Nathaniel Askovar - Brotherhood

[Obsidian Sea]

It was a clean day in Tantras. The snow was thawing, and the pale sun was blinding in its intensity. Nathaniel Askovar thanked Lathander, and thought this a fine day to visit The Morning Halls of which his friend, Artemis D'Assanthe, spoke with such radiance. Presently, he was sitting in The Green Sirene, giving the morning and the stage to Tarric. As he had ever since they first met in The Net of Stars, Tarric was performing handsomely. Perhaps he was no Bard, but still his music had a quality that helped it transcend the milieu. Even if it did not, Nathaniel Askovar would be grateful to hear him play: for the Shaaran believed in the collective power of music, and in sharing without shame being given or taken. And if Tarric's music had not been adequate even then, affection can transpose things base and vile to majesty and bloom: though it was not with Sune's sharpest arrow, still Nathaniel was stricken. He smiled through the performance.

"I had thought to visit The Net of Stars again this night."

"I thought The Silly Satyr, truth be told."

"Yes?" pressed Tarric, taking his seat at their table again and pushing his concern through his eyes. "I do not like the idea of it, Nathaniel."

"It is not as cruel a place as you think it. You, or any other. People think too much Evil of those who drink and jeer. I enjoy the liveliness of it."

"Perhaps The Roaring Lion, then?"

Nathaniel smiled, allowing himself to thaw from thought, "Perhaps that, then."

Tarric was glad to hear it, and made a move towards the bar. He was going to purchase an ale. Tarric's constitution was commendable. The boy Bard was not neurotic enough to try and match it: he knew that he could not. Since his first night in Derlusk, Nathaniel knew quite certainly that alcohol had more command over him than he of it, if given half the chance. Still, he enjoyed the occasion that he went far enough to enjoy has alcohol, short though the distance was. It was only morning now, however. It was hardly necessarily.

"Will you go to The Morning Halls, then?"

"I think I will. What of you?"

"The Happy House," Tarric responded, letting the sentence be continued through his eyes. Nathaniel understood. A pause followed, before the chestnut blonde leaned forward to greet Nathaniel with whispers of conspiracy. "Is it true that you created one?"

The Bard responded with his eyes, too. They were shimmering; an imperfect commixture of brown and gray that made games for those who enjoyed their attention. The Harpers make distinction between their initiates and their siblings, though there was little hierarchy beyond that. The former must still be proven to join the latter. But it was true that Nathaniel Askovar had mastered that which others could not. Soon he would hold the secrets of the Harpers to his breast. It was something he was confident of, and hopeful for. Then he and Tarric would speak openly, even of these things.

Nathaniel knew that Tarric had not mastered that which they spoke of. Few had. The myriad challenges of things Arcana were not to be underestimated, but among Bards, Nathaniel had always showed great eagerness for the Arcane. Perhaps because it was so different to the life he had known before Derlusk, where his father's tomes teased him to learn. There was so much to learn.

"Lliira's laughter..."

With that, Tarric had made Nathaniel laugh. It jolted Tarric back to life from his moment of wonderment, and made him momentarily sheepish, as we often are when we are unintentionally entertaining to others in a way that we can misconstrue for mockery.

"I will be off, Iraebor. The Morning Halls will be most splendid at noon, and more the fool am I if I miss that moment."

"The Roaring Lion this eve, then?"

"The Roaring Lion."

[Obsidian Sea]

When light broke upon the next tenday, Nathaniel Askovar thought that the first of those days was fit for a prince.

With that in mind, he made a grand tour of the many taverns of the town, and locked lutes with some of Milil's most esteemed between the harbour and the east gate. It was, he told us frankly, just as The Harp of Cimbar had insisted to him by way of a letter: talented though those of The Happy House are, it was Nathaniel's eclectic range and incomparable accent which earned him a degree of distinction that others could not eclipse with technical superiority in the customs of songwriting. Insofar as technicalities an be considered, one might even think Nathaniel inferior, for he was not the writer of much of his own repertoire, and those that he did compose borrowed from his fundamental unorthodoxy, and confounded expectations. Still the essence and attributes of truth were decoratively interlaced over all that he sang, doing great honour to the artform though it defied the traditions to which some other might cleave without thought.

