Jasper hadn’t said much on the brisk walk to the inn, instead choosing to pass the time with fiddling with that same armour buckle on his shoulder, which looked to have faded slightly from near constant attention. His one remaining eye darted to every shadow, not letting a single possible ambush site be unscrutinised. Jonatan was unusually silent as well, whether it was from shock or the alcohol, he just wanted to sit down for the moment.

When they finally did reach the room where Jasper had been staying, Jonatan collapsed into the small wooden chair by the bed, taking several deep breaths to try and clear his head as the events of that day, and the sheer craziness that accompanied it.

It just occurred to him that he had never spent a night in one of these rooms. It was like any other inn room, small with a single feather bed, chair and set of drawers that doubled as a table, lit by lamplight hanging from the walls. The window shutters of this one had several messages scratched into it such as ‘Maralla x Sienna’, ‘Halfdan was here’, and ‘Hey, look, a wall’. Inn scrawls always brought a smile to Jonatan’s face.

One unique thing about this room, however, was the amount of litter that had been hastily stuffed into a drawer that now barely shut. From what scraps he could see, it looked like the wrapping for meat, bread, and other miscellaneous foodstuff containers, all picked clean. Jonatan took another look at Jasper, who was sitting on the bed, unwrapping a half-eaten strip of salted jerky, and taking a large bite, his eye closed, and face at peace.

Now that it was lighter, he could see his features more clearly. His cheeks had filled a bit since the other day, and his face was a bit more colourful than before, like he had finally caught up on a years’ worth of lost sleep. Now he looked like he could easily pass for nobility, or maybe even a fey if it weren’t for the faded scar running from the bridge of his nose to his right temple, passing under the dirty eyepatch that seemed to make every expression a scowl.

Jonatan couldn’t tell what it was, but he felt a pit in his chest open when he looked into his eye, as if he could see into everything he was feeling, like gazing into a lake where it stretched as deep as the ocean.

“You’re staring at me.” Jasper’s voice cut through Jonatan’s thoughts. He was staring at the ground, fidgeting with his clasp uncomfortably.

“Oh. Sorry.” Jonatan looked away. He wasn’t used to being awkward, and vowed to never get himself in this situation ever again. “So, thanks for saving me and all but…how did you do that?”

Jasper turned to Jonatan with a quizzical look.

“Why are you keeping up your cover? I understand in public but here? It’s just us, and I need to trade information.”

Jonatan gave his own look of confusion back.

“Information? Cover? Sorry, I’m really stupid right now so I don’t really get it. What?”

Jasper’s whole body tensed up, his eye narrowing at Jonatan with fearful aggression.

“You’re not with Whispers?” Jasper spoke in a low, sharp tone, his hands drifting towards the blades on his belt.

Jonatan’s throat caught, his mind scrambling to try and think of a way to deescalate the situation. That being said, what he saw from him earlier didn’t fill him with confidence that he could escape. While his mind shut down, his body took over control of his voice and spoke a single word.

“Nope.” Jonatan cursed his lack of filter. He blinked, and in the instant when he did that, the point of a sword was hovering in front of his face, with a very serious half-elf behind it. Jonatan raised his hands up beside him. “Sorry?”

Jasper didn’t reply. He raised his off hand, and gently pressed it against the steel of his blade, which started to hum after a few seconds. The air around them started shimmering, as if a light layer of fog rolled over them. A chill went down Jonatan’s spine, he’d seen some magic before, but his recent experiences had been rather sour.

“Tell me your name, and why I sense Bardic magic from you.” Jasper spoke harshly. He’d make one hell of an interrogator if he didn’t look like he was a child.

“Jonatan Willow and I don’t know.” Jonatan blurted out, as if the truth were forced out of him. He blinked a few times, terrified of what embarrassing secrets could be exposed with that kind of power.

“Where did you study magic?” Jasper pressed his sword slightly closer into Jonatan’s cheek.

“I dropped out of school when I was 16, I haven’t studied in 5 years, and never learned magic.” Jonatan tried desperately to stop his secrets from spilling, only to further embarrass himself, with his squirming.

Jasper’s expression changed from guarded fierceness to deeper confusion.

“Are your parents Bards?”

“No, I’ve never met a Bard before, though I’m jealous of them for their music and romantic skills from what the stories say.” Jonatan had never admitted that before, his cheeks rising red.

Jasper’s blade wavered slightly.

“Are you hunting us?”

“No, last time I hunted something, a rabbit kicked me in the nuts…I screamed.” Jonatan shed a small tear when he remembered that repressed memory.

Jasper completely lost any sense of momentum he had, his blade dropping to his side and bewilderment plastered all over his face.

“I…what is going on? You’re one of us but you’re not but you have our magic, but you were never trained…” Jasper’s voice trailed off as he slumped onto the bed with his head in his hands, muttering to himself, rocking slightly.

Jonatan shifted awkwardly, unsure whether to comfort him or run in case he got sword happy again. But there was something that told him he was safe here, that he had something important to tell this young man who saved his life. He racked his brain looking for something he didn’t know, thinking through every barfight, every fuzzy hangover, every barrel brewed. He hadn’t thought this hard since he woke up on that hill a few days ago.

