Role

Chapter 4

I spent the next years hiding. Always running from the debtor that never came.
I slept where sleep found me, in gutters, ditches and the occasional barn. I
panhandled, begged, stole for my dinner and as I moved from place to place I
started singing again, listening to people's stories, sometimes retelling them
or telling one of my own. I never thought of performing, of music as a
profession, it was just a part of my life, and slowly, painstakingly I honed
my craft. I started with barn dances and tiny village taverns, then moved up
to small towns and on to the cities. At the end I found myself at the Mushroom
Tree Tavern in Evermoon when I was asked to perform for the first time at a
court. I have seen all manner of people and I have witnessed them struggle
with their every day mundane tragedies as well as with those that are life
changing or life ending. No matter from which background they come, no matter
the poor decision their tragedy compels them to take, it is that breaking
point that makes the hero or the coward.

Having been in exile most of my life I know that loneliness doesn't bring the
artistic expression to sharpen, but it puts the mind and soul into a stupor
which blinds the eyes to the world. It is only the bard that should hide his
feelings, and it is only the bard that should express his own in the guise of
someone else's. Because if there is any beauty and worth to the art that our
own pain swans it must be a universal one, one that would reach others in the
pits of despair and show them the shining full moon overhead.

Over time I became comfortable wearing many masks. People avoid the acerbic
poet, they sit on the far side of the room from the depressed bard, they are
quick to share their pain with an understanding barkeep and they are willing
to follow on any quest a bard brazen enough to voice their claim to legend.

And all of it, ALL of THIS, because how could I quietly disappear in the
shadows and allow this world to crumble under its own pain? How could I betray
those eyes of purple that could never get enough of this world no matter how
ugly it turned out to be? How could I say that I want to close my own eyes
forever, when hers, even after her soul was gone, kept darting around, looking
for something that she knew must be there.. looking, for some redeeming grace.