In these things, we thought no differently of Nathaniel than the other people of the city, though perhaps we had a keener interest in appreciating the things that he so freely shared between the poorest patrons and the pomp. Once, to me, he disclosed a bias for performing in the less moneyed places of cities, where he perceived a greater sense of community and an eagerness for living that felt, to him, suppressed by the weight of the wealthy man's own expectations of himself, and of the society to which he was subscribed.

“And by what power are you granted exemption from this condition of social obligation that confounds your fellow man?” I once asked of him.

“I know not by what power I am made to be exempt from social expectation, but every man is exempt from social obligation,” began his reply, and his tacit ability to sustain eye contact in a way that was neither facetious nor insulting reminded me again of a wisdom he possessed which was unwarranted for one of his age. “The greater pity, I would think, is that one would not want to be obliged to his fellow man; to his community. Each and all of us can and has contributed to our communities, though it is for us to decide in which way we do it, and whether we do it for good or ill. What is more important is the choice that we each can take to do it. No man is an island.”

“Quote the poets at me, will you?” I recall myself retorting, a spasm of laughter locking my syllables.

Young Nathaniel was not swayed by the superiority of my station, and I am thankful for that. We of the Harpers do not, in excess, seek to distinguish ourselves by station. Each of us serves our part, and serves a great role in preserving and progressing the way of the world. It was, I realise, a boyish swagger – coloured, I think, with tints of arrogance – that made him impervious to the deference that was expected of him by an enforced sense of station: it was perhaps this resilience also that had made the young Bard implicitly align himself with the drunkards, and those who make a meek existence for themselves.

And yet again we know this not to be the case, reader, for he gave us testimony of his friends who defied such simple classification of the preferences of this unorthodox boy, who has been Nthanda, and Nathaniel Askovar. None less than one whom, as I perceive it, he holds in the highest regard, the most recent daughter in the Peveril family of Impiltur. His appreciation for her is detectable, and palpably to me, it is felt all the deeper by the accidental intonations of wistfulness – or dare I say it, melancholy – that find their way into his speech once his speech is well underway.

To me he was not – is not simple, who in Tarsakh, 1363 Dale Reckoning, became in full our brother, and who throughout his life was best known by the name, Nathaniel Askovar.

[Obsidian Sea]

Tarsakh paved the way with snow for the coming of Mirtul. Many days had passed under an iron sky, ruffling the blanket of stone which had conquered Tantras' streets. The snow was abating now in The Vast, and spring, belatedly, made itself known to the people therein. Among them Nathaniel Askovar was yet biding his time. Relative to the time he had spent in Impiltur, in Derlusk, and growing upon The Shaar, it was still yet a short stay which he was indulging in Tantras, and his newfound association with his brothers and sisters of the Harp served as a compelling reason to stay. And now, sitting together one final time in The Net of Stars with Tarric, that newfound association was to be a compelling reason for him to go.

“Impiltur will be different now, since the king's passing.”

“In some ways.”

“Are you worried?”

“Worried, Iriaebor?” inquired Nathaniel. Around him, he could hear the creaking hinges of a door and the strains of the floorboards, simulating a ship environment. This was an accident of the architecture, more involved with the age of the establishment that the intention of its owner, but for those who were as comfortable in maudlin surroundings as Nathaniel, it was a nice touch.

“About your friends; about the state of the nation.”

Nathaniel pressed his dusky lips together, deliberating.

"Daemons, Nathaniel."

It was not the place of poetry to contradict the weight of Tarric's words. Knowing this, the boy to whom they were delivered chose to remain quiet.

Tarric regarded the boy across from him, younger and more discerning than he. He did not know it to be true if Nathaniel was more good at heart, though Nathaniel's goodness was not something he doubted. There was , however, something about self-possessing intelligence that seemed implicitly sinister to one as blindly good-natured as Tarric. His education with we, the Harpers, taught him much of what he sought to know, and made manifest the truths that he was born to know. Nathaniel, as the Damarans say, was a different beast: the business of the Harpers was a business he had been carrying out long before he stepped foot in The Happy House of Splendour and Song, but that had not made his intentions accidental. That degree of independence typifies many among Those Who Harp, but it is not what is true for us all. Tarric was meek, perceiving a shift in status between he and his partner which the latter, of course, blithely ignored.

“Does it worry you?”

“Aye.”

That made Nathaniel smile. “It shouldn't.”

