:There are a lot of monsters which are pretty solitary. Something like a cloaker* will happily go decades between social interactions.:

*A species that engages in predatory mimicry of human outerwear as a strategic lifestyle. 

He...doesn't think Marcus would lie to him about this, under the circumstances (at least, not this direction: "deliberately leaving out the existence of cursed sapient cloaks" might be more plausible, as a temporary measure), but he is rather suspicious that someone might have been lying to Marcus.

:...and they're people?

What...do they gain, by being people? Such that Nature would have bred them for that, even though smarter animals are more susceptible to starvation all else equal (since you need more food to run more brain)?:

(He finds he wouldn't actually have been surprised by cursed mindless clothing: you could mix them in with your real grave goods to discourage tomb raiders. It's just another form of trap.

Cursed lesser-animal clothing, he could maybe see, as a sort of extension of bedbugs and lice.

But people??)

:--oh, or was it non-natural selective breeding?:

in the full breadth of history wizards may have done some horrible fucked-up shit with [running-mad-scientist-animal-breeding-programs-for-intelligence]^† on cursed clothing, and felt they were acting rationally at the time

---

^†four syllables

:Nature does not breed for subtle incremental changes the way you might improve a breed of sheep. Things mutate and stretch, hybridise, spontaneously generate, or leave eggs sleeping in the soil for centuries until the right conditions occur. Many species hyperspecialise for extremely specific conditions and struggle to reproduce outside them, but reproduce with sufficient vigor within them to justify their wider presence in the ecosystem.:

:So why do cloakers need intelligence? Perhaps they need it for a once in a millennium conclave of cloakers. Perhaps they need it to grasp the exact confluence of circumstances which makes it correct to lay their eggs. Perhaps they have some innate magic best operated by an intelligent mind. Perhaps they simply need to outsmart humans to best ambush them. I have no way of knowing, really.: 

:And all this is leaving aside the fact that wizards do not need to resort to the processes of nature to create life; they can simply create souls and bodies they require directly, assuming their power and art is sufficient. Even if it is usually easier and more economical to repurpose what is existing.:

:Fair enough.:

(Every time that people back home thought a species was spontaneously generated, it eventually turned out that it wasn't. But he would not actually put it past this world's natural processes to pull shit like that.)

He is concerned that there is perhaps not a great deal of overlap between "people who can create souls from scratch" and "people who can be even remotely trusted with this power", but it doesn't exactly make the top three worst things he's heard lately.

(Maybe if the power were more widespread, but it sounds like it isn't.)

He is once again wishing that otherworlder biologists would have a chance to come and learn about this place.

He thinks a great many walk-ins have wished such things, over the eons.

As they've been talking, Marcus has retrieved the buckets and yoke from where they were stored inside and started walking out in the dark. 

As conversation falls silent, he turns his focus out into the dark. This path is regularly traveled, kept free of stones and plants, so it's a good deal less hazardous in the poor light, and they swiftly reach the point where a series of steps cut into the riverbank reach a point where the ice is kept thin and can be broken through with a stick. 

The walk back is a little harder, being uphill with two buckets full of water, but it's also over fairly quickly, and after that a few trips to collect already-chopped firewood are all that remain before they can find silence and stillness in the woodshed. 

The woodshed has little by way of walls, but it has a solid roof and the piles of wood still interrupt the wind. 

He doesn't, quite, bring himself to ask if he can do the walking, and perhaps some singing on the way. He still feels kind of guilty about barging in earlier, and anyway he probably shouldn't walk this path for the first time in the dark.

Minaiyu is in the mood for songs about hope and safety and rising up and building anew.

He sings of the pain of losing everything, yet in the end finding joy in a new life in a new world; of how spring will one day return, as it always does; of the invention of new medicines that could cure many forms of contagion that once killed countless victims (the song is clearly meant to help people remember which leads to pursue, should they find themselves in a society without such medicines); of love that feels like coming home.

The first song comes out a bit awkward, but before long he starts to warm up to the new singing voice.

He can't quite manage fully simultaneous translation, but the pauses are short enough that an outside observer might not notice.

Marcus doesn't bother putting reactions in words; he just pipes impressions and emotions across their bond. He's more curious than melancholy about the mourning songs, so different from his own. The winter songs strike a chord with him, and so do the songs about invention and wisdom, in their own different ways (he doesn't react as though the advice therein is particularly important). 

But it's the love song that he finds most moving. There's a need there, for him, somewhere. A desire to surround himself with precious people, a hunger for love that's like a fortress against the world. As the song ends, Marcus ends the link with a flash of selfish guilt. 

:It's early days. We may yet both be at home.:

(It's hard to really believe that he can ever get used to this place, but people can get used to a lot of things.)

:I hope so.: 

He doesn't really want to articulate what exactly he hopes, so he's just going to do his best to sound sympathetic and move on. 

He goes back to singing. This one is about the songwriter's experience competing in a long-distance footrace. It took a lot of practice, and a lot of struggle, but in the end she triumphed.

(She didn't come in first or anything, but it was the sort of footrace that is more about beating the course than about beating the other runners. She made it to the end, when the her of a year ago would not have been able to.)

Marcus is onboard for songs about people trying to do hard and impressive things, even without context for why this thing is impressive, but the tipping into and out of melancholy leaves a weird taste in his mouth about it. 

:Well, it's a narrative pattern, right? Korri starts off excited but kind of underestimating how hard it's going to be, and then she struggles and runs into setbacks and considers giving up or lowering her sights, and then in the end she picks herself back up and reaches for the goal anyway and makes it?:

(He gives her name as a string of phonemes, but includes the spark of excitement that he actually understands how rolled R's work now and doesn't have to resort to the usual approximation of her name!

(Alien soul implants are pretty cool sometimes, he has to admit.))

:Yeah but if you were singing it, you'd just kill the energy of the audience for a bit, wouldn't you? Like, sometimes the audience wants to feel melancholy, but not for thirty seconds in the middle of another song.: 

:Is it worse than having hardships in the middle of a non-sung story?

I see why sometimes people might not feel up to it even if they know there's going to be a happy ending later (plus they might not know), but you can't really evoke triumph if there isn't *some* sort of struggle along the way.:

He...would not completely put it past some culture to not have this narrative structure? But it would be very weird. A very different kind of weird than giant bees.

(He rifles through his memories of last night's music. There were lots of bittersweet ones, but...they were bittersweet all the way through, weren't they.

Or at least, the most memorable ones were? It's not like he was looking at them through this lens at the time.)

:Stories aren't meant to be enchanting in the same way, are they? A triumphant song can leave the struggles implied, because if you want everyone to feel triumph, they presumably already know what they're feeling triumphant about.: 

:But I suppose you're right, it's not that strange. It just wasn't what I was expecting.: 

:Huh, I suppose that does work for a triumphant song, in some contexts. Like...not quite *non-fictional* contexts, I gather that those events did actually happen to Korri, but contexts where the song is meant to be about whoever's singing it right now and not a specific person.:

:Stories can be pretty enchanting?

...come to think of it, I think I've heard that that's more true in places with cheap paper and cheap printing? Because writing stories down lets you make them more detailed, and the paper can remember every good plot point and turn of phrase and so on that you came up with over months or years, even when you might have struggled to keep it all straight in your head (let alone convey it in speech, let alone teach it to someone else who can tell the story when you're not around). It's not uncommon for novels to be over a hundred thousand words; if you count series of connected stories together, it can reach into the millions.: