It turned out the bard’s name was Ryndalon because of fucking course it was. Bright little weedy name for an energetic, weedy little man.
"Really?" Sebastian couldn't help but ask. Memories were already flowing into his mind of having to scale up and down the stone walls of Eldfäst, to rip out the creeping vine with its bright blue little flowers that bore the same name.
Invasive stuff — had to be dealt with as quick as you spotted it, or it would cover the whole damn place in a matter of weeks.
Useful to make a simple healing potion though. Not nearly as strong as Caladrius, mind you, but it wasn't nothing. Especially since, unlike Caladrius, even non-Relicts could use it relatively safely and without the guarantee of a slow and painful death to follow.
But to name yourself after it?
Sebastian looked the man up and down, unimpressed.
He didn’t look like much in his muddy blue surcoat and well-worn boots. Not that Sebastian was really in a place to make judgments on the state of someone’s clothing, not right now. Still, he didn't appear like what one might imagine a successful bard to look.
He was about the same height as Sebastian too. Tall for a human, with delicate long-fingered hands. All signs he had enjoyed a childhood with plenty of food to eat and a nice safe place to sleep every night. A life more privileged than your average peasant by far.
"It's tradition to choose a flower name to perform under," Ryndalon had replied with a supercilious little sniff. "And it's not so far off from the name I had before. Besides, the plant's both pretty and useful — and more importantly, no other bard's made a name for themselves under it already either."
Though whether he had meant bard or Bard — those trained musicians who, in addition to the usual singing and performing, could do some amount of mistweaving magics as well — remained to be seen.
Unlikely though. Traveling alone and scruffy as he was, Sebastian felt it was safe enough to assume Ryndalon was just your run-of-the-mill, non-magical wandering bard. Useful enough to spread news and entertainment, and therefore generally given much the same rights of travel throughout the continent as a healer or messenger.
But any Bard worth their salt would undoubtedly have a retinue; bodyguards at least, maybe even a servant. All provided by a grateful king or local priestess or high councilor — whoever was in charge, anyway.
They were rare though.
Sebastian had never had one cross his Path in all his years, for which he counted himself lucky.
Emrick said he had come across one once, hunting draugar on one of the many little islands that made up The Crown. But Sebastian's fellow Relict had been unusually tight-lipped about the encounter. He would only say that the Bard's music had been unlike anything he had ever heard, before or since.
Still, the ragged man in front of Sebastian now certainly didn’t much look like any so rare a creature as a Bard.
Didn’t smell like it either, so clearly a few days short of a much-needed bath. His scraggly brown hair was tied loosely in the back, several strands falling into his face which he was constantly brushing out of his eyes. They were a deep lake blue, a color that had Sebastian thinking of…
Never you mind what it had Sebastian thinking of.
He scowled at himself, trying to pull his meandering thoughts back into line. He needed to get to that healer — and fast. Obviously, he was concussed on top of everything else if he was thinking about the color of some bard’s fucking eyes.
And of course it would have to be a bard, wouldn’t it? Someone probably used to being loud and noisy, always making a show of themselves.
Sebastian couldn't have run across some taciturn farmer or preoccupied merchant, could he? Some bland local yokel to point him in the way to the next town, uninterested in anything more than getting Sebastian there and then himself immediately back home.
No, of course not.
As if it were some foreordained cosmic law that a Relict with better shit to do with his life must be in want of a musician to make a mockery of it. Must be some defied asshole out there cackling to themselves right now, pleased with their own divine self at complicating Sebastian's life with this shit.
A damn nuisance just waiting to happen, if you asked him.
But to be fair, it wasn't anything about the man himself — not really.
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How could it be? Sebastian had known him all of a minute. But…
It was just…
It was just that damn song.
Well, song perhaps was simplifying it. Really, it was a whole damn series of songs, any of which could set Sebastian's teeth to grinding just as soon as he heard the first few notes when some tavern's local musician inevitably begin to play any of them.
But it was specifically the last of them that had been a special sort of trouble.
The first...It hadn't been so bad, not really. Some completely bullshit tale about a bard who had ambushed a Relict on the Path — well, a Paladin according to the song, but they were the same thing. Just Relicts that had gone and changed their name centuries ago, when the mages broke with the church.
But you could strip all the feathers off a griffin you liked, still didn't make it a house cat.
This particular griffin, however — as in, capital-G Griffin, Order of the — had been subjected to a number of grand and glorious adventures during the course of the song itself.
And traveling alongside, cue one brave and quippy sidekick. Every Paladin's best friend; a bard who dogged the hero's footsteps the whole way, closer than his own shadow. All the better to tell the heroic tale afterward, of course.
Fine.
Complete fantasy, obviously. Especially given the inaccuracy of the monsters described in the song.
But it was a damn sight better than most songs and stories out there about Relicts. Usually they were cast as the greedy, baby-stealing villains of the tale. Hero was a bit of a nice change really.
When Sebastian had first heard that song, he had assumed the musician playing it would be laughed out of the tavern before even getting a chance to finish and that would be the extent of it.
But the tune was catchy. Before he knew it, Sebastian was hearing the song everywhere.
Couldn't go into a tavern or alchemist's shop or — hells, even a brothel — without someone singing the damn thing. Without some local tavern drunk taking one look at Sebastian and belting it out at the top of their lungs while the Relict was left scowling into his supper. Or an alchemist humming it under their breath as they counted out his coin, Sebastian himself counting the seconds until he could conclude his business and leave.
Without someone singing that candy-coated ditty at him that made a mockery of everything he had been put through. The Levy, The Ordeals, The Path —
And everything he risked his life doing after; day after day, job after job.
As if being a Relict was some — some great and noble calling.
As if someone like Sebastian could ever be called a hero.
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