Chương 307: 3.8

Paul listened to the footmen talk of what was by common agreement now called the elf feast." The light of the sky, the colors!"" Yeah but did you see the ass on that Annana woman? Sight to keep a man warm for winters to come." In the morning they broke camp and took the fresh, gently inclined road east and north back towards the Vah." Some of us weren't staring at her ass."" More fools be those of you that weren't that was heaven's own ass!" Paul considered what they had all witnessed. What he had been a part of.

His fingers still itched, tingled with the feeling of the instrument in his hands. The touch of one part to his lips. The way he breathed." Honestly I was a bit busy keeping up the rhythm. I never thought I could be a player... but this thing, it just felt right in my hands. And that sound we made?"" Yeah, I always wanted to play, But Pa would have tanned my hide if he saw me talking to the wandering singers when they came by."

Beyond the sights and the visions and the food that was the word on most of the men's lips. Music. They had all been given an instrument and however roughly actually taught to play it that night. All of them had made music. It was fuzzy now in the morning. He'd not really understood all the little details of how he was doing it at the time. But it had not been difficult either, like martial drills, like the first steps of the carolla.

He just followed and repeated what he was shown and sound, music came from the instrument. Buoyed by a dozen other pairs of hands doing the same as he. By that voice of an elf in song." It wasn't really that hard was it?"" Nah given the racket you made this morning it was plenty hard, just elf magic helping ya along. Like everything else last night." They had made what he had to agree with Alder was a real, true song.

Although again like the men bemoaned, whatever knack had been briefly unveiled by the elf was long since faded with the morning sun. Leaving all but a few of the already musically trained stumbling to try and recapture even a tiny part of what they had made with the Fae and the fire and the strange stones which shone with light and images never before seen. The visions? Memories? Sorcerous enchantments upon them all? Mere light and shadow in clever artifice?" I honestly preferred the bosom myself.

Just the pertest things." The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation." Was I the only one not ogling over the woman!?"" I don't see how you couldn't! She was right there on the stone fifteen feet high!" He'd heard the fae creature's throat crack and break in grief at the end there. Sang on for a time but still ached and pained. Then fled. It had been something that caught him up in all of it like a ritual in the temple. The ones Jewel's family attended every winter.

But so much more. The stones became the heavens themselves. The Original Heavens? So the elf claimed. And that thing..." Bounty and gift for all men's eyes she might be or not, But I wish the elf had shown more of her over what he did." It looked like a city. But a nightmare of one. A seething, hungry thing that left all around it a waste of starving, desiccated bodies. The word for it felt like living terror on his tongue now. Uruk." Do you think what we saw was the truth?"" How should I know?

That's business for the countess and her pair of men." Paul shook himself. His life with Jewel and his time in tutelage had taught him better. Ballads and boasting were the way of all courts. Be they fae or man, dragon or speaking beast. Celsus told fantastic tales such that you'd think grazing and shitting on pastures for eight years was an epic undertaking to keep the very firmament of the sky in its place.

Jewel herself could weave tales with the best of Knights and although she never lied she also never entirely told the fullness of what things had actually happened either. Adding flourishing expansiveness to the events that Paul thought was rarely warranted. Paul focused himself on that fact. That for all the sorcery and wonder in the world. For all the myths and legends about the elves of the world and their uncanny powers. A feasting boast was still a feasting boast.

That place, that horrible thing which he had seen and heard in the song of the Elf even if it existed probably had never been anywhere near as horrible as the vision had shown him. There was obviously some kind of bad blood between Alder and this Uruk. It was probably just what the fate of every 'cursed settlement' from the legends eventually met. After no stone was left atop another and the lands were forgotten. The last spite of the elves was to paint all their history as some horrific fiendish place.

To lay all the evils and troubles of the world upon them. That just made sense. It had to make sense. Paul shivered and tried to stoke his bravery in the warmth of the early morning sun. He focused on riding and on the feeling in his fingers. The memory of playing music however directed, it called to him. The idea that he could in fact do it at all. Even past the usual time of youth when one would normally apprentice for it. Yes.

He'd take that part of the elf gift and let the rest settle into the usual boasting and half truths of a court ballad fade. An entertaining memory and nothing more. Besides by the elf's own words there was no longer any place called Uruk. And ancestors or not there seemed to be no malice held for him over whatever transgression was made so long ago. Yet still the vision of that city haunted him. The bodies so numerous the skulls tumbled like grains of sand.

The walls rising up like a hammer about to fall upon his head. The last parting words on the wind.