Chapter 12: The Broken Bard of Blackwater
Once he was released back into the light of day, he was frantic. He made straight for the swamp’s borders, but he’d never really be able to escape from it. It was inside him now and his soul was as muddy as the velvet slippers he tramped through the muck with, and every bit as ruined. He fled upriver on the first barge that he could flag down, with promises that the count would pay them double for their trouble. They accepted of course, but no matter how fast they poled up river - no matter how far he ran from the terrible things he’d seen, the dreams kept coming.
At first Louven Solovino tried to ignore them, but that was a complete failure. He wasn’t strong enough to ignore a nightmare when he could taste the muddy water as he was drowned or feel the way the fish devoured the fleshy remnants of his corpse. By the third night he was drowning himself in alcohol, which only dulled the dreams of murder and betrayal a little.
In the end, the only thing that did any good was to start telling the crew scary stories about the blackwater. That’s what he’d come to call the swamp because it had a nice ring to it. In truth he wasn’t sure it had a name. The night he told the crew about the fall of the Unwritten Rule was the first time he slept without waking up screaming since the day he escaped from the crypt of the swamp. It was still rough, without any of the flourishes he would need to add before he played it for anyone important, but it was a start. As long as he spent the day tuning his mandolin, and telling the swamp's stories, then he would be able to sleep at night. He’d still have dreams about the terrible history of the swamp, of course. The swamp still had to inspire him.
As long as he did as he’d sworn, Solovino would be an observer to the terrible history of the swamp rather than a participant; he would get to watch as the small fishing village of Triesten was torn apart by the hordes of the dead, rather than be forced to relive the agony of one of the victims over and over again. It was a devil's bargain, but he took it without ever once looking back. What he didn’t see was how his stories infected the minds of everyone he told them to. It was the smallest of sparks, but with each word, the influence of the golden Lich that was now his master, grew. The more the bard’s words spread, the larger that the domain that it was trapped in grew.
By the time Solovino reached the court of his patron, Count Garvin, he’d managed to whip up not just an impassioned ballad about how the brave warriors he’d fought beside had fought bravely he called ‘To The Last Man,’ but he’d also improved on the older song of ‘Riley’s Rotten Riches.' It had been out of favor, for some time, but now that Solovino had a new horror to link to the old tale, it seemed more relevant than ever.
In front of the court he delivered the sad news that even though the mercenary company was successful in purging the swamp of lizardmen, they were ultimately done in by another, far greater evil. The dreams made him think that some of the lizards had escaped, but that wasn’t something the count would want to hear, so Solovino glossed over it. The bard tried to tell them all about the Lich, but he was surprised to find he couldn’t. All he could tell the assembled court was that the undead rose from the ground and tore them to pieces. When he was asked for more information, he could only tell them about a few of the vile creatures, but no more. Some part of himself was no longer under his complete control, and that terrified him.
The Count issued a new call to arms at once, urging brave and godly men to purge this new evil, and offering a generous purse for doing it. Why wouldn’t he? Solovino thought skeptically while he maintained his mournful expression in front of the assembled guests, he’d never have to pay up for the lizard men now, so he could spend that coin twice.
That night at the feast when he tried to sing his songs, nothing tried to strangle him, not even when he rhymed Lich with witch and labyrinth with plinth. The darkness that resided inside him now would let him sing and tell stories all he liked, but never issue a genuine warning about the terrible danger that any would-be heroes were likely to face if they actually went to defeat this foe. It was a maddening realization, and by the time he finished with his performance of ‘To the Last Man,’ he was crying actual tears, which the audience found very moving. They weren’t tears of sadness though, but tears of frustration. Even if he couldn’t see what he was doing exactly, even if he didn’t know precisely how he was spreading evil among the lords and ladies of court, he knew he was nothing more than a puppet on a string at this point.
Of course he was. That’s what he’d agreed to in exchange for his miserable little life. He knew that, he just didn’t expect the Lich to be able to enforce such a bargain from almost a hundred miles away. Even from this distance though, every note of his new and improved version of ‘Riley’s Rotten Riches,’ rang with evil. Solovino wasn’t sure that it was related, because even though he’d seen many of the swamp’s memories, he still had no real idea of what order they belonged in or how they fit together. That kind of clarity probably wouldn’t come for a long time. He did know that it was the only local tale of tragedy worth telling though, and that it would be an easy thing to link it to undead horrors rising from the swamp and make them feel familiar to his audiences.
