Tale the First - The Songblades Born

Tale the First - The Songblades Born

Feb 27, 2024

A sickly sun scorched grey-streaked skies. The world beneath its rays was starved of light. Mists and shadows ruled in open expanse without a solitary drop of vibrance. The gray wastes drove into endless muteness. The whole of the universe was stripped bare of the pomp and circumstance of color.

A man lay motionless upon a pile of once-gleaming now ghostly treasure. The gems and coins, the artifacts of great ages past, were spectres of their former selves. The man was pale as a winter moon.  His skin was almost translucent in the ethereal light of this shadowed world. All was calm, stretched, standing upon the edge of time in suspension.  He opened his eyes.

Their silver shone with a brilliance that beguiled the shadowed world.  They shone where shining was taboo, set forth a gleam that defied all the weight of darkness and oppression of gray. He stood with lithe precision. His muscles were sleek and firm.  His sinewy form stretched and gave the impression of a lion preparing for the hunt. His eyes surveyed the landscape and he sniffed the air, rose his brows briefly and scowled.

“What is this?” The words were muffled to his ears, as if travelling over a massive expanse. He looked at his hands, whiter even than he remembered, and finally let out a roar of insane proportion belying the smallness of his stature. The incorporeal treasures around him shook with the force of a preternatural, bestial rage. The roar chased the sickly darkness through the heavy air and was swallowed by the world’s great maw of gray as if with a yawn.

The strain of the roar emptied from his muscles like water and he slumped briefly, but then he sang – a haunting, tenorial melody. Its beauty warred with the malaise of his surroundings and he lifted his head and began to smile, showing rows of gleaming white teeth, sharp and clear.  He sang of the sun, the light and the stars, of the colors of spring and the white harshness of winter.  He sang of all that which was good in the world from whence he came. He sang to sew iron into his soul as he continued his long journey through the colorless desert lands.

He wore simple leather armor. At his sides two swords of simple craftsmanship hung. They barely moved in their scabbards on opposite hips as he strode like a surefooted stag through the wasteland of his own personal nightmare.

“How long has it been?” The spectral voice seemed not his own. “How long will it be?” All sense of time and direction, of thought, of color, of hope were drained from this place like blood drawn out of a corpse leaves it hollow of its humanity.  He sang on in tones and a tongue immortal – clear notes shattering the muteness of the air for fractions of a time before the silence stifled them.

Far in the twilight haze a mountain rose like a dark, jagged slash, in an already dim sky, as if true darkness laughed at mere shadow. The mountain called to him by discordant notes needing to be rectified and so he went towards it, singing as he went. The tones of his voice pushed back the miasma of despair that hung so heavily upon the place, but only just beyond his path.  It was as though his voice had created a buffer, tiny as it was, between he and the malevolent atmosphere.

The journey to the erebus mount stretched to time and distance of insanity.  Here it looked closer than his own hand. There it was a speck upon a distant, broken horizon. Everything in this wicked realm bent toward driving madness.  Still he trudged. The peak appeared in a flash. One moment he was in a giant expanse and the next he stood atop the very pinnacle of existence and saw all that shattered world below. There, driven like a stake in the crown of the world was a giant sword, its blade made of pure, impenetrable darkness that exuded the dark as a thing visible in the air around it.

The man approached it slowly, the whiteness of his skin a stark contrast to the black of the blade. Curiosity compelled him forward. He stopped singing. Air caught in his throat. All that mattered was the Sword.  It was ancient and primordial, and yet somehow new, as if it had only just appeared and waited for its time to force its will upon the world.  Yes, it had a will indeed.

His skin touched the blade and he felt a shock of extreme cold.  The ice beneath his flesh warmed to it, welcoming the waves of chill like a fresh breath after long smothering. Skald. The voice in his head resounded with a preternatural depth. Skald, why do you corrupt my lands? The depth was laced with anger, yet there was a hint of a smile in that voice.

“Corrupt?  How can this place be more corrupt than its colorless malaise?”

Ah, young Skald, I barely allow such light as this. As the voice spoke within his mind the area around the man began to drain further of light until he could see nothing at all.  The dark deepened until all senses faded to nothing. Taste was ash. Touch, numb. Hearing muted. Sight blinded. The scent of cold permeated.  The crushing black oblivion made him wonder if he were still breathing. This must be the void at the beginning and end of all things, the blank slate of decayed and unborn worlds.

That is better is it not, Skald? The voice boomed in his skull, as if heightened in the darkness.

“No ,you wretched thing.  What madness drives to depths of darkness? What insanity finds comfort in oblivion?” He thought he spoke but could not hear his own words. “What hope is there in this jet black silence?”

The laughter that responded shook the man to his core. It was long and loud and harsh. And yet you revel in the cold at least. Show me, Skald, the way of your song here in the utterdark where it cannot be heard. The laugh began again, mirthful and alien.

