Baritenor

by Petrichord

Rating: everyone
Tags: Sandbar, Slice of Life, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Gallus
Length: 4639

Carols mean as much as those who sing them.

Let's say you have a small treasure trove's worth of history tucked away: a collection of carols from a civilization whose peak has long since passed - for all intents and purposes, a hidden record of holidays in song.

It's something to be cherished, right? Something to be remembered from a place of delight, not disgust?

Sandbar agrees. Gallus doesn't.

Written for Muramasa for Jinglemas 2024. Feel free to check out the group if you're interested in participating next year!

Strayed a bit with this one. Let me know if you're dissatisfied and I'll whip up another. In any case - to you, and everyone reading this - Happy Holidays, and I'll see you all next year. Hopefully with more than three published stories, of course.

Published 2024-12-26 13:50:00 UTC
Last updated 2024-12-26 13:50:00 UTC

Tenitone

“I’m only gonna say it once.”

Sandbar nodded, curled on the couch, a steaming mug of cocoa (with a perfectly average number of marshmallows, natch) laid carefully on the floor in front of him. “Okay.”

“And you’re gonna stop bugging me about it afterward.”

Sandbar smirked. “Maybe.”

Gallus frowned. “What do you mean ‘maybe?’ ”

Sandbar reached down and took a sip of his cocoa before replying. “I mean maybe you’ll still care after we talk about it, and maybe you’ll calm down a little. I’m not saying that you’ve tried to cover up your feelings with blustery feather-ruffling before—”

“Good.”

“—Because it would be stating the obvious.”

“What’s obvious is that you’re a pain in the neck.” Gallus rolled his eyes and settled back on his bed, leaning against the wall and idly kicking at his own long-emptied mug of cocoa. “And I don’t ‘ruffle my feathers.’ ”

Sandbar’s smirk widened. “Want to reach out a little to the left and give one of your wings a squeeze, big guy?”

“Ha.” Gallus’s debatably ruffled wings snapped shut. “Do you and the other four dinguses get together in the evenings to talk about how to annoy me or something? ‘Cause I’m getting that vibe.”

“And I’m getting the vibe that you’re stalling.” Sandbar’s smirk shifted into a friendlier, warmer smile. “Come on. Please?”

Gallus sighed through his beak, making his nares whistle like a teakettle. For a second, Sandbar’s mouth twitched like he was trying to suppress a laugh.

The two roommates stared at each other in silence. The sun, caught like a painting in the frosted windowpanes that illuminated their room, continued its descent past the horizon.

Finally, Gallus opened his beak again. “Alle Jahre weider, Kommt—”

“I didn’t want you to say it.” Sandbar shook his head. “I wanted you to sing it.”

Gallus crossed his hindlegs and kicked at his empty mug again. “Not happening.”

“You can’t just sing a Hearth’s Warming carol—”

“It’s not Hearth’s Warming.”

“—Okay, ‘not-Hearth’s-Warming.’ You still can’t sing something all by yourself and expect the rest of your friends to not be curious. Especially if it’s something we haven’t heard before.”

“Didn’t Professor Rarity tell us that—” Gallus pitched his voice up to an overly posh and under-ly flattering imitation of Rarity’s voice, “ ‘a generous pony recognizes when the affairs of another are particularly personal and gives them the benefit of doubt?’ ”

Sandbar playfully waggled his hoof in the air. “Didn’t Professor Applejack tell us that when it comes to the lil’ things in life, sometimes the best part of bein’ honest is learnin’ about who’ll make fun of you and who’ll stay with you, lil’ things an’ all?”

“Yeah, and you’d all make fun of me.” Gallus’s tail twitched.

Sandbar cocked his head. “You know we’d all stay with you.”

“Smolder would absolutely make fun of me.”

“Can’t it be both?”

Gallus jutted his lower beak out; from a non-griffon perspective, it was impossible to tell if he was grinding his jaw or pouting.

