An opening of eyes. Breath - close and musty.
No sight. The only sound my breath rasping, my
heart wolloping.
Beginning to sit up proves a poor decision -
there is a sword tip half an inch from my forehead.

I reach out and find plank walls and realise -
the barbarian did, in fact, have yet one more throwing axe
and zero respect for a herald of King Forest Evergreen III
of the Emerald Hills.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I mentally find the scar from the blade --
back of the neck, right between vertebrae.

That was some skill. The barbarian clan of the southern Celestial Kingdom
normally overhanded their flung weapons - sidestepping was a skill I'd perfected over the years.

That barbarian's voice was too melodious.

Not a barbarian, then; A Dark Bard, disguised, set to ambush me. Probably one of Squire Brennon's lickspittles.

The air became thicker as I breathed, less nourishing - I was glad that the Hills buried in oak those who fell the final time.

The rote echoed from my mind out into the wood and woods around me

"Pervading every nook of existence - scuerta haas tinne coll, the leap of the salmon and the drop of the leaf."

The air freshened. I turned my head to cough and the damnable sword tip -- they buried me with a warrior's sword for a headstone - nicked me.

If I ever got free from ... ah, but I WAS free; the finall fall released me from the geas that Dunraven had placed on himself when the Hills came to us and offered that we could join, or be disjointed.

I still could do nothing about the sword. No sun, no source of heat - nothing to heat it. The wood could not move it; The Creatress had deemed that wood yielded to metal, long ago, in the beginning of this world.

So.

Taking stock - No harp. Please let them have burned my harp. No flute. Aaaaand -- nope, not even the damned drumstick. I can't dance in a coffin. I could sing -- my voice emerges cracking, singing a poor idea. The vertebrae were not the only thing the axe blade reached through.

Someone wanted to make sure I stayed among the fallen.

I refreshed the air once more. At my disposal, then:

Simple cantrips; Air, Water. Acorns from the oak. (oh Acorns. My nose for a Hazel coffin.)

The druidry training, then. If I focused, concentrated ...

From Seed, Once the Seed of Seeds

I urged the Oak to grow under my fingertips
twisting my sense of time
slower
and slower -

push.

Push.

Push up Pushing up to reach the sun and stretch and reach but

no sun

must
go
back to ACORN;

it dropped into my hand.

A weave of water, ever so thin, surrounding it, nurturing it.
The air infusing it.
The dirt under my NAILS OH PAIN IT HAS ROOTED JUST HOLD TO THE CENTER UNTIL A LEAF THE PAIIIIINNNNNN

the leaf unfurled
my mind reached out
the oak a door

------

Light. A fresh breeze. I gasp -- my fingertips are buried in a tangle of roots of a three-hundred-year-old massive oak. It worked.

I pass out.

------

I awake. There are no trees. There is a ... A bonfire? In the distance. Perfuse light from everywhere and nowhere surrouds me, in stark contrast to the darkness all around. I take a reflex to stand and a green cloud suddenly hardens around me - I am flying? Floating. Far beneath me is a sigil. An Oak. It slowly rolls about.

I mov- wait, I am not moving. I'm not walking. I'm floating. But I'm not moving what is this another coffin? Beginning to panic, I see the bonfire from the corner of my eye and suddenly I am

IN IT OH NOT FIRE WHY DOES IT ALWAYS HAVE TO BE FIRE --



it's not fire.

A red flame flickers out of the darkness, as if summoned by my thoughts, and a voice says "Welcome, Mage."

"We require your assistance to catch this Tiermes."

-- end of Chapter 1.

(some editing and typo changes made from original draft. Copyright 2011 Steven "bardfinn" Akins. This work is licensed to you under a Creative Commons NC-BY-SA 3.0 License, except to Grey Area and it's agents, assigns, and designees for which a separate license is in place.)

awesome

Yes, more to come. I've got material I haven't written about this character before, so there will be more.

wow, an entire month between writing. That's terrible.

I might be forgiven as I had a lot to juggle.

-----

I suppose I have to have a title. It;s a difficult position -- Bard is my title, conferred on me long ago by my former master, Clu, in the Emerald Hills

My given name is Finn mac Gill, meaning "Brightness of the Clan Gill" - a traditional name for the firstborn son of the firstborn son. Scion of the family, destined to lead it one day.

The difficulty was that I did not really wish to lead a family of goatherders and fishermen.

--

I was sent to a monastery by my father at fifteen, to get an "Education". I had learned reading and writing and fieldcraft from my father, who -- from what I remember -- was a good man, but stern, distant, and prone to losing his temper in a snap.

While I was at the monastery, a bard named Dunraven talked with me. He decided I ought to be a bard -- and as was his right, he told my family that I would be training as one.

My father, on receiving the messenger, was angry. He'd never had a use for bards, and his heir was being taken off by one. He swore some violent oath, smashed in a chimney with a bench -- which caused the house (we had a greathouse, a hall) to catch fire. It burned. He was never seen after that night.

The rumour was that he attacked the messenger -- a grave sin.

---

So, I trained.

