The Bard

Before the time before our time, two Mothers of the Blessed met.
Together settled at the edge of desert wastes.
The mother daemons, one of forge and one of sea.
Two lovers, goddesses.
Their passion tempered Bellkeep’s gate. Their sorrow branded it.
 
That was always how the story began. As reliable as the tide.
 
Poetry’s hands were steady. Dark skin against the darker cast metal of the bell drum in her lap. Etched into its surface were long tongue shapes curling around each other at different lengths and directions. The cracks between them had the look of rock buckling under the heat and pressure of a volcano. Perfect for her composition.
 
She’d threaded strands of silk into the pair of long corkscrew horns at her brow. Rich crimson and cerulean, for the forge and the sea.
 
Her fingers traced the runes carved into the base of the bell drum. Her hands cupped the round hollow bowl but could not quite touch. Poetry hummed a quiet prayer to Avandra. It would settle her thoughts, temper her focus. Her music was as much for her Lady Luck as it was for her own heart.
 
Poetry settled into the insistent thrum of the tavern. The Lotus was always uneasy on match nights. A gentle rumble from the arena upstairs kept the room from ever truly going quiet. She imagined that they were an audience for her performance. No, better yet, that she was a solitary out in the Malachite wastes. That the voices were on the wind. The rumble merely that of distant thunder.
 
She let the sounds of the crowd drift away, and she began to weave the tale. As it always opened; with the forge and the sea. She struck a metal tongue with her fingertips. It replied with a smooth echoing bell tone.
The tale of the Bellkeep was as old as the city that bore its name. The Forge-born met the Sea-bound at the cliff edge of the world.
 
Her fingers paced across the tongues, coaxing out the notes hidden inside. A short tongue for a bright tone, a longer one to let out a deep-rooted bass. Her fingertips skipped across each others’ paths. Like children playing at the cliffside.
 
One chime after another, she slowly tapped a rhythm of climbing and descending notes. Laying the foundational theme. Her telling of the Bellkeep had no words. Poetry kept silent, save for an occasional hum with the harmony of bell tones she kneaded from the surface of the drum.
 
The Forge-born met the Sea-bound at the cliff edge of the world, and with the other Ancients they built sandstone city walls.
 
Her fingers pranced across the drum, remembering their steps. Punctuating her steady rhythm with a warm melody she’d composed for the Forge-born goddess. A woman of toil and intellect, whose fires blazed and hammered out the shape of the city.
 
With the image potent in her mind, Poetry gently exhaled into the bell drum. The metal warmed under her touch, and light began to flicker from beneath the cracks. Quiet embers. Sparks of dull orange drifting up with a current that wasn’t there.
 
Sustaining the illusion, Poetry’s rhythm hardened to a march. The forge. The hammering of steel, as Forge-born worked and armed the walls and led her hordes of craftsmen on.
 
A counter-melody snaked through the Forge-born’s theme. Blue wisps of sea air rising from the drum, joining the sparks.
 
Where her lover’s song was bold and fiery, the Sea-bound goddess followed a theme of plaintive sighs. Salt winds that swelled within her chest. They breathed their life into her soul. They beckoned her to seek out worlds beyond horizon’s sight.
 
Palm flat against the drum, Poetry muted the longing melody. Beside her lover, lifetimes passed. The Sea-bound fought the ocean’s song.
 
With flicks of her wrist, Poetry sculpted the ancient skyline in the flames of her drum. She playfully struck the tongues with one hand, reaching up with the other through the clouds of illusory light she had conjured.
From the blue sea air emerged the shadow of a row of sail. The ship, as fated to the sea as she who built it with her loving hand. The Sea-bound goddess and her child. Her jewel. Her home. While fervent was her passion for her Forge-born love, the waves would always call.
 
The sea would always sway her heart.
 
A second marching pattern grew from the wistful melody.
 
Past harbor’s reach the goddess roamed, protecting home and bay. On spy for dangers from the sea. But never straying out of sight.
 
Poetry trilled her fingertips against the drum. The patter of a heartbeat at the edge of the ancient world. The Sea-bound always peering out, past lands she helped to tame.
 
Spectral fire flared from the bell drum with a familiar, grounded march. The Forge-born, anchored to her work. Devoted to her realm. She watched her lover drawn from shore. Each passage further, further still, till one night shared in bed became their last.
 
Other stories of the founding bell would follow the Forge-born from here. Poetry could tell that tale asleep. Her lover lost among the waves, the goddess forged a mighty bell, to dedicate with sorrow and her grief. Ring out, it would, to call the Sea-bound home to shore. The bell was packed upon a ferry bound across the bay. Its home to be a temple on an isle. But cruel were storms clouds when they struck, and sunk the cargo and its crew. The bell it sank to depths below the bay, it burrowed, burying itself. Pulled deeper, deeper in the earth. The chasm in the bay, the Bellkeep, sacred to this day. Commemorating depths of ancient love.
 
Of course, the trench in the bay had a bottom; any fool with two wits knew that. But there was romance to the story that ‘when night was clear, one could perchance to hear the tolling of the bell, it’s clamor beckoning the Sea-bound home to reach her love.’
 
In their bones, all the folk of Bellkeep knew to revere the depths, and the ancient power that gave rise to the legend. Though it was never the tragedy of the bell that left a lingering ache in Poetry’s heart from the telling. Not the star-crossed lovers whose passion and loss was “the greatest romance of the ancient ages”. No, that tale was as old as the first speaker of Blessings. For Poetry, her chest swelled and tears fell for the story that was not spoken, never written nor passed down. The blank she’d been forced to fill since she was a child with wonder in her heart and at her tongue.
 
