His fire was away from the other.  The others had a fire that was big, the roar of it so loud that he swore he could nearly hear it even tucked further back into the woods like he was.  He could certainly see it which ran counter to his small banked fire, giving out warmth but not his position.  More so he could see the figures around it, easy to target silhouettes in the night.  On top of that their merriment would be a plain giveaway even without the roaring flame. That wasn’t his responsibility though.

He enjoyed the dim rolling orange of the embers of his flame, of the silent hum as each ember gave off their warmth.

With an exaggerated sigh, she broke that silence and and settled herself down around his fire, not quite opposite of him but at a slight angle so that she could see him, and him her, without having to look directly over the flames.  Their was a glint in her blue eyes and a wry smile when his pale green gaze shifted up to acknowledge her and then back down to the leather bracer he was polishing an oiled sheen onto.

“You have an image problem you know,” she started without preamble.  His eyes raised again, saw that her smile slightly wider, growing another notch as his brow furrowed as he worked through her words.  After a moment he nodded and returned back down to his bracer.  There was silence once more that he hoped against his knowing would last.  The wisdom of his experience proved true as she started again, “The others are happy to tie their stories to yours, to make sure their legends get sung through the ages because yours will carry them there.”

His hands stopped their work and his brow furrowed once more.  His pale, pupilless eyes raised again.  “That’s a bad thing?”

“No,” she answered, the glean in her eyes growing.  The red of her hair just catching the rolling orange of the flames for a moment as she sat back.  Content to have gotten more than a word out of him.  “What’s bad is that if you were to walk over there, storming blade in hand, with your eyes aglow, they’d scatter for fear that a wrathful fey had descended upon them.”  She leaned back in, reaching into the backpack she’d dropped at her feet.  “The problem is that you inspire greatness as much as you inspire fear.”

He sat for a moment, silent in the face of her accusation, and then placed his bracer and the cloth down besides him.  Without distraction he faced her fully.  “That is the nature of things, nature of what I have done making me who I am and thus creating their reaction.  I’m not intended to be their friend,” there was a pause from him and his gaze slid down.  “Nor do I think I should be,” came his half-whispered follow-up.

“I think you mistake what is for what has to be.  Stories are, ” she paused as she finished rummaging around in her pack and pull out a half-full bottle of wine with a cry of victory.  “Stories are far more flexible,”  she emphasized her point with a point of the wine’s neck at him and then began to try and work the cork off.  “That is after all what…I am…blasted thing.  A little help?”  She extended the bottle towards him once more, stubborn cork still separating her from the contents within.  He took the bottle, scarred hands easily gripping and removing the offending piece of wood.  He handed it back and she gave a warmer smile in thanks.  “As I was saying, a bard’s job is to grow the tale.  I’m not just a historian noting down facts of a run into an ancient ruin or a battle with some dragonkin, I’m finding the best way to tell it.”

“The best way how?”

“Best way to keep them happy, to tell a story that people need in that moment, to give them something that keeps them going.”  As she spoke the bard gestured and the wine sloshed around in the bottle, though for the time being it all stayed within.

Once more his brow furrowed.  “That’s to imply that there isn’t a sole truth to the event.”

“It’s to imply that a sole truth may not matter.  A child’s song may entertain when young but bring comfort or peace when older.  What things mean to any one person, at any one time of their life is different.”  She finished with a distant smile on her face but she then seemed to recover herself, to see the him before her, and instead took a sip from the bottle.

“Defying the truth is to temp Fey,” it was a route line and he delivered it with the same enthusiasm.

“For a Landian maybe, with your minds and your memories.  To let truth be what it needs to be in the moment is very Human.”  She smiled cleverly, the grin shaping around the bottle as she took another sip.  “Legend is that this cycle has more of us than Aenesi, and seeing as you’re the last of your kin its very short on Landians.  I think it’ll be an interesting one as a result.”

The Last Landian watched the bard for a moment, shifted uncomfortably, and moved his gaze back to the fire.

She lowered the bottle, her grin replaced by a guilty frown.  “That was inconsiderate of me.  I’m sorry.”

“Facts are what they are,” came his answer but he looked up at her, “but thank you.”  He picked back up and returned to polishing the bracer.

