Prologue
"Music has always been the most powerful weapon in the world."
Long before humans ever harnessed the magical techniques of song, known as songbending, it held bewitching power over them. Like everything else on earth, music had a physical form and guardian known throughout the Tri-kingdom of Salbain, Berain and Angor as the angel Hanaraitha. In her musical form, the angel could sway the minds of kings and great generals. The mesmerizing beauty of her songs flowed from the depths of the earth and sea and caused many to fall under her spell. The trees, the rivers, the mountains, were bound together by her resplendent, flowing melodies. Hanaraitha’s light and beauty flowed in every living vein, breathing through us as our precious life’s blood. This guardian could have used her power to rule, but instead she used it to make life beautiful.
The harmonious bond between music and the world was never meant to last, however, for to every light side there is also the dark. Hanaraitha had a twin sister, an equally powerful angel called Demises. Foreseeing how her sister would grow in strength as she rebelled against the forces of heaven and harvested the energy of the earth for her own dark manifestations, leaving rot and ash in her wake, Hanaraitha presented herself to the mages of earth in the form of a lovely stringed vessel. From that moment on, she allowed musically gifted preceptors to harness her power as a deadly weapon and develop a legion of songbenders to arm themselves against the coming evil.
As the kingdoms slowly grew in strength and numbers, Demises gathered enough power to summon demons from below the Seven Winters Mountains, the formidable wilderness of the Tri-Kingdom. They clawed their way to the surface of earth and emerged as simple ghost stories among the lonely villages along the countryside, but once they developed a lust for human blood, the threat of them had finally reached the Tri-Kingdom.
The legion of songbenders was established for the sole purpose of defeating these mysterious and vile creatures. Their leader, Del Adagio, harnessed the sacred gift of songbending when he was only a child. The three kings of each great city called him a gift from the heavens, a prophet and warrior. Songbending wasn’t a talent any one person could simply learn, as Del Adagio’s master always said before him. Nay, the angel Hanaraitha chose her warriors long before their hands ever touched the sacred stringed instrument.
There was one venerable songbender she chose from another time and another world. An ordinary, yet musical girl whose name was Sara.
Sara met Hanaraitha’s meticulously planned fate when, on a stormy eve, she slipped down a steep flight of stairs and struck her head upon landing.
She thought she was dead. Perhaps she really was; but Hanaraitha had other plans for her soul, and for the songbender she was to become who was long, long before her time.
The greatest battle to ever threaten the Tri-Kingdom was soon to come, and the world needed to be ready. Hanaraitha meticulously examined that there was only one sure way to win this war. If Sara failed her mission, the world would be permanently transformed by Demises forever, the joy of music never to be seen or heard from again.