“Pretty please?” Sandbar tried again. “I really want to hear you sing it. I won’t make fun. Promise.”

The room dipped darker still as the sun’s descent nearly concluded itself.

Finally, Gallus opened his mouth one more time.

“Alle jahre weider
Kommt das Groverkind,
Auf die Griffonstone hier
Wo wir greifen sind.

Kehrt mit seinem segen
Ein in jedes haus,
Geht auf allen wegen
Mit uns ein und aus…”

Sandbar didn’t say anything as Gallus completed one verse, two, three. Silently he watched; silently he sipped his cocoa. Only when Gallus’s voice died down did Sandbar set his half-emptied mug back on the floor and dared to speak.

“You’re a Baritone.”

“Well, yeah, sorta.” Gallus shrugged. “I mean, I talk higher? But when you’ve got to project your voice, sometimes you realize your vocal range is different from your normal conversational pitch—”

The totally-not-enthusiastic baritone blinked.

“...I mean, theoretically. They’re just words, y’know, that I heard some ponies using outside the — y’know, Professor Pinkie’s class, she’s the one obsessed with singing — so I’m probably not even using the right words there, y’know, just talking out of my butt—”

“You’ve got that right.”

“Eat a rock.” Gallus flopped on his bed and rolled over, glaring at the wall and giving Sandbar an excellent view of his ruffled feathers and not much else. “We’re done.”

Silence hung for a couple seconds more. Sandbar sat there in the near dark, chewing on his lip, brow faintly furrowed.

“I think it’s cool that you’re a baritone,” Sandbar finally admitted.

Gallus didn’t say anything.

“I thought that you’d be more of a tenor, but I guess a lot of the singing that just kind of happens around the place is in a higher octave. Ponies tend to have higher voices, I guess. But since that wasn’t any pony carol I’ve heard of, it probably makes sense that it would be in a different range.”

Gallus continued his best impression of a Hearth’s Warming corpse.

“Look, I just want you to talk again, okay?” Sandbar pleaded. “That’s why I’m babbling. I really did like that, honestly. I wasn’t making fun of your singing, I was making fun of your getting defensive about it, because your singing was really nice. Really, really nice.”

The blue, feather-ruffled Hearth’s Warming corpse flicked its tail.

“And I didn’t want to talk to you about it because I thought it was funny, I brought it up because I wanted to know what it was called. What it was about.”

“Why, for homework?” Gallus spat back.

“Only if you want to teach me.”

Gallus didn’t say anything for a moment or two. Then he sighed loudly, rolled over onto his back and laced his claws over his chest. “Alle Jahre Weider. It’s about the spirit of King Grover watching over everygriffon and guiding us to do good things.”

“Wait, I thought he was just a king.” Sandbar leaned back. “Did he become a ghost, or something?”

Gallus stretched his forelegs. “Ugh, don’t be dumb on purpose. Ponies have their princesses, but they aren’t literally everywhere all the time to make sure that ponies do the right thing. Your moon one doesn’t literally show up in your dreams every night. It’s like that.”

“But isn’t he dead?”

“You try being alive after a couple millennia.”

Sandbar’s smirk returned, albeit fainter. “The princesses pulled it off.”

“Yeah, and one of them went crazy and lived on the moon for a thousand years.”

Sandbar snorted. “Yeah, I guess that’s true.”

Gallus cracked a wry smile. “Tell you what, go live on the moon for a thousand years and tell me what crazy powers you get from being really old. Until then, take for granted that ‘the spirit of Grover’ is like ‘the spirit of Hearth’s Warming,’ deal?”

Sandbar carefully moved his cocoa mug, slid off the couch, trotted over to Gallus and extended his hoof. “Deal.”

Gallus stared blankly at the hoof. “What, you want me to kiss it like you’re some kind of royalty?”

Sandbar’s ears flicked back. “I jus—”

Gallus reached out and fist-to-hoof-bumped Sandbar. “I know what you meant, dummy.”

