Two bards had shared that campfire, their voices blending with the crackle of burning spruce, until the shadows between the ancient trunks shifted.
Fian watched, paralyzed by terror, as the great white wolf descended from the frost. In an eruption of snow, snapping jaws, and rending claws, the White Queen tore the old bard to pieces. The music was severed mid-phrase. The old man’s blood steamed on the frozen moss, staining the night crimson.
Then, she turned to Fian.
She stepped over the fallen body, her muzzle soaked in dark, hot blood, and stood face-to-face with him. Her breath smelled of iron and winter. Her eyes glowed like pale, frozen glass, boring straight through his trembling frame.
She did not strike.
Instead, her bloody jaws gently set an instrument down at his boots—the dead bard’s lute, untouched by the carnage, smelling faintly of worn cedar and old songs.
She whispered, her voice like grinding ice:
“Take it. I promised his soul that this lute would find a worthy successor—so that his song shall never truly fade from these woods. Bear it well, bard. For I will keep my eyes on you, and when your hands falter, I will return.”
She took in his scent with one long, deliberate breath, turned, and dissolved into the swirling fog like running water.
Fian stood by the dying embers until dawn, clutching the lute to his chest, convinced he was a mere chronicler who had witnessed a terrifying, senseless massacre and somehow been spared. He wrote of beasts, blood, and cruel winter.
He had seen every drop of blood. He had recorded every detail.
Yet, as a chronicler, he had understood almost nothing.
He did not understand the sacred debt of the fallen bard, nor the dreadful mercy of the Queen who had granted an agonizing spirit its release. Most of all, he did not understand that the instrument in his hands was not a lucky relic—it was a tether, binding his own life to an ancient vow he had never sworn.
Until that night, seasons later, when Fian stepped into the warm glow of a crowded tavern, raised that very same lute, and began to sing.
And there, deep in the darkest corner by the chimney, a pair of eyes glowed back at him like frozen glass.
Watching. Weighing every chord.
And now I ask you, travelers…
What if…
… Fian never made up the terrors of the Mistwood?
… he remember evereything with perfect honesty?
… it was merely the sacred laws behind the slaughter that escaped his mind?
… and the White Queen was never hunting him for blood, but listening for the soul of the song?
Maybe the chronicler did simply not understand what he saw.
You should look at the old tales once more. For sometimes, a witness tells you the exact truth of what happened—while remaining blind to why the forest demanded it.
It is just a thought. Nothing more, nothing less.
Thy path shall start right here:
And follow the story one after another.