Jonatan bolted upright, pieces clicking into place in the rusty machine that was his brain.

“The dream! I played a song in the sky and weird things have been happening since, like a dream where some old guy told me some stuff and critiqued my playing for some reason.”

Jasper stopped, staring at Jonatan with a wide eye.

“You played a song that you heard in the sky? Do you remember it?” The young Bard stood up, excited, seemingly forgetting that he was still holding a sword.

“Uh, yeah I think so. I was drunk at the time so bear with me.” Jonatan tried to calm Jasper down, slinging his lute over his shoulder and into his hands, tuning it up to something a bit closer to acceptable pitch.

Jasper sat staring expectantly, as if he were about to open an urgent letter from a particularly dramatic spouse. Jonatan knew that feeling, though in his case it was his father asking for regular updates.

Jonatan ran his fingers over the strings, strumming a chord or two, loosening his fingers up, then closed his eyes, trying to remember every detail of that night. The fuzziness of the sky, fuelled by a drink off with the blacksmith earlier, the wetness of the grass that sat beneath him, the tree that poked his back with new buds, the smell of woodsmoke rising from chimneys drifting up the hill.

His fingers started moving, plucking strings as he did then, a calm rhythm, filled with quiet melancholy and fiery hope. It was one of the most heartfelt and devoted pieces he had ever heard, like a mother’s last words to her child. All his sarcasm and his crassness melted away into the melody he was playing channelling the determination he heard in the song.

He lost track of himself, lost track of the inn room and of the events that happened in the last few hours, and played. It made his heart ease, made his heart glow to be playing something like this, something so deep and powerful. He wanted to be a part of that, to be able to play and songs like this that he wrote from his own experiences.

His mind expanded, filled with images of fire, of pain and of sorrow. He saw through familiar eyes the world crash down around him, of monsters tearing it apart brick by brick. But even in all that agony, he felt the song swell up in his heart, music that filled him with power and the will to push back, to fight them all alone if he had to.

Then it was over. The song hadn’t played any further than that, and his hands fell silent. The images were gone, the emotions that he had felt moments ago were but memories, and the weight of his body settled back into him. Jonatan opened his eyes, the world was bright, but the shadows seemed longer, with more dread around every corner.

Jasper sat perfectly still, staring with a single wide eye, his cheek wet a single tear trail.

“Oh…I see.” A faint whisper escaped from the boy’s lips. He stood slowly, returning his blade to its home, then slowly paced the room several times, his face dark and fiery.

“Did I do something wrong?” Jonatan asked quietly, his annoyingly pretty voice practically echoed in the silence. He slung his lute onto his back, and ran his hands through his hair, absently wiping dirt from his mop of sweaty brown hair. He could really go for a bath now that he could think straight.

“No.” Jasper stopped walking, his sparkling eye filled to the brim with intense thought. “The old man had what we needed to get started. Properly, with all the fury and passion of an epic.”

“If you’re trying to spin poetry, try a limerick, they’re the best.” Jonatan raised an eyebrow at his lack of clarity.

“I see now. I apologise for how I treated you, Jonatan. My assumptions were mistaken.” Jasper bowed his head, then sat on the bed again, sighing deeply. “You will not like what I have to tell you, but you must hear it, for yourself and for all of us.”

“I can guarantee you that I’ve heard worst from drunk bandits using deer bones as weapons. Just tell me what’s going on, and what the hell it has to do with me.” Jonatan leaned on his knees, his gaze meeting Jasper’s.

“What do you know of magic and those who wield it?”

“Well, no details. I’ve seen people use it before, but it was mostly for party tricks and, more recently, murdering me. That being said, I have heard that people who use it get really grumpy when you get their title wrong or something.” Jonatan shrugged. He didn’t want to pretend that he knew what he was talking about, so sadly fought the urge to say all the rumours about druids getting a little too close to nature.

“Magic is everywhere, but it can’t be accessed easily. If you don’t have some god or powerful being granting you the power, you need a family history of it, like having a dragon in your family tree. If you want to use it but have none of those, you need decades of rigorous training and study to be able to use even the simplest spells. Even then, you might not be able to even create a spark at your fingertips.

“I am a Bard, which you might be familiar with. We manipulate magic through performance, music, and passion, letting us turn songs and dances into power. There are several colleges where you can learn to do so if you have the aptitude.” Jasper drew one of his blades and presented it forward. “I was trained to be a gladiator at the College of the Blades, turning my swordplay and technique into dances that let me cast spells.”

“What other colleges are there? And why don’t I know about them?” Jonatan looked on in fascination.

“There are six in total, and none of them are great at advertising. They prefer the recruitment route. Blades, Eloquence, Glamour, Lore, Valour and Whispers are the shorthand names of each of them, and you can imagine what they teach in the names. Blades teaches swordplay like I mentioned before. Eloquence was essentially our bank, raking in gold from plays, debates, and negotiations between nations.

“Glamour was all about theatrics, being as beautiful and devoted as possible. They’re a bit of an oddity but you’ll find no better models and performers. Lore was our history, our library, and our study hall. If it were ever written, you’d find it there. Valour was our strongest link to the world, a place for those who wished to sing songs of war as well as fight in them.