The man began to sing into the silent dark. A song was always on his lips ready to burst forth, and as he did so he could not help but move, to draw his swords and begin a dance of mourning, as was the way in many of the tribes he once walked with. It grew slowly from the thinnest whisper. The twin blades leapt to life in his hands, but as they dragged through the solid dark they were scoured and shaped, by his will or by the other’s the man did not know, but he could not help but continue.  Soon his voice was an arising moan accompanied by a whistling harmony around the whirling blades. Silence yielded to the sound of singing. As he danced, and played, and sung, and swung the darkness was pushed back inch by dreadful inch. The light in his eyes shone like rays of dawn, and an aura of silver light tinged with icy blue spread from him in all directions.  As he circled and whirled a wall of light began to form around him, growing from the edges of his swords and hanging in the air as drapes of radiance.  The crescendo of his song drew light into the darkest places of the world, and drove back every ounce of darkness except that of the Darkling blade itself.

Skald! Stop your ceaseless corruption and I shall grant you a boon…

The voice sounded distant now, as if it struggled to battle through the light of the Skald’s performance, as if song, and light, and harmony could shatter any foe, any power at all. His song became the roaring cascading crescendo of life in a place of death, and at his feet growth began to sprout and bloom, the first flashes of color this world had seen in millennia. Ethereal flowers bloomed. Crimson petals streaked with vibrant glowing orange.  Lilies patterned with peach and dotted with drops of starlight white. The vines were fluorescent green, cascading and growing up faster than the darkness could hold them back. Roots drove deep into once grey soil now turning all the shades of earth.

Skald! Yours is an existence anathema to my realm. STOP! I shall free you, but not for free. I will exact a toll.  Though you love the light you will be my blade in darkness, and one day you will repay. You will repay.

The man continued to dance and sing, ignoring the enfeebling voice of darkness. The wall of radiance was an ever-growing stain of light in a world of darkness.  Growth and life expanded wide and far.

You would take my world and turn it into yours! I WILL NOT ALLOW IT!

And as he danced two more blades, forged from shadow essence drew forth seemingly out of nowhere and began to swing and dance a mournful dirge in tempo with the Skald’s light blades. At first there was a battle in the skies. A crash of light on dark, but soon they joined the dance too. The dance was a balanced one, a dance of light and shadow. A Song of Sun and Void. The blades danced of their own accord, and the man reached out a hand and drew the sword from the mountain. In the rising tide of the performance and the connecting moment of two opposites a single, pure, clear, perfect, supernatural note rung out across the vast expanse of all that is, and a note returned in reply, the first rawly beautiful cry of a newborn universe.

I will not yield to you!

“Nor I to you. It will be a long struggle indeed”

The skald awoke in a blinding light covered in snow.  The sky burned sapphire. The sun cast vibrant rays across a vast mountain valley.  The snow stood brilliant white against the backdrop of stone, and evergreens peeked out green beneath their winter shrouds of frost.

A cave’s gaping maw yawned wide to his right, icicles hanging like stunted, jagged teethe from its top.  He entered slowly, a faint familiarity about its form.  As he descended deeper, and the light began to fade, he was struck with a maddening fear.  He said a series of arcane words and touched his hand to a blade and a light shone forth as if from a bright torch. He calmed in its rays.  He followed deeper as the rough stone gave way to well-hewn masterfully worked archways with tapestries hanging in faded tatters, barely holding on to their former color.

“Home” The man wandered through the remnants of his old life, picking through the bones of what was, trying to remember, and to ascertain all that he had lost.  In the center of a vast cavern, where once a horde of wealth and ancient histories lay in orderly patterns, there was now only dust and emptiness. Still, carved into the wall, the vast stonework done by his only Giant friends, was a great dragon in regal splendor, bowed slightly as if listening intently to someone or something. Beneath it, in words he barely recalled how to read it said, “Boreal Blade, Siegyrd, may the light of life ever shine on and through you. Dravok Naa, Masni.” Live well, Friend.

The words rang in his head and played like a song.  The shadows of this place crept in against the meager light of his shining sword, and Siegyrd was afraid.  “How long… how long my friends?” Sadness began to take him, the wasting miasma of the place he had escaped making the shadows seem villainous.  The demon called Despair began to rear his ugly head in Siegyrd’s mind, and his thoughts grew dark.

“NO!” He finally roared, his voice larger than his stature by far. He began to chant, to sing a bright tune that pushed back the darkness.  He sang in ancient tongues, a song of casting, and in mere moments the light of a small sun burst forth from his hand and raised high in the cavern, banishing every corner of darkness.

“A light to those in darkness

The night to evil bred in day,

A sign of hope to those in trouble,

And doom to those who stray.

Now begin my wanderings,

Life embattled, Come what may!”

Siegyrd breathed deeply, feeling the light as a living thing in his lungs and left with the song of light and darkness burning in his veins.

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