Spin Songs for the Sea by heget

Coda

Request prompt from juliana, what happens immediately after this story:

Eärwen’s head overflows with song, the tunes sloshing around like water in an overfilled bucket, spilling over the sides as droplets of dripping notes and stray lyrics to soak her thoughts. She carries the songs from the sewing room as she leaves to her next lesson, skipping through hallways of pearl inlays and tiles brightened by red coral while humming and whistling these smattering of melodies. She sings fragments, unable to hold them all, as she turns each corner, needing to set them free. They snarl and slip through her mind, hopelessly tangled, overlapping like the wake of ships against incoming waves. Half-finished lyrics float into the pale vaulting of Alqualondë’s palace and echo down the passages that glimmer like mother-of-pearl. Faintly the parts blend together, a mermaid’s sweet sorrow intertwined with the call to trim the sails, the chorus to the crab dance against bright rising notes that mimic splashing water, even a short rhyme about ducklings waddling to the shore. Eärwen slips out of the palace and runs down the private pathway to the royal docks still singing, challenging the raucous seagulls to a musical duel as she struggles to remember the last line of her aunt’s shanty. “Up aloft from down below!” she hollers as she hops onto the dock, swinging her arms to mimic the heaving of halyards.