It was true though, and now the very genesis of the swamp’s evil was spreading into populations entirely outside of its domain. Most of them would shrug it off, but some would get infected by that tiny splinter of evil and go home to strange dreams and a faint lust for gold. Over time they might become the swamp’s creature every bit as much as the poor fisherfolk of Triesten had been before they met an untimely end. The wraith had now found a way to spread further and faster than even the mosquitoes it had used so effectively before.
The bard wouldn’t need to worry about bad dreams tonight. That night he went home with a Baronetess who insisted on her own private encore. He played her every bit as well as he played his mandolin earlier in the evening and left her even more tainted than the rest of his audience. Solovino was a spiritual leper now, and even if no one else could see that yet, he could feel it growing inside himself a little more after every performance.
He stayed at the Garin’s court for the rest of the season but moved north as winter turned to spring. The count had offered him a new commission, and several women of the court had made other very appealing offers, but it was time to go. Not because Solovino wanted to of course, but because there was no solace in singing to the already converted. After months of playing his songs, everyone that was vulnerable to the swamp’s message was already infected by the subtle magic of Solovino’s voice. His dreams were growing ever darker, and he was certain that the only cure was to find new audiences to sing to.
So, he rode and he played. He stopped in small inns and larger taverns. He played before the local barons and viscounts, and even a duchess on occasion, but he didn’t stop. He didn’t dare stop, and he couldn’t look at himself in the mirror. From the reaction he got from the ladies of every court that he stopped in, he knew that his voice was still just as clear and his face, just as handsome as ever, but he could feel the darkness growing inside himself, and on the occasion that he accidentally saw his face in a stray reflection he recoiled in horror. Even if his flesh felt fine to the touch, he knew that he was rotting away. It was one more secret he feared the discovery of - that one day a beautiful lady would help him remove his shirt and scream as she found the open sores and rotting flesh that must decorate his body by now.
They never did though. They always begged him for another private show before he disappeared on the road once more.
He added new songs to his performances. Now whenever he sang about ‘Riley’s Rotten Riches,’ he sang about ‘Garin’s Goodly Gold,’ too. The swamp loved nothing more than when he tried to send brave fools to their horrible ends and rewarded him with an almost pleasant night’s sleep whenever he did such an awful thing. Solovino didn’t stop though, even though he knew it was wrong. It was the only thing that kept the darkness at bay.
Before the ill-fated trip to slay the lizard men of Blackwater Marsh he’d been like any other bard. He’d lived for wine, women, and song. Now though wine did nothing for him, women were only used to reassure himself that he wasn’t the monster he’d feared he’d become, and song had become a terrible punishment. He would have preferred that his mandolin was strung with blades rather than that he’d become the personal bard of the Lich that owned him now.
He’d tried to take off that cursed medallion so many times now, but each time the motion was met with the feeling that his heart was about to explode. One time he’d even tried to do it despite that. He’d gotten good and drunk and tried to rip it off as a perverse form of suicide, but he’d only blacked out from the pain and woken up in a puddle of his own vomit. He’d tried to confess to a priest, but even entering a church or walking near a cathedral was enough to make him physically ill now.
It hadn’t even been a year since his terrible brush with death, but he didn’t even feel like the same man he once was. Some days he didn’t even feel like a person anymore. He was a monster now, and as he completed his circuit through Abendean and Black Rock, before steering back towards Count Gavin’s seat of power in Fallravea, he could swear that he could tell if he’d sung one of his black ballads to the people he passed by on the high road just by the look in their eyes. It was a subtle thing, but more and more as he walked by strangers, he could see a darkness dwelling inside them where the spark of life and joy should have been. It was disconcerting, but even in the place where those darkened souls dwelled in great numbers the sky did not fall, and village life still continued as normal.
Normal for everyone but him. He played for harvest festivals all the way back to his patron to pay his way, but at each one he stopped at, they wanted to hear the older songs he was once known for. ‘The Maid, Waylaid,’ ‘A Pretty Witty Ditty,’ and other fun crowd-pleasing favorites. The fragile smile he wore to hide the monstrosity he’d become was much too fragile for such frivolity now though. No - he could feel them looking at him with concern now, but as soon as they figured out what he’d become, those looks would be replaced with outrage and pitchforks. He had to move on before that happened. He had to keep spreading the songs of his true master before all the awful things he’d done caught up with him.