“Why spend time doing that?”  She asked after a moment.  This time he didn’t look up from his work, pale eyes focused on the task.  Scarred fingers making the tiny circles with the oiled cloth.

“Because I need it to keep me alive.”

“Aren’t you suppose to last long enough to face down the First Dragon?”  His hands paused at the mention of the ancient menace, she noticed it and her next words were hesitant.  “Is that not your story?”

“This bracer is apart of that story, has to be for the story to be what it is.”  He shifted the bracer, both so that she could better see it and so he could see the sheen of the oil caught by the fire.  “I may actually clean it because I’m worried that dirt, grime, and time will weaken it and have it fail me when I need it, but also because for me to note be this way is for me to not be the story that I am.  It’s important to respect the role that it plays.  I imagine you treat your harp the same way.”

She smiled with a laugh, happy perhaps because she had gotten more than a few words out of him.  “Fair point.”

“Question for you if I may,” he continued without looking up from his work.  He seemed almost overly intent upon it now.

That widened her smile, “What have you got?”

“Why do you drink?” her smile wavered for just a moment and she watched him, his eyes still on his work, and found herself without words of her own for a moment.

“I think wine can make for good company and revelry.”  He didn’t respond and she waited a moment to give him space.  When he didn’t she found herself continuing, “Do you not drink, no celebrations in your storied past?”

He shifted the cloth in his hand, held the bracer to the glow of the embers again and inspected his work.  After a moment he looked at her and took a heavy breath.  “I’ve not since I lost the friends I once celebrated with.”  He lifted his gaze and watched the bard for a moment then returned to his bracer, turned it over in his hands and placed it down besides him.  The bard’s mouth had opened to make a retort but she found none and instead she started to lift the bottle but stopped there and looked it at, at the swirl of the disrupted liquid.

“Dragon’s above,” she cursed lowered the bottle, looking at the Last Landian.  His hands were resting in his lap now and he was staring into the embers of his fire.

“I’ll trade you a truth if you’ll share one with me.”  Her eyes focused on him, his face was his usual stoic mask but there was something in his voice she not heard in him before.  Not when they’d first met those handful of years ago, not on any of the the adventurers she’d seen him on since.  He sounded weary.

“I don’t know if I can handle a Landian’s truth,” she answered with her own whisper as she stood.  He looked up as she moved, maybe he expected her to part company with him but instead she moved about the fire and sat a little closer to him.  “After we first met I found my own band of adventurers.  They were young, like me, but they had thoughts of clearing out the dark places of the world, where the fey had grown dangerous or dragonkin had gathered.  It made for good stories, stories I was happy to sing of in taverns.  Stories that weren’t just remembrances of an old world.”  She paused, her throat growing tight, and she didn’t resist the urge to drink from the bottle to fight off the memories.  “They liked the status their adventures and my songs brought them but they also liked doing good, I think they liked the feeling of making the world better vice just getting by in it.  I know I liked the look in faces of the crowd when I sang their songs.”  She knew she was rambling now but the tears had started to come and she had to pause against the lump in her throat, to fight the grip around her heart.

During a heavy breath she felt his hand touch hers, the scarred fingers rough against her skin.  She shifted so he could take the bottle away from her, it was probably for the best she thought, and no doubt he wouldn’t want to look after a drunkard.  She heard him put the bottle down and then his hand came back, touched hers again.  Tentative and wary but questioning.  She wrapped her hand tight about it as she stifled another sob.  She looked over at him as she recovered and saw in his eyes what she felt.  A great sadness.  She also saw his understanding in the small smile he gave her, the gentle squeeze his hand gave that she never would’ve expected.  

“They reached for higher and grander things and found that the world is darker and more dangerous than they thought,” he continued for her.  It was perhaps the closest to poetic she’d ever heard him speak and to her surprise she continued.  

“I ran when they started to fall, the Hagercs pummeling through them.  They shouted for me try and escape, others came with me but I heard each of them fall as the Kercs caught and overwhelmed them.”  She paused and blinked fiercely, looking at the darkened canopy, as she tried to clear the tears from her vision.  “I only lived because I was further back, there to watch and write their story, not to take part in it.”  She looked down at the Last Landian, the tears still in her eyes caught by the glow of the embers like little stars.  “I couldn’t do anything to help them, and I’d do anything to forget that feeling.”  The silence of the night and their memories enveloped them.