Sandbar rolled his eyes good-naturedly. “Wow. You really got me good that time. So…”

“...So?”

“Got any more?”

Gallus fist-to-hoof-bumped Sandbar again. “There.”

“Awww, come on, you know what I mean.” Sandbar plunked his butt down next to Gallus’s bed. “That can’t be the only griffon not-Hearth’s-Warming-carol that you know.”

Gallus arched an eyebrow. “And what if it was?”

“Then I’ll be very sad”

“Good.”

“Sad enough that I might forget to refill your cocoa.”

“You’d refill…?” Gallus turned his head nearly fast enough to give himself whiplash, eyes darting from Sandbar to his empty mug to Sandbar again.

Sandbar nodded.

“...Get the bad cocoa. Not the all-natural, no-preservatives stuff you can find in the teacher’s lounge. I want the cheap, artificially sweetened powder that comes in packets.”

“Marshmallows?”

Gallus straightened up and eyeballed Sandbar like it was a matter of life and death. “Extra marshmallows.”

By the time Sandbar returned with a small tray clutched between his teeth, Gallus was sitting on the floor, peering at a little yellow notebook under the glowing lamps that illuminated the room like a theatre stage.

Sandbar set the tray down between them and worked his jaw a little. “Oof. Hey, thanks for getting the lights.”

“Well, duh. I can’t read in the dark.” Gallus looked up and eyeballed the mug nearly overflowing with marshmallows. “So where’s my cup from?”

“Sugar Science has been working on some kind of reconstituted truffle recipe, and I know that she’d bought a bunch of those packets for her experiment on—”

“Cool. Gimme.” Gallus slapped his notebook on the ground, reached over and grabbed at his mug. An errant marshmallow fell out of the mug and bounced on the floor as the griffon took an eager sip, and as his eyes glazed over Sandbar grabbed the fallen marshmallow and popped it in his mouth.

By the time Sandbar swallowed, Gallus was still in the middle of one very long, very enthusiastic slurp and rapidly approaching the chocolate sludge at the bottom.

“You’re welcome,” Sandbar ventured.

“Yeah, thanks” Gallus replied as he pulled the mug away, fished out a few marshmallows with his claws and crammed them into his beak. As he chewed, Sandbar eyed the little yellow notebook.

“Can I…?” Sandbar probed.

Uncharacteristically, Gallus nodded. Sandbar picked up the book and flipped through it, a frown creasing his forehead as he flipped from page to page.

“...Wow” Sandbar finally replied.

“Wow, what?”

“Dude, I know I said I wouldn’t make fun, but…”

A broad smirk crossed over Gallus’s beak. “Buuuuut?”

“Dude, your hoofwriting is terrible.” Sandbar held the book open. Spindly little lines, slashed across the page like claw cuts, were over- and undercut by blobby little letters running into each other in a hodgepodge of symbols that bore more than a passing resemblance to bubonic flesh.

“Or maybe your eyesight is bad,” Gallus countered.

“Or maybe your hoofwriting is terrible.”

“Or maybe you need remedial reading lessons.”

“Nopony could read this,” Sandbar countered as he jabbed at a particularly ink-splattered section of savaged paper.

“I can.”

“You wrote it.”

“Skill issue.”

“Remind me to never copy your notes,” Sandbar moaned as he set the book in front of Gallus again.

“This is a reminder to never copy my notes,” Gallus parroted back at him before finishing off his cocoa with a particularly enthusiastic slurp.

“Fine! Fine, dude, I give up.” Sandbar chuckled and reached back to grab his own mug for a quick sip. “Mmm. So what’s in the book?”

“Oh, gee, mister genius here wants to hear me sing more traditional carols and doesn’t understand that most griffons keep them copied down in books for easy reference!” Gallus fired back playfully.

“With hoofwriting like that?”

“Skill iss—”

“Okay, skill issue, I get it. So you keep all of them copied down in there?”

