most horrific shriek of torment must not haze his sweet measures into retreat.
Immersed in a melting sequence of song, the bard let the wraith’s deathless rage become mirrored: gently, terribly, unflinching in honesty, he described the balked need, then the hurt, raw enough to devour all resilience of spirit. Human himself, he acknowledged the hollow agony of separation. Captive as well, but unbroken yet, he encompassed the cry for requital that festered the wraith’s insatiable need.
His music wept the river of tears that purposeless emptiness forgot how to express. Unreeled as a thread of glittering gold flung downwards into the void, he probed the wrack spun by the wraith’s blinded misery. He sifted, patient, through veils of dread fear, and chipped at the tarnish of desolation. Beneath the bleak chasm of alienation lay the buried gleam of forgotten identity. He must plumb the pit and shape the wraith’s Name, before its crazed torment wore away concentration and turned at the last to consume him.
Harmonics spiralled into the air and woke other tremors of insight. Touched by echoes of his own buried memories, the bard encountered themes from the essence of his very self. Bright flashes of resonance sprang from strengths he had once expressed in full cognizance. The unconscious awareness shimmered within him, until the aching tremors of stifled experience stormed over his nerves in sweet waves. He had known a forest clearing by night, ringing with cascades of unworldly harmony played upon crystalline flutes. Partnered in matchless love, he had cherished a woman with such bonfire passion that the land’s flux had ignited to burning. His own aroused flesh, ablaze with hers, had scalded them both, incandescent…
Even the suggested memory of her evoked longing beyond all threat of danger to bridle.
Loss followed hard on the heels of epiphany. Fast as his fingers spun song to recover her, the gift of her being no longer lived in his mind.
He tasted the cinders of absolute grief, and pain great enough to seduce him. The glass edge of torment nearly made him let go: how easy to embrace the blind ease of oblivion. Surrender beckoned him towards the numb absolution of apathy and promised the end of intolerable sorrow – which was the same lie proffered by the wraith. Almost, he had been lulled to forget the stalking presence of that lethal danger.
Bare-fisted courage braced the bard’s rocked commitment. He firmed his purpose. Determined to ride out the rip tide of unrequited futility, though the cost left him weeping forever, he unleashed his yearning of spirit until his trained fingers howled his agonized emptiness into grace upon silver-wound strings.
Too late, he realized his effort went wrong. Unstrung past recovery, self-betrayed by the diabolical mistake that had tripped him, he realized the quickened voice of his past had wakened too many powerful echoes. Taken in, he himself had succumbed to beguilement. The pattern played into structure belonged to no starveling wraith! Waylaid by his own searing mastery, he discovered, stripped naked, the strains of his own Name resounded upon the loom of creation. Left with every guarded boundary undone, he stood shieldless before this antagonist. Of the countless thousands of ravenous entities his talent had peeled down to vulnerability and redeemed with tender compassion, this one did not seize upon his disadvantage. It did not rip hungrily into his essence, hating the blood and the bone of him. Rather than savage him in his defeat, this intelligence met his terror with a gentle pity that steadied his measures to haunted wistfulness. Shocked soul deep, he found his tears streamed for a pain all his own, with himself, the bird caged with clipped wings.
Immersed, he could not tear his rapt focus away. The net of his true Name surrounded him without struggle, soft as a caul, even as the ringing chords under his hands sealed the framework of his imperative summoning.
His wily contender was no wraith at all, and on this day, never had been. Enthralled by the gift of his own nature, he beheld the trickster at the last, illumined by the living force of his music, now upraised to the beacon flare of true magecraft. He faced another veiled crone, not the same who had delivered the lyranthe: that one was never his friend.
This woman wore no shimmering violet mantle. Her cuffs were not banded with scarlet. Instead, a single ribbon of white silk shone moon silver against her plain robe of grey wool.
Initiate discipline quelled the shocked reflex that urged him to stop off his strings and unspin this illusion of substance. Blind rage could at least seize that destructive outlet, even at risk of unravelling the most vital part of himself. Yet before his lightning reflex forced annihilation, she tilted her veiled head and spoke.
‘Choose wisely.’ Voice she had, tender enough to wrench his exposed heart-strings.
Wracked foolish with dread, all but paralyzed by fear of the price he might pay if he dared to listen, he fought the dark pull of his agony. Dispossessed, he owned nothing else but his music. Will defended that talent. Although sorely afraid, he cherished the strings, infallibly striking the notes that refined the connection, strung thin as a cobweb between them.
‘You are finished with banishing free wraiths,’ the crone said with ineffable gentleness. ‘That hideous trial is over.’
But he heard the clear warning she left unspoken, laced through his echoed counterpoint: that his future course of confinement extended without the fierce solace of the lyranthe. The other hag in her purple robes well knew that his gift for song might be turned to forge the key to wrest back his freedom.
His pealing cry of resentment retorted: repeatedly he had tested the enspelled barrier that hemmed him! Whenever he tried to break through, other forces would answer, bleeding him until he lay helplessly prostrate. The silvery walls of sealed spells locked him down under twisted skeins of revilement. If he ventured too close, he trod a verbal bed of live coals that burned him to humiliation beyond endurance. He crumpled, each time, savaged by accusations that pierced without mercy: ‘You have destroyed the woman you loved, left her forgotten and abandoned. Ruin walks in your footsteps. Behold the days when you trampled down hope. Come forward, only to suffer again! Walk your scarlet-soaked battle-fields and acknowledge your legions of slaughtered dead.’
The veiled woman wept in sympathy with him. While his music transmitted the relentless sting of his cringing nerves, she did not spurn him with scorn. As if he was not wretched, or defiled beyond bearing, she answered with consolation.
‘You are not all they say. Truth has many facets, and your eyes have borne witness to more depths than most. If anyone claims that you sold yourself out, and betrayed every love you once cherished, I say otherwise. Your past never followed the ruinous path, as your captors claim, to your detriment. Oh, you have wept! You have survived horrors. Truly, you have suffered all measure of grief, your inner heart cannot lie to you. But emotions can be manipulated to extract an undue toll of cruelty. Never bow to defeat! Not once have you forsaken the ground you stood with steadfast integrity, and even bled to secure.’
He let his notes answer, distrustful of words. What facts supported her bed-rock assurance? Against the conditioned responses he knew, her contrary statement meant nothing.
She did not disagree. Would not belittle the terror that clamoured, racing his breath until the black-out pall of self-hatred threatened to crush him.
‘Doubt frames the walls of your prison,’ she said. ‘Some of your uncertainties hide deeper truths. Others mask distortions and outright falsehoods, crafted by design to break down your spirit and finally destroy you. Are you alive enough to fight back?’
Battle, he knew. His bitter contests with uncounted free wraiths affirmed his hard-won experience. No matter how often he tasted defeat, his core fire would not stay doused. He might not remember his history, or the deeds he had written by choice, under Name. But through his skilled hands upon the lyranthe, his defiant joy shouted, undimmed and unbeaten.
