Thanks to: BrokenKestral and trustingHim17 for setting up this writing prompt challenge!

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Trumpkin wasn't much one for singing. He liked music as much as the next dwarf, and he could whistle as merrily as a bird, but he much preferred plain, practical speech. If one was to go to the trouble of saying something, why not say it outright and have done with it?

Trufflehunter seemed to think otherwise. Whatever Trumpkin might say of his songs, the Badger persisted in using his warm baritone to say things musically – most often singing the sort of things he said in plain speech often enough. Badgers were stubborn like that: they held on. Held on to memories not even their own to forget. Held on to hopes best left forsaken. Held to some notion that there was always something to sing about.

It wasn't that Trumpkin disliked the Badger's singing or even his songs. Really, Trufflehunter sang beautifully, if husky and soft (qualities Trumpkin appreciated, what with living in hiding with him). There was something about his songs that felt almost grounding, but maybe that was because he was a Badger. So Trumpkin listened with half an ear while he smoked his pipe and stared into the fire.

Trumpkin wasn't much one for singing, but he knew a beautiful bit of music when he heard it. The fauns were best for it, as far as he was concerned. He liked a tune that drew him to dance or swayed him to sleep. (His disposition inclined him to only sparingly appreciate the doleful sorts, and he'd not heard the kind intended to rouse in one thoughts of glory and valour.) Music moved him as much as it did anybody.

But there came a single note that moved him as no music had before. It filled the air with earth-quaking thunder, yet sang cool and sweet. Sang? Surely not: 'twas only a horn. A fabled Horn from the ancient past, yes, but still only a horn. A horn that seemed a little – a very little – like Trufflehunter's songs, but both higher and deeper, grander and more intimate. What a sound it was that graced his ears and stirred his heart! He enshrined that wondrous note in his memory.

Trumpkin wasn't much one for singing, and he certainly didn't look for it where none should be found. Better that way, taking in only what was really there. Imagination was a fickle thing, but truth carried one through to the other side. And that applied to all of life.

So it was that when he heard a hint of a song in a near-roar from a Lion who should not have been there at all, Trumpkin hardly knew what to make of it. (He was, of course, trying to make something of the Lion Himself at the same time.) But that hint of a song became much more when the Lion really roared. If Trumpkin hadn't known what to make of the first, he no more did the second, for it was lower and stronger and wilder than the note of the Horn, and yet there seemed a whole song wrapped up in that sound. Stranger still, the song, if he could call it that, had no words, and yet he felt it in his bones as surely as did the earth's foundation. Perhaps because he was a Son of Earth. Perhaps because he heard it with listening ears. Whatever the case, it called to him and bade him awaken. So he awoke and answered.

Trumpkin wasn't much one for singing, but he found himself listening for it everywhere. It was there in wordless music and the laughter of a feast, in joyous silence and cheerful company, in the presence of Aslan and without.

And yet… not truly without. He first noticed it in the ringing of hammer on anvil as it smote a leaf of gold. He listened for it in the gold itself, said to have been preserved from the beginning of the world – Once-living gold yet sings,/ Lifesong in dead gold leaf. And through the long years of Caspian's reign, it seemed to Trumpkin that, though no one heard it as he did, he could hear the echoes of the song from the crown of the king that Aslan chose.

Trumpkin wasn't much one for singing, but he loved Aslan's songs. The song that began all life rumbled in the depths of the earth, bubbled in the waters, whispered in the air. It moved the dwarf more than plain speech or sweet music alone ever could, for it sang in his heart. So Trumpkin sang too.

I don't know how, but when He touched me
I once was blind, but now I see
And now my lifesong sings
~ "Now My Lifesong Sings", Casting Crowns

"Prompt: Tell of a time when music changed things in Narnia—either because it changed hearts or because it held magic.

Author's note: It kind of snowballed and went in a bit of a different direction, but one of the intentions of this story was to follow up the oral-tradition poem "Gold Leaf" (chapter 2 of "In the Way They Should Go").

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