“Not all of them.” Gallus rolled his eyes just as playfully. “There’s, like, hundreds. Just a few.”

“Your favorites?”

Gallus paused. Then, picking up the notebook, he opened his beak again.

“Es ist ein Ros entsprungen
Aus einer Wurzel zart.
Wie uns die Alten sungen,
Aus Grover kam die Art
Und hat ein Blümlein bracht,
Mitten im kalten Winter,
Wohl zu der halben Nacht…”

Sandbar sat quietly while Gallus sang. He watched the griffon’s chest fluff puff out with every breath, ears tilted in Gallus’s direction as each word rang out of Gallus like the tolling of a clock tower’s bell. He waited patiently until Gallus was done, then waited a few seconds more before breaking the silence.

“That was beautiful.”

Gallus’s cheeks went slightly pink. “Shut it.”

“Why would I make fun of that? Seriously, dude.”

“Well, but—”

“Does that seem like something I would do?”

Gallus stared silently at his empty mug. “...Thanks.”

“Hey, you’re welcome.” Sandbar smiled. “So what’s that one about?”

“Griffon stuff,” Gallus mumbled. “And also roses. Growing in winter, despite everything.”

“Do they do that in Griffonstone?”

“They used to. Lots of things used to grow there.” Gallus looked up at Sandbar, looking faintly pained. “You haven’t exactly, y’know, caught the empire at its best time.”

“Professor Pinkie seemed optimistic about things getting better.” Sandbar rolled his shoulders in an approximation of a shrug. “And that one postal delivery griffon, Gabby…”

“Gabby would look on the bright side of things if she was rolled in pitch and set on fire. And Professor Pinkie is…Professor Pinkie. So they can look at it and see a bunch of roses, but all I see is dirt, broken buildings and a whole lot of meaningless legends. And whether or not you agree with the last one, you’ve seen some of the pictures that Pinkie brought back with her.” Gallus pointed an accusatory talon at Sandbar. “You can’t disagree that Griffonstone is a mess.”

Sandbar looked for a second like he was about to object, before shaking his head. “So if you keep the carols in that notebook, well…it’s pretty full. Got another?”

Gallus snorted. “Why do I get the feeling that you’d ask me to sing all day for you if you had your way?”

Sandbar rolled his shoulders again. “Maybe it’s a pony thing.”

“Or maybe it’s a you thing.”

“Maybe I like carols.”

“More than usual?”

“Maybe I don’t get asked a lot about what I like and don’t like. Some of us tend to be more outspoken about that.”

“Smolder.”

“Smolder.” Sandbar grinned. “And if you really hated singing them, you would have stopped at one, right?”

Gallus snorted again and looked down at the notebook. Sticking his tongue out of his mouth, he flipped through a couple of pages, then a few pages more, before opening his beak once again.

“Leise rieselt der Schnee,
Still und starr ruht der See.
Weihnachtlich glänzet der Wald:
Freue Dich, das Licht kommt bald!
In den Herzen ist’s warm,
Still schweigt Kummer und Harm,
Sorge des Lebens verhallt:
Freue Dich, das Licht kommt bald!...”

Once more, Sandbar listened in silence to verse after verse, chorus after chorus. Once more, he waited until Gallus’s voice had died down completely before speaking.

“Do griffons sing often?”

Gallus stared bemusedly at Sandbar. “Do I look like a choir bird to you?”

“Not just you.” Sandbar shook his head. “I mean back when all these were made.”

Gallus’s bemused expression slipped abruptly into a frown. “Yeah.”

“Oh.” Sandbar gulped. “Sorry, I should have — I mean, I could have read about it before asking you, or talked to—”

“I’m not going to expect you to read a history book before talking to anycreature, dingus” Gallus snapped. “You think I’m mad at you about that?”

“You just look…”

“Like I appreciate the reminder? Oh, it’s great, absolutely great. Yeah, in case the notebook didn’t remind you?” Gallus waved the yellow notebook around in the air before slapping it back on the ground. “Tons of them. Tons and tons and tons of them. We had a carol for basically everything!”

