Inanis, Chord, and the Pipa That Speaks to Another World

The girl is young, and calls Inanis mother; Inanis calls her Chord. She is worn out from practicing the pipa, so Inanis lets her have a day off. As a child, Inanis says, she went on stage whether it was wind and cold or her fingers bleeding, and once she had a daughter she swore she would never perform again.

The girl asks about the family's great ship, the Golden Jade Pavilion, and why she is not allowed near it. In this scene Inanis does not explain.

What she says at the end is: “Whatever happens, from now on your pipa is for you alone.” She goes on to say that their pipa can raise a strange power, and that it “speaks with another world.”

In another conversation Inanis calls the man she is speaking to master, and calls Meng Hua her master's wife; he is never shown.

Inanis says that Meng Hua planted a crack in Chord that connects to the Discordance; that Chord has forgotten everything from before that day, and that the memories made since are eaten by whatever lies behind the crack. Practising the pipa can just barely hold memory together, but it cannot stop the body being eaten away.

The voice says Meng Hua means to feed the crack to something terrible in the Discordance. All of it is the two of them speaking — the scene offers nothing to corroborate it.

The conversation also turns on the Golden Jade Pavilion: it is built out of illusion, and it gathers the disordered Sha-Chi thrown off by people's pleasures. Inanis says her master, to escape being devoured by Meng Hua, once spun a cocoon in the Endless Blackwood and drew the dreams out of passers-by.

The other man ends by judging that Chord will not live past eighteen. That is a prediction, not an outcome that has happened.

At the parley Zuo Shang mentions that the Order will send a pipa master into the field — a Chord-Wielder — and calls her a puppet-creation without equal in the world. It is Zuo Shang's statement.

Elsewhere the Illusion of Inanis introduces the Realm of Mirage to Soul, saying that Zuo Shang's forces will not find that place; that she cannot send him in herself; that the pipa may help. The illusion deep in the forest came into being when a pipa of her own making destroyed itself. She asks Soul to go and save the Chord-Wielder.

Whether Chord and the Chord-Wielder are the same person rests on a shared name and a shared instrument; not one line of the text says so outright. It is recorded here as an inference, not an assertion.

The Illusion of Inanis says she made the Realm of Mirage between the Waking Realm and the Discordance.

In the same passage she notes that Remnant Dust can be used to train abilities lost to Heart Damage — the first time the story explains Remnant Dust at all.