The Conference of the Elders was complete for the moment. The Senior Elder smiled at the wide table of earnest, strong men and women who had followed his lead through so many turns and twists of Ternian history. "We are agreed then!", he said, with a strength in his voice that the others had thought would never return.

"Tern will not be taken, and we will not be thrown down. May the music always be with you as you go!".

At the ritual words, the Elders muttered in their turn, "Let the music go on always" and rose, wandering out of several hidden entrances in the tall building above their hiding place. The lanterned passages along the polished wooden walkways of the city glimmered invitingly in the warm night air, and they made their way by twos and threes, most of them toward the ancient hall with the strange symnbols at the door. For it was the night of Music Fest, and even now they could hear the humming and plunking as hundreds of Ternians came from their farms, their fisher's houses, their studies and their wood craft centers for two hundred miles around, tuned and tried the hundreds of delicate darkwood instruments, mandolins, guitars, Terran Banjos, dulicmers, and more to welcome the beginnings of the Ternian Forth Season, the time of reborning, new growth, warm evenings, soft rains, and the arrival of calves, lineria, lammbrui, and other livestock and wild newborns across the land. The night air hummed with the tuning chatter as the Elders' approached, and they could hear a young Ternian turk startinga whoop up with a wild banjo riff, faster than skilled, loud and ringing, and his challenging young baritone singing out the rhythms of Big Balling Boston.

The stamping of feet and the clapping of hands rose louder as the crowd grew and caught the infectious rhythm in their hearts, more instruments capturing the key and chiming into the irresistible beats, the watchers swaying and nodding, their smiles broader and their hearts lighter. The Music Fest was underway for another year...