“Like what?”

“One for waking up on a sunny morning. One for waking up on a snowy one. So, so many about King Grover, about being strong and honoring the family legacy, and a bunch about stuff like brawling, drinking, feasting. I kid you not, we have one for taking a dump the day after a feast!”

Sandbar’s eyes bulged as he clapped a hoof over his mouth, but he failed to stifle a peal of laughter any further than a gagging, half-giggling wheeze. “Gross, dude!”

“Hey, if you’ve got a problem with it, go to the grave of the silverfeather who wrote it and whine at the dirt, not me. I’m just the messenger.” A grin, only barely suppressed, slid over Gallus’s face. “Can you believe we were supposed to have a week of all that? Just songs, songs, songs all the time. I’d rather stuff rocks in my ears.”

“No way.” Sandbar pulled his hoof away from his face, still grinning from ear to ear. “You celebrated Hearth’s Warming for a whole week?”

“Back then they did, yeah. And I told you it wasn’t Hearth’s Warming. It was, uh…” Gallus’s tongue jutted out of his beak again as he screwed up his face in concentration for a few seconds. “...don’t remember the old-timey name for it. Not Hearth’s Warming, though, that’s the point. Different holiday, different meanings. Different things we were thankful for.”

Gallus fell silent. His eyes slid floorward, his expression faltered, his wings folded back in on themselves. His jaw worked, mouthing nearly inaudible words.

Sandbar leaned forward. “Uh…I didn’t get that last bit, sorry.”

“Different endings!” Gallus snapped, head whipping up again. For a second, irritation smeared his features into an ugly scowl, before that, too, faded. “...Look. Do you know why I don’t like this whole dumb collection of songs? Why I didn’t want to share them?”

Sandbar blinked. “Uh..because you were embarrassed at being caught singing?”

“Besides that, smartass.” Gallus rolled his eyes. “Which, by the way, thank you for busting into the room while I was clearly in the middle of something that I obviously didn’t want company for.

Sandbar looked pained. “I needed to pee, dude.”

“Yeah, and the first thing you did when you came in here was stand there slack-jawed before asking all sorts of stupid questions, so how’s that working out for you?”

Sandbar froze. Abruptly, he stood up and bolted for the bathroom door, slamming it shut behind him.

When Sandbar returned, Gallus had resumed lying back on his bed, little yellow notebook once again spread open on the ground, revealing a faceful of utterly illegible scratch in the lamplight.

“Sorry about that,” Sandbar admitted.

“Dude, I knew you were spacey, but come on.” Not bothering to sit up or even move his head, Gallus jabbed an accusatory talon in Sandbar’s direction. “What kind of pony forgets to use the bathroom?”

“What kind of griffon doesn’t share his beautiful voice with everypony else?” Sandbar countered.

“The latter’s about privacy. The former’s about being too dumb to not die from a bladder explosion.”

Instead of replying, Sandbar sat down in front of the notebook, squinted, and peered at the pages as if hoping that narrowing his eyes would suddenly make everything legible.

Just when he was about to get a headache from his fruitless efforts, Gallus spoke up again.

“You’re really going to keep running that ‘beautiful’ bit, huh.”

“Yeah.” Sandbar leaned in even closer until his muzzle almost brushed against the page.

“What do you think flattery’s going to get you? A high five and a parade in your honor?”

Sandbar looked up. “Is it really flattery if I just want you to sing more?”

“There’s no way somecreature didn’t put you up to this.”

“I put myself up to it. Does that count?”

“So if I open the door and find that somecreature’s lurking outside—”

“You’re talking to the pony who was so excited to hear music that he forgot to pee. You think I was in high awareness mode?”

“A likely story.”

“Well, then, you’ll have to assume that I’m not too dumb to forget about my bodily functions. Which is better: sating your paranoia in the short term, or having something to make fun of me for over the rest of the school year?”

