The instrument’s haunting timbre was like nothing I’d heard before.

As the final note lingered, floating in the air beyond the point the minstrel had dropped the small flute from his lips, the silence lasted a half second more before the usual tavern chatter crushed back in from the outsides, transporting me once more into mundane reality with a sense of profound loss and longing for some otherworldly landscape I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

I wanted to shake the patrons by the shoulders for daring to bring that moment to its sudden death, demand an encore and be transported back to that place again, if only for a moment. I couldn’t shake the notion something – whatever that might be; I had no idea, but something vitally important – might have happened if it had just lasted a little longer.

The musician was already leaving, paid by the establishment rather than the crowd, threading his way through the throng to the exit. The flute went into the pouch he slung over his shoulder as he moved, smooth motions so practiced they seemed like extensions of one multi-part movement. He was quick, efficient, almost to the door before I made up my mind.

I hurried to intercept, barring his way in the way of opportunistic conversation, but in my haste I had none planned. We stood there a second, sizing each other up in silence, my sloppy shoes and wind-ruined hair versus his painted leathers in black and white, intricate markings telling stories I lacked the language to translate.

“Excuse me,” he said, after a moment. Polite but distant, like greeting a stranger. As if he was somehow unthinkably unaware of the unearthly spectre he’d brought into the world only moments ago. Unaware of the impact on its audience, like no other music I’d ever heard.

Although the other patrons seemed to have moved on already.

“About your music,” I found my lips saying.

“I’m just passing through,” answered the bard, fast enough I suspected the answer was ready-made. He blinked, and his eyelashes seemed to move through treacle, like time was still catching up after being frozen in place. I moved my hand at my side, feeling it slice through the ripples in its wake, half a step out of the rest of reality. Not real. In my head. Just a feeling.

“I was wondering what instrument you were playing,” I pressed, in violation of social niceties but not too far, not yet. Enough to throw off the established script of how these things were meant to go; to set on subconscious edge and draw attention.

It worked. His eyes focused on me as more than an obstacle; saw me for the first time, even if the seeing was too early to come with any particular insights. The gamut of micro-expressions came and went, writing me off as a potential threat or indeed anything other than what I appeared to be: a poor, damp farmhand warming himself in company by proxy after a passing shower.

I made no move to unblock the door, and his weight shifted back on his feet in response, settling in for a brief hiatus.

“It’s called a flute,” he said, unhitching the pouch at his shoulder and pulling it halfway out for me. The instrument was white and uneven, covered in the same black engravings decorating his clothes. “Air is blown into one end, producing the noise, and the holes drilled into the stem determine which note is played.”

“And the markings?”

“Decorative.”

Silence descended again as the conversation reached its natural end. I should have stepped aside, but couldn’t let it go.

“I’ve heard flutes,” I insisted, nodding at the pouch. “Yours is different. Reedier.”

“Yes, that’s the shape.”

“The notes turn corners at the end, after the breath stops flowing.”

The musician hesitated, then pushed the flute back down into its holder. “I’m flattered you think so highly of my technique,” he said, sharing a thin smile. “In truth, it’s an old folk style from my homeland. But I’m afraid I’m not giving lessons. Just passing through and paying for board. If you’ll excuse me –”

He made to squeeze through the gap between me and the door. For the first time since the music ended, I realised the rain outside had never stopped, pattering gently down in a thousand heavenly fingers. If I blocked him off now, again, my plausible deniability would shatter and the situation would escalate. One look at the bard was enough to convince me he’d avoid conflict, all scrawny and ducking away. But the staff the tavern employed were another matter. One already had their eye on us, watching from a distance.

If I was to hold him back, I had to do it with words.

I kept my arms to my sides. “And the –” I struggled for the phrase. Nothing I could think of in the moment seemed to fit. I was a farmer, not a fancy university jargon-weaver. Longing? Yearning? It wasn’t quite right. I stopped and tried again. “When you played,” I called after him, “time slowed down. A hole opened and sliced off every –” I gestured at his back, making a rough, uncertain shape, “– fifth second. Other things, too. Taken from the room, sucked towards that destination, but not fully. The hairs on my arms, the thoughts in my head, the light, the dark, all of it reaching. Every fifth, sixth fraction, just enough to notice. For… what?”

At best, I sounded high on drink. At worst, like an obsessive devotee. If the musician walked away now, the opportunity would be lost.

He didn’t walk away. Instead, his heel came down on the slick cobblestones, swivelling at the ankle as he turned to face me. With both hands he lifted a thick hooded cloak over his shoulders as if to hide his face with patterns that drew attention like his music did souls. It did keep the rain out of his eyes.

“Then you feel it,” he said, voice low enough that I barely heard it over the chatter at my back. “Best you forget.”

My chest fell as I exhaled, almost hesitant to believe the vindication was real. “What is it?” I asked, unable to stop regardless.

