miles away on, the other side of the world, practically, on the Eastern Continent, where they was far more advanced in metalworking an' fine things. There might have one or two others in all of the Lowlands, perhaps a few more in Inquanok City. Impossible to buy anywhere, really, but as it happened my mother knew the owner of one of the open-sea trading vessels that once in a great while tied up on the Eastern Continent. She waited four years until it finally showed up. I never asked what she paid for it of course... You can't know what a magical thing that was to someone who'd never seen anything like it before. All them shiny gears and music at my command, anywhere I liked. Came with three little cylinders, so you had three pieces of music."

"From what I've been saying, I suppose you can predict what i'll say next, that I lost that wonderful gift and the memory of that happy day, when I lost everything else. But that ain't what I is going to say. Look here."


Amphy opens the leather pouch at her side and pulls out a small object wrapped in a velvet cloth. You unwrap it to see a small, intricate mechanism, slightly tarnished, slightly discolored but otherwise showing little indication that it is hundreds of thousands of years old.

"Still works as well as ever. They wrought well on the Eastern Continent, as you can see."

Amphy smiles at you

"If you were paying attention earlier, you may recall that the fish weren't the real birthday gift. That's just traditional. This is my real gift. Not exactly sure why, except you gonna have a lot more birthdays and me...well, I think soon the Gods Below is gonna have mercy on their poor abandoned daughter at long last, pretty soon now. So you can make better use of it than I can. My daughter Pris gets my old sword, and you get a music box. It not too difficult to use. There's the other two cylinders, and there the crank to wind it up, and that lever starts it . Already wound it for you, so just push that lever down..."

You do so, and the little music box emits a faint whirring and clicking noise. And then you hear the first notes of a song from a time long before the dawn of recorded history, from lands long since swallowed by the seas, from the distant springtime of the world. The tune is nothing you've ever heard before, thin, tinkling and slightly eerie. The notes are subtly different than any you've heard before. based as they are on another, inhuman, system of harmony. It is also very beautiful, and as you listen to the music box whirr and play it's song, you can almost see that summer's day, see the bright sun and blue sky, hear happy laughter and, for a moment, you can almost see the young Amphy, happy and unknowing, surrounded by her friends and family.

"Happy birthday" says Amphy the Amphibian Girl.