Chapel pianist · Alpine Isle (4th island), Rimeholt (plateau town), chapel (Chopin Op. 52 No. 4).
Talk
- “Name's Einar. I play the piano in the chapel. In the cold. People ask how my fingers keep moving. I tell them they don't stop. If they stop, that's it. They're staying where they are.”
- “It's an impromptu. Chopin. Means made up on the spot. He wrote it down, though. I've played it fifty years. Nothing about it is on the spot anymore.”
- “The church came up the gorge in pieces. On backs. Somebody carried the piano. Nobody remembers who. Nobody wants to. You don't ask a question like that. You just play it.”
- “Folks come in to get warm. There's no stove. It's just out of the wind. They sit, they listen, they leave a little warmer. That's not the church. That's the song. Or the wind stopping.”
- “Snow piles on the roof all winter. Then it's winter again. You can hear it settling during the quiet bits. I leave the quiet bits in longer for it.”
- “My mother wanted me to be a fisherman. Out on the ice. I said, Mother, I'll catch nothing. She said that's fishing. So I took up the piano. At least here I catch a tune now and then.”
More talk
- “There's a word for how this one's played. Rubato. Means stolen time. You take a little from one bar and give it back in another. Nobody notices the taking. That's the whole trick. Whoever wrote it knew somebody'd be listening.”
As the gods fall
Once the gods of 3 crypts have been beaten and their chests looted in your world (the Gang of Elites counts), every third talk:
- “Five of us, I'm told. Five chapels, five songs. Nobody's ever put us in a room together. I think that's on purpose. One song, somebody'd notice. Five, it just sounds like weather.”
Once the gods of 6 crypts have been beaten and their chests looted in your world (the Gang of Elites counts), every third talk:
- “Lately when I get to the end there's a little more song than there used to be. I don't know where it comes from. I don't stop to ask. You don't stop a song to ask where it's going.”
When you walk off mid-sentence
- “You leave. Good. It is too cold to stand still anyway.”
- “Ah. Well. I talk too long. My fingers are the same.”
- “Go, then. The piano does not walk away. It is the only one who does not.”