“Loss. But it sounds like you already knew that.”

I frowned. It was hard to separate the background noise from the foreground, and even now I was still feeling the aftereffects of the minstrel’s song. I’d wandered in from the fields with no coat on me, but stepped out into the drizzle without it. A hard day’s work had served to keep me warm, but that, too, was fading.

I joined him further out onto the path, making way for a couple passing by in the opposite direction, hands clasped with cheery smiles. It didn’t take long for them to pass.

“You sing songs so sad your audience feels them?”

The bard smiled, then. It was genuine this time. “All music does that. Mine isn’t even particularly good at it. Self-taught, no schooling. I pick up bits here and there, various embellishments from local provinces. No one style, no popular ballads. Just what I need and no more. But what I lack in skill, the music itself makes up for.”

I sensed there was more, and waited for him to continue.

He sighed, and patted the pouch containing his flute, now concealed under his cloak. “Not everyone can feel it. Most people have an inkling, a shadow on the edge of their perception. Occasionally,” he nodded towards me, “a few notice more. Do you remember the melody I played? Could you sing it back to me?”

I considered it. I remembered the way the notes sounded. The timbre, the way they spiralled and bent. I remembered how it made me feel, and I remembered the effects on the tavern.

I could not bring the melody to mind.

The bard saw it in my face, and nodded. “I don’t play songs,” he said. “I play loss. I perform for crowds and take payment in divine subtraction, snipped from the world in a thousand small incisions. Too small to notice, most of the time. It feels like reaching because it is. It’s the rest of you reaching for what is being taken from you, and from the world. And no, I can’t give it back. Take consolation in that it’s only very small. You’re already adjusting to its absence.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because people are stronger than they think, and because I am careful,” he answered.

“I mean, why do it at all? What is the point? I could think of some things I’d like to lose,” I added. “My debts, for one, and my neighbour who everyone knows is bad news. But are you a – a thief? What would you do with a handful of seconds, smells and shadows?”

“Oh,” said the bard. “There’s plenty one could do with all those things, given the right application. But not me. I just take it. Where it goes after that, who can say?”

A trickle of water spilled over its limits in my hair and trickled down my forehead to the tip of my nose, and I shook my head in a flurry of tiny departing droplets. They were replaced in seconds. I was now very damp, and the night chill was starting to move past mildly inconvenient into irritating.

“As for your first question,” the bard continued before I could protest, “Let me tell you a story. Brief, because of the rain.”

“We could head back inside,” I mentioned.

It was met with a head shake. “Some time ago, a musician was coerced into making a promise they could not keep to a power they should not have bargained with. They ran, and thought they’d outrun it. They hadn’t.” He paused, pursing his lips slightly. “Soon after, the musician’s health deteriorated. Illness, so people thought. And it was. Just not how they imagined it.”

I wiped another row of droplets from my forehead before they could get in my eyes. The bard wasn’t playing, but I could almost imagine that same muting of the world around us. The shaft of light from the open door hadn’t moved, yet seemed somehow further away.

“The point of death came and passed,” said the bard, oblivious to my shivers. “Yet the musician did not die. Their heart stopped, along with their breath, the muscles wasting away until all that was left was despair, pain and cruel constant awareness. Such is the price for dealing with entities beyond the realm of human ken.”

“And yet here you are, alive,” I pointed out, trying to lighten the mood.

“Oh,” said the bard. His tone was light, but he didn’t smile. Rain slipped off the wax on his hood, running harmlessly onto the cobblestones below. “It wasn’t me. When I made a bargain, I made sure it was one I could keep. Though nor did I get what I asked for.”

“And what was that?”

“Mercy.” One hand reached into his cloak, and once more withdrew the pouch with the flute. “Consequences, to them, are final. Right and wrong, immaterial.” He drew back the lid of the pouch and pulled out the instrument fully.

The flute glimmered a bone white under the moonlight. Close up, I could see it was irregular and knobbled under the carvings.

Belatedly, I realised what it was.

“This is what’s left,” the bard said. He touched the instrument briefly to his cheek.

My breath fogged shakily in the air.

“My task is simply to play,” he stated. “I don’t really know why. To spread their influence, perhaps. To let them taste parts of our world, our experience. To delight in our suffering, possibly. Or maybe just because they can. I do know that if I stop, the consequences will be real. But I can limit the impact.”

Words failed me again, and I watched him in silence as he replaced the flute the third time that night.

“And you,” he said, turning his eyes back to my face, “should go back out of the cold to your warm tavern. You have lost something tonight, something you will never get back, but take solace in the fact it’s small.”

I nodded dumbly, and he nodded back at me, eyes staring back out of the hood.

“Goodbye, thief,” I said, and watched in the rain as his black and white coat retreated into the darkness.