Watch now as I wave my hands in the air, and then yell PROFIT!!.

The training was five years, it was physically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually challenging. I was expected to memorise songs, poems, lineaologies, histories, methods, constellations, fieldcraft; to learn the cultures around us, swordfighting*, construct an instrument, compose music, learn the law, provide judgements on same, settle disputes; to travel and to carry news onward to the places I visited; to carry on a conversation within a conversation (your idiom is to Read between the Lines, I believe), know the seasons and mark them for all to know, and to pronounce geas and judgements where needed.

I ticked Swordfighting -- this is accurate, but not entirely true.

From the moment a bard begins training, that bard is forbidden to carry or wield metal weapons on pain of death -- any bard willingly carrying or wielding a weapon in hand forfeited life. Yet, it was absolutely necessary for a bard to defend himself or herself from those who did not follow our laws, and from the unSeelie Fae - who respect only what they fear.

In addition, bards must learn every conceivable and known profession -- one cannot judge that which one does not know. One cannot lead that which one does not know. One cannot perceive that which one does not know.

So, a compromise: Bards are allowed a walking stave, and to train for swordfighting (that they may know how a swordfighter moves and stands and sits and fights) using wooden swords, weighted and balanced as the metal swords, made from oak or ash.

A bard's true weapons are wit, intellect, skill in hand and eye.

I will be the first to admit that, as a bard, my one failing is in a lack of wit. It kept me from seeing the poor decision to follow Dunraven, aged and portly as he was, into the wilds.

--

Long ago, when my people came to this land, there were others here. The first bard, Amergin, contested with them and won a bargain: In return for their lives being spared, those people would retreat to their own realm, and would only be allowed to pass hence on certain days of the year.

A powerful bargain. A powerful geas. A powerful legacy.

Do you know what happens when you fall down a hillside, are knocked unconscious, and your travelling companion suffers the same trying to reach you to rescue you, and neither of you regain consciousness for days? When those days lead up to the beginning of the year? The harvest festival?

Fate happens.

------ end of Chapter Two.

Three

-------

Let me tell you, so that you might fully understand -- the land I come from, the Emerald Hills, was not the only land around us. We had neighbours, we had distant embassies, we had strange and unique visitors. And, in a difference from this world, we had magic. It was everywhere - as tangible and tasty as the air, in that you could not see it but you could feel it blow upon your cheek.

Only a few had the ability to ... I struggle here, because there is no good translation for this word ... ask? request? command? craft? weave? hold? be held? braid? give birth to? midwife? All of these and more are embodied in the root of our word for what we do with magic.

Let us suffice to say that, while almost everyone could feel magic in and around them (though some have lost this gift), only a few had the ability to guide the magic, to shuttle it.

One could be born with the ability, to intuit it. One could learn it, through applied study. One could be gifted the ability, by those who had the means to do so - and here, I refer of course to She who created our world, the Phoenix, wherever she walks or flies or -- another word that is difficult to translate. Here, in this world, magic practitioners Warp. It is much like warping.

All life comes from the Phoenix, from her flames as she flies across the sky each day. All life moves to the Phoenix, to her ashes and embers in the night sky.

----

We had many who had developed schools of the shuttling of Magic. Bards, such as I, weaved and braided it with words and music, sometimes tying knots, sometimes vibrating the magic. Others midwifed, nurtured, gave birth, raised - they tended crops, forests, the creatures therein, small children. Still others grabbed ahold and shook it, whipped it, wrapped it about themselves and made clothing and weapons of it - Wizards you would call them.

One of the things given to us is to repair the magic when it is torn, when weapons sever it, when it wears thin in a person. Those who specialised in this had the ability to heal terrible injury -- so long as there was a sliver of magic still clinging to the smallest part of a person's body, they could ... let us say, for lack of a better word, reach along the magic, and pull the body back together again, entire and whole, and place light back into it once more.

Those who sew, though, can also sever - and it is a terrible thing indeed to specialise in severing the work of the Phoenix. Yet, it is done. Dark Bards who sing shattering harmonies about a person. Wizards who rend and tear. Once-healers who have turned their face from the flames and who seek what lies in the ash can burn and dissolve the magic from a body, and some even then can puppet the lifeless.

War was there, as it is here, a constant thing. Shelter from it was a luxury.

--end of three

Four --

As I floated a kilometre above Philadelphia, watching a monstrous Arachne Weaver, Shadow Spirit of House Dannan, rampage -- severing beacons, spawning angry spirits, and never running short on Mana -- I shivered, and thought of the words I had spoken a few days before, of the Mages of the land I came from. I shivered as I thought of the word; the word that I had spoken of, but never spoke aloud.

I had refrained from forming the syllables to put my audience at ease. The tongue of my homeland is strangely structured and often the listeners of this world miss nuances.

I knew, now, hearing the coordination of the astonished hunting party, why I had never said the word.

"Araneida". The formal full name of a mother Mage whose children are Mages. From "Aranea" -- a mother.



Here it means spider.

Edited by Bardfinn (Oct. 2, 2011 02:59:08)