Gallus raised a talon in the air. Then, after a pause, he lowered it again. “Well played.”

“Thanks!” Sandbar chirped. “So you don’t like griffon carols because…”

Gallus glared at Sandbar. “Did you really have to ruin a perfectly fine conversation about how dumb you are by constantly asking the worst questions?”

“The dumbest questions, you mean?”

Gallus moaned. “I ought to slap the smarmy smile off of your face.”

“But you won’t.”

“Oh, yeah? And why’s that?”

Sandbar set the notebook down, pivoted and plunked his rump down by the side of Gallus’s bed, with only a leg’s worth of space between the two. “Because you know that I have as many mean bones in my body as Ocellus has failing grades on her homework.”

Gallus looked dead at Sandbar, who returned his gaze without flinching.

Gallus cracked first.

“Griffonstone’s gone, dude.”

“Huh?”

“Griffonstone doesn’t have glorious kings anymore. It doesn’t have an empire. It doesn’t have mighty armies, rich merchants, loving mothers and fathers. It doesn’t get roses in the winter. It doesn’t get roses at all! It’s just this stupid patch of dirt surrounded by a bunch of big rocks, a few dilapidated houses and a clawful of castoffs from when things were supposed to be great. You don’t get children’s choirs singing in auditoriums to crowds of hundreds of nobles and the nouveau riche, you get…”

Gallus faltered, then pointed at himself.

“Filthy little orphans digging up paper scraps while rummaging for food in dusty buildings that hadn’t seen use in years. You get smears of history, blots of culture and a bitter reminder that things didn’t used to make you resent who you are. Resent that there was a glorious world and all you got out of it was dust, hunger and endless stories about times that you were born too late to live in.”

Gallus paused again. Abruptly he sniffed, rubbed at one of his eyes with his claw heel and started again.

“This stuff that I go over, it’s…it’s nice to dig out when everycreature’s acting nostalgic, because I can use it to remind myself that it’s all over. There’s nothing for me back in Griffonstone, so I can take all these paper scraps, get them out of the way and move on with the holidays. ‘Good riddance to old rubbish’ and all that.”

“You really think it’s rubbish?”

“Yeah. I mean, no, not really, but…you know.”

“I do?”

“Yeah you do. It’s…uh…” Gallus sighed. “It’s like reminding yourself to forget something so you don’t keep turning it over in your head forever. Like a little string around the talon, except it’s sheet music instead of string.”

“That doesn’t make it rubbish.”

“Well, what else is it good for?”

Sandbar sat there. As Gallus watched, Sandbar focused hard on a spot on the wall behind Gallus and he rubbed his temple intently.

“Alle harry…alle harry weeder, kommt das Groverkind—”

Gallus wheezed with laughter, before snorting and pointlessly trying to cover his mouth with his claw.

“Hey, I’m trying,” Sandbar replied, cheeks going slightly pink. “If you think it’s so bad, you could always help me out.”

“And miss out on this? This is prime comedy, I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Sandbar grinned impishly. “I bet you’ll think it’s even funnier when I practice it with the rest of the gang.”

Gallus’s face paled. “You wouldn’t.”

“I would.”

“Don’t you dare.”

“It’s very pretty.”

“I don’t care.”

“I do.”

“Why?” Gallus squawked.

“Because it doesn’t matter what Griffonstone is like now. If it made something beautiful and somecreature remembers it, then not even time can take it away from us. And I don’t want to let time take these songs away from me, because you sing them beautifully and they deserve to be remembered because of that.”

“I should never have opened my beak.” Gallus rubbed his face. “I shoulda just left the dumb book on the ground and forgotten about it.”

“Or maybe you could admit to yourself, just once, that you find the attention flattering,” Sandbar cut back sharply, expression going hard as stone. “Accept that there are creatures who want to hear you sing and talk about history, creatures who want to treat you like a second family while you’re around because our lives are so much better with you in it.”

