delivery to Lenneth
Too heavy for owls to carry, yet these gifts were not seen to be delivered by any house elves. One morning they were simply there, heaped outside the door to Lenneth Valkyrie's dormitory room.
Musical instruments of Earth, from a mishmash of places and eras and cultures: a panpipe, an oboe, a kanun, a bouzouki, a balalaika, an autoharp, a didgeridoo, a harpsichord that very nearly blocked the corridor. None featured any special additions or alterations save one: a Moog synthesizer hooked up to a potted carnivorous plant whose container had been encrusted in glowing crystals. (Insects or meat would feed the plant; the plant fed the crystals; the crystals powered the Moog.)
That these gifts were left outside the room could itself be considered a statement, of a sort.
Upon the harpsichord's stand a quire of what might have been sheet music had been perched, open to a page of staves entirely blank of notes. At the top of the page, well clear of the topmost stave, a few words had been written in a hand the Valkyrie might recognize:
Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.
Musical instruments of Earth, from a mishmash of places and eras and cultures: a panpipe, an oboe, a kanun, a bouzouki, a balalaika, an autoharp, a didgeridoo, a harpsichord that very nearly blocked the corridor. None featured any special additions or alterations save one: a Moog synthesizer hooked up to a potted carnivorous plant whose container had been encrusted in glowing crystals. (Insects or meat would feed the plant; the plant fed the crystals; the crystals powered the Moog.)
That these gifts were left outside the room could itself be considered a statement, of a sort.
Upon the harpsichord's stand a quire of what might have been sheet music had been perched, open to a page of staves entirely blank of notes. At the top of the page, well clear of the topmost stave, a few words had been written in a hand the Valkyrie might recognize:
Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.