Page 48 of Discordant Cultivation

“Have I ever lied to you?” Vale let his thumb drift lower, tracing the line of Kieran’s jaw. “One perfect performance. That’s all I’m asking.”

Kieran’s shoulders sagged with the weight of inevitable surrender. Tears gathered in his eyes, but he nodded. “Okay. Okay, I’ll—I’ll try.”

“You’ll do more than try.” Vale stepped back, moving to the recording console. “You’ll show me everything you’ve learned.”

He started the recording. The red lights blinked to life like electronic eyes, and Vale watched Kieran’s posture shift in response. The gauze caught the overhead lights, making him look luminous.

There it is. That transformation I’ve been cultivating. From anxious boy to something rawer, more primordial than man. You’re learning to perform through the fear instead of letting it stop you.

Kieran closed his eyes and took three deep breaths that Vale counted along with him. Then his foot began to stomp—steady, rhythmic, using the basement’s acoustics to create percussion that seemed to rise from the earth itself. His hand found the body of the guitar, the gauze-wrapped fingers creating subtle differences in tone as he added slaps and taps that layered complexity over the simple beat.

When his voice emerged, it bore no resemblance to his speaking stutter.

A wordless vocal melody spilled out first, haunting and pure, notes that seemed to capture every moment of suffering from the past three weeks and transform it into something almost holy. Vale’s chest tightened as he recognized fragments of melodies Kieran had discovered in the darkness of the bag, now woven together into something cohesive and devastating.

Then the lyrics began.

“In the corners where the shadows breathe and whispers lie;

Every creak’s a conversation with my paranoid mind...”

Not quite singing, not quite speaking. Something in between that shouldn’t have worked but did, riding the rhythm like his voice was just another percussion instrument. His eyes opened, fixed directly on one camera with an intensity Vale did not know he possessed.

“Trust is just a five-letter word that cuts like glass;

When the darkness speaks in tongues and the moments never pass...”

His voice compressed, his delivery accelerating as he moved through verses about paranoia and suffocation. The guitar work remained minimal but perfect—just enough melody to anchor the rhythm of his words as his body became the primary instrument. The gauze on his throat shifted with each breath, each word, a visual reminder of everything being hidden.

“The helpers and the healers got their own agenda too;

Pills and bills and therapy, but who’s really helping who?”

A bitter smile twisted Kieran’s lips on that line, his eyes still locked on camera like he was having a conversation with Valethrough the lens. The tears hadn’t fallen yet, but they gathered like storm clouds.

The pre-chorus shifted everything. Kieran’s voice rose, found melody again, but broken and questioning:

“Tell me what’s worse than drowning when you’re standing on the shore?

Medicine’s just poison if you don’t know what it’s for…”

The chorus hit like a small explosion. Kieran’s whole body engaged—foot stomping harder, his hand creating complex rhythms on the guitar’s body between strumming as his voice slid between melody and spoken rawness with a fluidity that spoke of complete emotional surrender.

“And the hands that pull me up from hell;

Are dripping with the poison that will make me well,

Make me well,

Make me well...”

The tears finally fell during the second verse, but Kieran didn’t stop. If anything, the emotion made his unconventional delivery more powerful. He used his breath as another instrument, gasps and catches that emphasized certain words, turned his breaking voice into an artistic choice rather than a reason to stop.

Vale leaned forward, completely captivated. Kieran wasn’t just performing pain—he was alchemizing it into something that transcended conventional music structure. And the visual—thisbeautiful, broken boy wrapped in white, looking like a saint while singing about damnation—it was perfect.

The time signature shifted to 6/8, and Kieran’s delivery became almost hypnotic. His eyes showed shame now, he couldn’t quite meet the camera as he sang about dollar signs and profit in pain. But when he reached the crucial lines, his gaze snapped back up:

“But maybe, just maybe, the poison’s the cure;