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Indeed, Armavir might have lived his life unnoticed in
the large and intricate underground kingdom near Mount
Nevermind - a minor courtier, a fishwife without fishes -
were it not for his brush with death by electrocution, a near-
disaster with a happy outcome, for it galvanized his aimless
wanderings in legend and gossip into a genuine (if
overlooked) poetic gift, and charged him with a restless
desire to see the outer world.
It happened as such things often happen - a youthful
invention that backfires, but backfires in a most fortunate
manner. One does not discard a Life Quest lightly, and
Armavir's quest was what the Guild had pronounced as
"Something To Do With Wires": tensile strength, heat
conduction, musical properties - a world of circuit and
filament lay before our young hero. His heart in none of
these sciences but the musical, Armavir explored first the
variations of sound one could evoke from wires of different
thicknesses, tensions, and metals, designing the forerunner
of the cello.14 At first the experiments faltered, for Armavir
had not chanced upon the idea of making the instrument
portable; chambers of the undercity were strung with thin
and taut copper wire, hazardous to children, who took it
upon themselves to run chickens into those very chambers,
thereby decapitating and slicing
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