“I’ll give you a story in trade for yours, or at least try,” He offered after a while.  The bard watched him, his own heavy breath as if to steady himself and she gave his hand a squeeze.  “You know well that there are ages in the world, each brought on high in a battle against dragons but also cut back down in the fight against the returning First Dragon.  You know that each age is defined by an Heir of Lehn, the Quartes as you call him, the Wanderer.  The Wanderer who battles the First Dragon until they are both undone and the age starts anew.  I know those songs because I have…” he paused, eyes closing as his thoughts tried to adjust, “The Quartes of the last age was very much like the others before him, ones whose stories barely remain now as remnants.  He inspired and defeated dragons and their kin, he allied with the last of his kin, as well as an Aenesi Empire, and the Humans who were their allies.”  His gaze had shifted back to the fire, though his hand still held tight to hers.  She could almost see the armies of the last age dancing in the glow of the embers in his pale eyes.  “Like all the Heirs of Lehn before him he wielded…a storming sword but a whole blade as terrible as a summer tempest in its power.  When the final battle came he took his armies, he took his sword, he took everything he cared about and loved in an attempt to do what his predecessors, what his story said he, could not.”  He stopped here and she could see it now, the look behind the stoic mask he wore, could see not just the sadness but also the fear.  Much the same fear that had her reach for a bottle.  “I fought with everything I had,” he continued, lapsing out of the story, “I watched them all die.  I broke the blade, the one tie I had back to Lehn, defeating the Last Dragon…and I didn’t die doing it.”

He looked down from the embers, taking a shuddering breath.  She felt him pull back his hand and she let it go.  When she spoke it was barely above a whisper, barely more than the hum of the embers.  “Isn’t that a good thing?”

“I don’t think so,” he answered, looking up at her for just a moment.  Guilt rimmed his eyes.  “All of it is happening again, the cycle is playing out, but the blade is broken.  I am broken.”  He spread his fingers before him, looking at the countless scars, at the accumulation of damage.  “I think I may have doomed the world.”  He looked at her, the scared Last Landian and the Bard.  “I strove for more than any of my predecessors have and I found out the world is darker than I thought.”  Finished he turned back to the fire and she watched him take a breath and there again was his stoic gaze.  She’d seen the mask removed though and she could see the lines of it now.  She took a breath and gestured towards the bottle.  He returned it to her and she took a sip.  Finished he took it from her and took a drink of his own.

“Sisters,” she cursed, taking the bottle back and forcing the cork back into its neck, “don’t we make a pair.”  He nodded, still watching the embers of his fire.  After a moment of thought she looked at him and asked, “You’re going to try again?”

Once more he nodded, his face hardening as the mask threatened to break.  “I don’t know what else to do.  I thought maybe there would be another Quartes, tried to stay quiet and wait for him to appear.  Maybe two would be enough,” he shook his head and sagged with the old defeat, “but I know I am Quartes and no other will come to play my part in the story.”

“Couldn’t he still appear?”

“No,” he answered, “it would be too late.  I can feel the story playing out, I’m starting too late and can do too little now.”

She looked over at him, his resignation evident in sag of his form, in the unfocused glint of his eyes.  “I think that’s stupid.”  He blinked several times and look back up at her.  “You can’t play out the same story you have before, so what?  That story never worked out well in the past, for you or any of your predecessors.  What you’ve proved is that the story can change and if it can change we can make a better one.  Sisters, we could tell a different one.”  She finished, feeling the flush in her cheeks at the strength of her rebuttal.  For his part, he was staring at her with his mouth a gap, a dumbfounded look she’d never guessed to see on him that nearly made her laugh.

“How do we do that?”

“No idea,” the bard exclaimed, still riding the high of her emotions, “but that doesn’t mean we can’t aim to find out.”

“I…” he paused, his form straightened up, and there was just the hint, maybe just the beginning, of a smile on his lips, “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like you Keto.”

“Well, you’ll get to know me.  If I’m gonna help you figure this out I’m gonna need you to tell me about the last cycle.  I’ve got to figure out how to change your truth into a story.”