He perceived Tarric instinctively make to reach a hand across the table, but he corrected himself in a subsequent moment of sheepishness. It was Nathaniel's wont to be coy in such situations, and he did not amend Tarric's sheepishness with any initiative of his own. He marked the action, and watched it die.

“Life is a thing of constant--”

“I am in no need of your philosophy, Nathaniel,” said Tarric, with the unexpectedly swift and clean cut of a guillotine into Nathaniel's words.

It was one of the few times, Nathaniel told me, that he knew not what to say. Few could steal a Bard's tongue, and only the many years of an Elf, whom he called Kallian, had been fit to render him without words to say since he had crossed The Sea of Fallen Stars. With her, he had told us that it was the division of years and experience that made him unfit to grapple with her philosophy, too melancholy to align itself to his own. With Tarric, this was not the case. With Tarric, it was a division of hearts.

“Then shall I say nothing at all?”

“Yes. Say nothing at all.”

“Alright.”

And so for a time they sat in The Net of Stars, where they had first spent hours together, joined by Tarric's song; and now they spent their last hours together, bonded by his wish for silence. I know, reader, such an image may appear sombre, but in my recollecting of the pair, I have faith that rather, these moments of silence were long moments of intimacy.

“I know those that can aid us, and know it best that it is me who must,” Nathaniel explained after a time, suspecting that silence would transpose poignancy to pain if given the strength of an hour.

“You go of your own volition then?”

“I do.”

“You offered it of yourself in The Harper Hold?”

“I did.”

“But is it not you who thinks that we must ever go forward in life?”

“I do, Iriaebor,” returned the Shaaran lad, less a boy than he had been when he had first stepped foot in Impiltur, and yet who would never be more than one. He cast his eyes into the tangle of nets decorating the ceiling above them. “But perhaps going forward can sometimes be the progress of retracing one's steps; perhaps believing otherwise would be in defiance of all that history has to teach us, and to think otherwise is to lose one's hold on history's lessons?”

“I go to Harrowdale. That is west,” said Tarric, combating philosophy with fact, and Nathaniel felt his doubt.

“I have faith that the world is not so large we shall not see each other again,” Nathaniel said in consolation.

When he spoke to me of his last evening in The Net of Stars in later days, the Shaaran boy confessed that against his integrity as a Bard, he did not know if the words that he had spoken to comfort Tarric had been truthful of himself.

[Obsidian Sea]

In the days that followed Tarric's departure, and pending his own, Nathaniel Askovar began to sing of different things. Songs of travel remained foremost in his repertoire, and when he turned his hand to songwriting (and never had he, or another, declared songwriting to be his forte) , it had often been to pen songs of travel. These became commingled with songs of affection in these twilight days of his time in Tantras.

Nathaniel watched from the top of the city, high up in The Morning Halls as Tarric's ship set out from the harbour, going towards Harrowdale. The ship was called 'The Final Voyager', which seemed to Nathaniel, who upon this day was a pensive character, to be a suggestion towards the permanency of his parting ways with Tarric.

Affection might addle his acceptance of the case now and again for a time, but life was not to be lived within a vacuum, and as there was good that must be done, Nathaniel would be happy to know that Tarric would do it - and that he, too, would not be swayed to inaction by the tremulousness of a full heart. The Shaarans, he had once told me, believed only in the present day. They did not look to the sun which set overshoulder; the dying day, nor did they hasten in futility towards the next, for the sky was not harried to change its suits by those who are bound to the land.

He let his attention go to the consideration of the choir of Lathander that heralded the coming of noon. He thought that it was good of him to know the company of choristers who worshiped here, whose music was no less valid than Milil's. Ostentatious and elaborate, the design of The Morning Halls beggared all reason of wealth and definition - and in the eyes of the common man, The Morning Halls might be the grandest place in all of The Vast. In impressing a man thus, the halls fulfill a purpose that is secondary to their utmost accomplishment, which is to please the pride of The Morninglord, and flatter Him to look down upon the Godsworn city of Tantras. To Nathaniel, the temple was a place of socialising, and listening, and of anticipation for his impending return to Impiltur, for it served as a boastful reminder in stone of a dear friend with whom the Bard had parted erewhile, and to whom he would be reunited with the completion of his journey. It was one among the many long journeys he had made in his short life; the distance a pittance compared to others that he had travelled.

