Tales That Live Forever
Group: Class Lines · Tag: bard_lay · Priority: 5
| ID | Journal text | Awarded by | Items consumed | Items granted | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lindir of the Hall of Fire keeps the upper halls of Rivendell, where the singing never entirely stops. He told me the only thing about the craft he thinks is worth knowing free of charge: a song that is only ever sung by the one who made it dies with them, and my whole job is to hand it on in a state fit to be handed on again. He taught me the opening phrase of the Lay of the Second Spring -- eleven times, stopping me each time -- and put a thin silver torc about my neck with that same phrase cut into it. I am to go out and let the world happen to me, and come back when I have eight levels of the craft behind me. | q_bard_c_dn, q_bard_c_off, q_bard_c_s1r, q_bard_c_s1w, q_bard_c_s2r, q_bard_c_s2w, q_bard_inc, q_bard_lrn, q_bard_rtn, q_bard_spawn, q_bard_stn | The Unfinished Lay | Chorister’s Torc, Rapier of the Deathless Song, The Unfinished Lay | |
| 2 | I came back to Lindir at the eighth level of the craft. He took a folded leaf of vellum out of his harp case: the Lay of the Second Spring, which breaks off in the middle of a line and has done for six hundred years, because the elf writing it went to the Havens and did not think the ending was his to put on. It is in my hands now. I am not to write on it, not to show it to anybody clever, only to carry it and let it be unfinished at me until something happens to me that belongs in it -- and to bring it back at the fifteenth level. | q_bard_c_dn, q_bard_c_off, q_bard_c_s1r, q_bard_c_s1w, q_bard_c_s2r, q_bard_c_s2w, q_bard_inc, q_bard_lrn, q_bard_rtn, q_bard_spawn, q_bard_stn | The Unfinished Lay | Chorister’s Torc, Rapier of the Deathless Song, The Unfinished Lay | |
| 3 | final | At the fifteenth level I said the missing line to Lindir in the Hall of Fire, and he laughed once, delighted and slightly outraged, the way a man laughs at being beaten at a game he invented. He took the whole finished Lay down to the smithy of Rivendell, and what came back up was not a page: the Rapier of the Deathless Song, with the verse and my own ending cut along the blade. It goes about the world on an edge now and will not need either of us again. I have finished the first of the craft. Lindir speaks of longer roads -- the naming-songs, the lament that stops a fight, the making of a true name that a thing cannot refuse -- but those are for a later evening than this one. | q_bard_c_dn, q_bard_c_off, q_bard_c_s1r, q_bard_c_s1w, q_bard_c_s2r, q_bard_c_s2w, q_bard_inc, q_bard_lrn, q_bard_rtn, q_bard_spawn, q_bard_stn | The Unfinished Lay | Chorister’s Torc, Rapier of the Deathless Song, The Unfinished Lay |