She could not help but weep for the ship.
 
The stories mourned the unknown fate of the seaward goddess and her daemon crew, lost amid the waves. But at its core, the songs and tales were of the city and its patron goddess, the lover who stayed behind. It gave no mind to the captain and her ship, who were written out. They had simply perished beneath the waves. Lost to their hubris.
 
Poetry began striking up a new pattern with the bell drum. Of the oceans rising and falling, full of momentum and movement.
 
They shared their longing, goddess and her ship. It knew no life but on the sea. While carrying a cargo of lost souls, it sought new worlds, new kingdoms to explore. To conquer and bring glory to its maker and her kind.
They chased the setting sun. But weary days and sleepless nights unveiled no harbor land. The Sea-bound chased her guiding stars, she spurred her crew and ship through vicious squalls.
 
Poetry whisked her fingers through the air once more, enveloping the silhouette of the ship in a violent thunderhead. Cold white light flashed behind gossamer clouds. Churning. The ship consumed by storms.
 
The melody of the Sea-bound stood fast against the raging skies. The goddess coaxed her ship with weary, honeyed praise. Through centuries they’d braved, as one, through vicious storms and terrors more than these. Together, ship and captain had withstood the warmachines of Great Orc clans, the ravaging armadas of Great Elves. What could the world throw in their path that they could not defeat?
 
Poetry’s fingers tapped harder and harder against the bell drum as the illusory storm battered the ship. The rhythm and melodies chafing against one another. Panic and fear and brutal stubborn resolve coiling up not as music, but hateful noise.
 
Her hands suddenly withdrew from the drum. A minor chord hung on the air with a weary sigh. The embers in the bell drum dimmed, and were snuffed out. Above her, the storm clouds frayed and faded. Leaving only the soft rippling image of the Sea-bound’s vessel.
 
Moments hung in silence before Poetry caught her breath. She returned to the Sea-bound theme, this time soft. A few notes would rise up from the slow rhythm, as if struggling to burst free, only to stumble back into the quiet melody. A pulse, suffocating in the calm.
 
The ship floating above her head had slowed to an uneasy stillness. With each passing measure of the bell drum, Poetry’s illusions warped and faded, told the tale with solemn, faceless figures in the smoke.
Atop the world, the ship was frozen in the waves. While trapped in ice, the goddess and her crew could only wait. While trapped in ice, her ship could only suffer in its grave. Its sails could only flinch at howling chill and winds. Its sides could only groan against the pressure of the frozen sea.
 
Each morn, its crew would climb on deck, and cross the frozen waste. They braced their spears against its hull. Relentless, prodding, sharp. And every night, the frozen sea would creep back on the ship. To bruise and crack the mighty ashen oak hung at its ribs.
 
Poetry’s fingers frantically paced the scales of her drum. Inside, the crew they huddled close, and clung to sanity. They starved for air that would not freeze, for meat that would not horrify to take. Outside, the ice and cold would pelt the ship, its mooring shred like nine-tails on the wind.
 
While days or perchance weeks passed on, the Sea-bound stood before her crew with resolute control. But in her cabin, knelt alone and begged for sweet reprieve. She yearned to hear her lover’s voice. Found comfort in the silent conversation of her ship, and pleaded for the strength to save her crew. Return them to a life on land. To any land.
 
Every so often, a sour note would pierce Poetry’s melody. The daemon crew descended into madness one by one. With wildly beating chests, they fled the refuge of the ship. Left nothing but their footprints in the snow. So one by one they sought escape, to die, till only one remained. The Sea-bound, sworn to stand beside the ship she made by her own hand, till she could stand no more. The cold would take her soon.
The first cut of the captain’s axe struck against her ship with a harsh dissonant chord of the drum bell.
 
Her ship provided, piece by piece, each part that it could spare. She burned her pride, her home, her child, to keep herself alive. Each night, she wept, embraced within her vessel’s loving hold. The goddess bore the burning of her world to find her way to shore. There was a chance, if she could rest, if she could only last the night. She told herself these lies for precious sleep. But would awake with weary eyes when harsh light’s day showed no relief.
 
The Sea-bound anguished as she worked. With broken heart, her voice rang out defiant to the wind. Attacked the hull, the mast, the sails. She burned and burned, and falsely promised to her ship of worlds beyond that they would find. The goddess swore and lied and wept and watched her ship give up itself for her. With piece by piece. The cold it deepened as the ship grew small. Between the goddess and her ship, whichever lasted longer could not live for long without its other half.
 
The drum bell rang out each cut. Piece by piece. Each tap softer than the last, as the Sea-bound’s ship disintegrated into the smoke above Poetry’s head.
 
Raucous shouting in the bar burst through her trance. Poetry glanced up at the audience, but could not make out faces through the familiar blur of silent tears. She blinked them away and brushed the conjured smoke out of her view.
 
Two human men had taken to punching each other at a table of gamblers. Something exciting had happened in the arena upstairs. Upsetting, too, by the look of it. Coin was thrown and shoved into faces.
 
Beside her chair on the pallette they called a stage, an old snoring human slumped over his drink, covered in filth and booze. At the bar, an elf with skin of smokey violet silently watched, seemingly unmoved by the performance. Beside him, the orcish barkeep Hallide bit back a sob as she alone applauded over the din. Poetry nodded to the orcish woman and hopped off her stool.
 
There was always another night.