“And finally, Whispers doesn’t exist to anyone but us. They’re our secret weapon, our underground web of information that has its claws in every deal ever struck. Most people only know them as a ghost story, but they’re very real.”

Jonatan took that information in, slowly trying to process it. One detail stuck out to him though.

“You kept saying ‘was’ like they’re gone.”

Jasper’s face soured, his fingers tightening around the hilt of his blade.

“We were attacked. Eloquence was hit first, burnt to the ground within days, cutting us to our core. Glamour went to their defence, and never came back. Valour riled into a frenzy, calling to all their allies for war, but were betrayed and silenced soon after. That song you played was the last message of the elder of the College of Lore, an old brick called Varys Sylvas. In that song was the destruction of Lore, our very heart.

“I don’t know what happened to Blades, I was…away when I found out this was happening, and haven’t been able to get back yet. As for Whispers, well they his in the shadows before all this, so I haven’t heard anything.”

Jonatan was taken aback. The shift from excited explanation to crushing grief hit him like a wine bottle to the back of the head. This person sitting before him had seen his family, his community hunted down one by one, and it had driven him from place to place for months, never being allowed an easy sleep, a filling meal, or a chance to breathe. It made Jonatan’s chest tighten with pity and burning anger, to the point where only two words could leave his mouth.

“Who? Why?” Jonatan stammered, his voice quivering slightly. He wasn’t used to being this empathetic but then again he had never been thrust into such a horrible reality as this.

“If what the old man left us with is true, and if it’s the same everywhere, it’s not just a single who anymore. Bards are not terribly well liked by the other magical beings of this universe due to past feuds and such, but it seems they’ve started spilling over. From what information I’ve been able to find myself, there are three main enemies that pull the strings behind it all.

“The Order of Enlightened Wizards are a powerful Wizard school that hold incredible sway over almost every Wizard alive, and they treat Bards as their worst enemy. I don’t know the details myself, but they view us as lesser magic users and look down on us because of that.

“The Circle of Justice are a group of several different churches that worship gods of knowledge, justice and power, and hate anyone that doesn’t follow them fanatically. They were a threat before all this but now they’re uniting other gods under their banner, only ever growing stronger, stamping out dissent without a second thought.

“Then there’s the wildcard. Warlocks, sects, cults, anyone that worships and follows all manner of powerful monsters, demons, angels, gods, fey, the list goes on. They hate each other almost as much as they hate everyone else, but there are some that take it further. I have no distinct name or identity for them yet, but there seems to be one in particular that commands the others. All together they could amass enough powerful people to conquer almost any country if they wanted.”

Jonatan sat in silence, half from shock, half from his brain being unable to keep up with all this political violence and alliances and such.

“But what about me? Why did Sylvia attack me out of nowhere?” He just shook his head, trying and failing to click the pieces this time.

“Because you’re one of us now.” Jasper looked into Jonatan’s eyes with a hard but sad look. “The message that the old man sent wasn’t just his knowledge, but his power too. He sent his very soul to the wind, and you caught it by sheer chance, and now you hold in your hands the magic of a Bard. You will be able to do nothing like ever before, but you will be hunted to the ends of the world for it.”

“Can’t I…hide? I didn’t even know what this was, and I can’t even use it. Won’t they just leave me alone?!” Jonatan stood up, knocking his stool over. He felt his own anger bubbling up beneath the rage from the story.

“No. Magic is drawn to itself, so they will find you eventually. If you do nothing, you will die. If you run without a plan, you will die. If you go alone, you will die. There is no other way than to fight by our side and win.” Jasper raised his voice.

“Oh don’t you dare force me into doing this!” Jonatan stepped forward, standing over Jasper’s unfazed face. “I didn’t choose this, I just want to live my life damn you!”

Jasper rose to meet him.

“Neither did I. I didn’t choose to see my friends being cut down in front of me by people I had trusted the day before. I just wanted to follow my passions and lead the next generation to do the same. But now we have to fight to protect what we once had, and avenge those who no longer can.” Jasper’s face grew harsher by the word.

“I…” Jonatan lost his balance, falling forward, only to be caught mid fall by Jasper, who was standing like a pillar, embracing him tightly. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to kill anyone, I don’t want to let anyone die. I never wanted to be anything but happy.”

The words surprised him, but far less than the sudden burning in his eyes as tears tumbled down his face. His dam cracked, as he broke down crying into Jasper’s shoulder, who didn’t move, only held him close, never letting him go.

“I’m sorry that you were forced into our fight, Jonatan. There is nothing I can say that will make it easier, but there are things that we both must do now. If you ever cannot find the strength to continue, remember that you do what you must for everyone else that didn’t have a choice.” Jasper whispered, tightening his embrace.

Jonatan sniffed, took a deep breath, then pulled away from the young Bard, wiping his eyes with his dusty sleeve.

“Can I sleep first?” Jonatan sniffed.

Jasper looked up and down at his dirty form, then to the crumpled but clean sheets on the bed.

“Take a bath first.”