Ballad

The Stenza equivalent of a ballad is a combination of khe'drakha, storytelling, travel songs and war songs as befits the subject matter. Ballads are not as popular as any of these parts considered separately, and are usually done by storytellers who learned chant first. They often represent episodes of khe'drakha, but can also be completely independent of the grand epic cycles of Stenza poetry.

Execution

Ballads borrow from epic poetry the habit of line-pairs, in which one line is repeated possibly as a time keeping mechanism and possibly for emphasis. These typically occur once or twice per episode of poetry and, consequently, once or twice per ballad, typically as a framing device.
The subject matter of a ballad can vary greatly, from samples of larger khe'drakha to stand-alone incidents that are considered too "silly", informal, inconsequential or otherwise inappropriate for khe'drakha proper. As a result, ballads as an art form exist in a kind of Venn diagram with epic poetry, tangential and periodically its own thing. Of Stenza oral customs, ballads are the least popular and are considered by folklorists the least "stable", most prone to change or simple discarding.
(Incidentally, ballads are an excellent practice form for student khe'drakha performers.)