That night, Nathaniel Askovar did not come to the Harper Hold. He resumed his place of lodging at The Green Sirene, and bent the ear of his audience towards songs of his own penmanship. It was his voice, feeling and rich, which carried the quality of the performance. Nathaniel had never truly forsaken his Shaaran heritage, nor had he wholly fostered the musical traditions of civilization, or the Bardic colleges. This had resulted in the randomness; the fraught, and anarchistic arrangement of his pieces. I had the pleasure of admiring them several different times whilst this young Bard was gaining his initiation in the ways of Those Who Harp, and I would like to hear them again.

He plucked the strings of his lute with patient pensiveness. It was not his wont to move rapidly in one direction or the other with his music that night. The badge of truth was one that Nathaniel bore with pride, claiming it to be the duty of his Bardic identity. It had been for this reason, I know, that prior to that night he had reworked the songs of love that others had written, but he had never yet written a song of that quality for himself: he found that he named the very deed of love in his songs of travel, and that for a spiritual song of love he would be incapable of writing with the warranted honesty - an honesty which only experience brings. That night, Nathaniel played a song that was neither sorrowful nor bitter in its recollection of love.

In the morning by the sea,
As the snow cleared from the land,
Letting go each others hand,
Here we made our final stand.

I set you to sea; you said I was sky,
But you had caught me anyway,
Will I sing to the walls? Or talk to the trees?
The story we had, it now begins and ends with me.

It was a song of brotherly love. This might be all that he had; it might be all that he would ever know. If he could feel this for brotherly love, and portray that feeling with as much clarity again as he did upon this night, then I would not pity him for knowing no other kind. Sometimes his song was sang outward, and other times his voice became a powerfully introspective thing, and neither was the less truthful. At times it was buoyed by a lightness, like a spring breeze. There were other moments in which he grew roots into the earth, and sang through the very foundations of the inn. To my eye he had brought a tear; and to my ear, a refrain I have never quite remembered, and shall never quite forget.

[Obsidian Sea]

The peculiar circularity of things struck Nathaniel Askovar, as he held his footing on the vessel that steered him back to Sarshel, buoyed upon a sea of ever-increasing turbulence. It was nothing that worried him to excess, as it might have worried another - he held the conviction that Umberlee had no real business with him. His mind wasn't overly affixed upon the philosophical quaintness of his coming back to the northern city that had first held him since he crossed The Sea of Fallen Stars, either. His almond eyes were lifted towards the sky, which wore the garment of white vacuity without the lineaments. The shoreline, from afar, was wreathed in a costume of the same hue.

“It's a starve-acre place. You're a lucky one – or an unlucky one. Few ships come up The Easting Reach this far anymore, what with the snow keeping going and all.”

“Neither luck or unluck guides me, friend,” responded the Bard, turning to face the sailor that spoke to him. The sea, pressing up against the bottom of the ship, could not outmatch Nathaniel's sense of balance, and though the tides came high and the winds were so strong. “Purpose provides my compass, not the fates.”

The pair turned back towards the hilly, east-facing coast of Impiltur.

“It does make a person think, though. A short space of time, but I sense so much has changed, even now before our re-acquaintance.”

And it was true. There were few brothers or sisters to be found in the region to which he was on course. The king's death and news of Daemon resurgence had given much cause for activity, but much of the means to act had been wiped out by the same incidents. And what of Nathaniel's quest to see, and to travel? The Bard could not deny thinking on that as the ship began reaching towards the coast. He thought independently from the world, and nothing was large enough to consume him but the fascination of the largest thing – the entirety of the world and its contents; its people, and their settlements, and their undulating variety.

But perhaps the circularity of these things was not all-encompassing. Looking out upon the sea from which he parted, Nathaniel thought of the path that he had walked; the path he was walking; and the path that had yet to be walked. Derlusk had him for four years; The Shaar for fourteen. Now returning to Sarshel at nineteen, Impiltur had yet to take more than a year of his life, and there was so much accomplished, and so much more to do. Maybe like the sea that brought him here, the young Nathaniel was merely caught in an eddy. As it had since last he had been here, time and circumstance would change the landscape. His story was not complete, nor was he ready to believe that it would end here.

As in the Kythorn of the year that had passed, Nathaniel stepped off of the vessel that bore him hence, setting his foot upon the stone pavement of Sarshel. It was a step that for second time marked the dying days of Kythorn - the beginning of a new chapter in the seasons; in his tale; and perhaps, also, in Impiltur's.