Gallus didn’t respond.

“I know this is the holiday season and I should be generous about it, but this has got to stop,” Sandbar continued. “I am so, so sick of you bullying my best friend. I am exhausted with hearing you constantly shaming him out of doing things he obviously enjoys and making him feel like he can’t get sentimental about anything. I hate that you force him to act like some aloof, detached too-cool-for-school rebel wannabe because the idea of him having emotions and, Celestia forbid, actually expressing them would make you die of embarrassment. Basically our entire group is head over heels about him, and yet you still insist on being a massive jerk any time he tries to share something interesting, and I’m so sick of that. Everycreature is sick of that. So please, for once in the year, can you just stop?”

Sandbar was answered with silence.

“And we both know that I’m not talking about me, here—”

“I get it.” Gallus scooted back until his wings pressed up against the wall behind him, pulled his legs to his chest and buried his face in his knees. “I get it.”

This time, it was Gallus who was answered with silence.

“...I think I have issues,” Gallus said.

“Maybe a couple.”

“I don’t want to talk about it with Miss Starlight Glimmer. Or Miss Trixie.”

“I won’t make you.”

Silence.

“...Sandbar?”

“Yeah, buddy?”

“I wish I wasn’t myself.”

Sandbar shook his head. “But if you weren’t, then how would I have ever met you?”

Gallus chuckled sadly. “You’re a piece of work.”

“Takes one to know one, right?”

“Yeah...yeah.” Gallus sniffed. “I don’t know if I want to do the carols anymore.”

“Why?”

“ ‘Cause now I just feel embarrassed and sad that I made you angry.”

“You know that wasn’t my intent, right?”

“Yeah.” Gallus looked up. “I know, buddy.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

Awkward silence bloomed between them like a malignant rose.

Sandbar broke first. “I guess I should—”

“One more.”

“One more?”

“Then I want to get more cocoa. And maybe dinner. And I don’t know what I feel like doing then. But…” Gallus took a deep breath. “It’s one of my favorites.”

Sandbar smiled. “Thanks, Gallus.”

Gallus took another deep breath.

“O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum,
Wie treu sind deine Blätter—”

“Wait!”

Gallus paused. Sandbar stared at him, eyes wide, mouth faintly agape.

“It’s not the taking-a-dump one, if that’s what you’re wondering,” Gallus drawled.

“No, that’s not it! I recognize…I recognize this tune! I know how it goes!”

Gallus’s jaw dropped in a delayed imitation of Sandbar’s shocked expression. “No way.”

“Yeah!”

“I don’t believe it.”

“No, it…then it goes…dahhh dahhh dahhh dahhh, dahhh dahhh dahhh dahhh…” Sandbar closed his eyes and puffed out his chest as he continued the melody. One verse’s worth, then another. Gallus watched without comment as the colt’s voice grew clearer, louder, bolder.

It was only a little into what would have been a third verse of nothing but dahhh-dahhh-dahhh noises that Sandbar realized where he was and opened his eyes again. “...Uhh. So, that’s how it goes, right?”

Gallus blinked. Then, abruptly, he snorted. “You’re a Tenor.”

Sandbar quirked an eyebrow. “What did you expect?”

“From the way you talk? A Yovidaphone with two or three dents in it.”

It was Sandbar’s turn to snort in amusement. “Aww, more than one dent? I’m hurt.”

“No more hurt than my ears would have been if your singing had been any worse.” With a huff, Gallus pulled his body off the bed, grabbed at the notebook and expertly flipped through it until he reached one particular page. Eagerly, he jabbed a talon at one bubbly little cluster of might-have-been words. “Here, can you go over this line-by-line with me? I don’t know where or how this song survived everything, but if you’re gonna do this with me, I want you to do it right.”

Sandbar nodded. “I can try.”

“Good enough. So, keeping the tune, repeat after me: ‘O Tannenbaum…’ ”