Track 12: Daigo Ward

Track 12: Daigo Ward sits on a sun-warmed desk, a slender roll bound in worn indigo silk, its edges frayed from years of careful handling. The outer shell is a smooth, almost obsidian black, a lacquered gloss that catches the lamp in a coppery halo. Along the seam runs a narrow brass trim, and the glyphs etched into the cover—a crane in flight over a crescent—glow faintly when the room's resonance stones hum in the corner. When you tilt it, the scent of aged parchment and resin lifts into the air, and you can feel the texture of the track through the fingers before you even touch it: a micro-draft of memory, a whisper of a melody waiting to be unfurled. It's not a page you read so much as a room you re-enter, a memory encoded in ink and thread, a fragment from the Daigo Ward, a legendary guardian of a monastery perched above misty rivers in a region where mountains breathe fog. The track carries the sense of duty, of eyes that never sleep, of a world where sound can seal a seal and keep a door from opening. In the hands of a collector, Track 12: Daigo Ward becomes a key and a lamp: it unlocks the Orchestrion in a home hall and lets you press the room into the slow, deliberate tempo of a ward watch’s patrol. When you load it into the Orchestrion, the door of your hall opens to a measured rhythm—woodwinds rising, a distant bell, brass that sounds like a trumpet half-hidden in shadow—and the world seems to tilt just enough to let visitors hear the era the track remembers. Players talk of how the tune steadies nerves at gatherings, or how it lulls a restless crowd into quiet conversation, turning a simple house into a stage where memories can be traded as easily as gossip. As for the market, the track travels as a rumor through the Saddlebag Exchange, where sellers note its scarcity in quiet, almost reverent listings. A well-placed dealer might price Track 12 in the gold-and-silver range, a reflection of its polish and the story bound within its threads; others, recognizing a moment’s need for a mood, will let it drift into the two- to three-gold band, knowing a patient buyer will find it in a corner stall between a map of distant coasts and a crate of rare inks. The price shifts with fables—who found it, which archivist remembered a whisper of the ward, which group offers a small tribute for a melody that can turn a room into a corridor of memory. And if you listen long enough, you’ll hear the city exhale along with the track, the ward’s quiet vigilance echoing in every note, a reminder that sound, like watchfulness, travels best when it’s kept safe in a roll, a hinge, a memory, Track 12: Daigo Ward. Some nights the storekeepers trade stories as they consult the inn's candlelight, and the track becomes the language by which they barter, a shared chorus that binds strangers into a small choir. And for those who keep a quiet watch over their own halls, Track 12 offers a reminder that even the most careful catalog can become a living room when sound remembers. Because every note returns you to the moment it was first pressed—corners of a library, the hush after a storm, a memory of a city waiting for dawn. It is not merely music; it is a ledger of places you have not visited and those you long to hear again.