Scene One - “A Song for Liars”

The candles in the great hall of Valdenmere burned the way they always did at council gatherings. Tall, gold, and deliberately beautiful. Everything in this hall was deliberate. The tapestries chosen to remind visitors of old victories. The wine selected to loosen the right tongues at the right hour. Even the musician, positioned near enough to the long table to be ambient, far enough to be ignored.

That was always the trick with Dandy. Be the thing no one thinks to guard against.

He drew the bow across the strings of, The Weave and let the note hang in the air, warm, and unhurried. The instrument had no twin in the known world. His father had carved it from heartwood pulled from a tree that had fallen the night Dandy was born, or so the story went. Whether that was true or the kind of thing fathers say to sons who need to believe in something. Dandy never pushed to find out. What he knew was the sound it made. Fuller than it should have been. Like it carried a second voice just beneath the one you could hear. People didn't always notice they were leaning in until they were.

The council hardly looked at him. That was fine. That was the point.

There were four of them at the head of the long table, which meant it was a private gathering. Formal enough for tall candles, small enough to mean something real was being decided.

Lord Cassin sat at the center, the mage. The most powerful man in Valdenmere, though you would not know it from looking at him. He had the soft face of someone's grandfather and the eyes of something much older. He held his wine glass without drinking from it. He had been holding it for an hour.

To his left sat Aldric, the warlock, whose rings caught the candlelight every time he moved his hands, which was often. He spoke in that rehearsed way powerful men speak when they want to sound like they're thinking out loud. Dandy had met a hundred men like Aldric. They were the easiest kind to read.

The warrior, Bren, said little. She sat with the stillness of someone who had learned that rooms like this were not her kind of battlefield, but she was watching everything. Dandy noted her. She was the one he'd have to be careful of.

And then there was the paladin, Serath, who had the uncomfortable quality of seeming genuinely devout. Holy men at political tables always made Dandy uneasy. You could predict a greedy man. A true believer was harder.

He played something soft and winding, the kind of melody that made people feel like they were already home, already safe, already past whatever difficult task they must accomplish. He had written it for exactly this room.

The conversation at the table had been careful for the first hour. Trade routes and grain yields. The kind of talk that meant nothing and signaled everything. They were waiting for the wine to do its work.

Then Cassin set down his glass.

“The Ashen Reach has held to the terms of every preliminary discussion," he said quietly. “Tranodian is not a man who bluffs."

Dandy's bow did not falter. His face did not change. But something behind his sternum went very still.

Aldric leaned forward, “and you're certain of the numbers he's offering?”

“I've seen the ledgers", Cassins voice carried the particular flatness of a man who had already made his decision and was now simply informing the others. “He wants ten thousand from the lower districts in the first year, after that the arrangement scales."

The warrior Bren turned her wine glass slowly on the table. “Ten thousand is a provable disappearance. People will ask."

“People in the lower districts ask questions that don't travel far”, Aldric said.

Serath, the paladin, had his eyes closed. Dandy watched him from the corner of his vision. The man's lips were pressed together tightly. Whether that was prayer or guilt, Dandy couldn't tell, and somewhere in the back of his mind a quiet voice told him it didn't matter. Serath was still sitting at this table. 

“The demon lands have something we do not”, Cassin continued. “Permanence, Tranodian has held The Ashen Reach for forty years through force of will alone. Every attempt to unseat him has failed. Whatever he is, whatever he has made himself into, that kind of stability is worth more than gold to a council that wants to last".

“And the elves?". Bren asked.

“The elves worship trees and keep to themselves. By the time they understand what has happened, it will already be the shape of the world", Cassin finally lifted his wine glass and drank. “The gnomes will follow, they always do".

The candle nearest Dandy guttered once in a draft from somewhere and steadied itself.

He played three more songs. He played beautifully. He smiled when Aldric tossed him a coin purse at the end of the night and told him he had real talent. He bowed with the easy grace that came naturally to him and made his way toward the servant's corridor at the back of the hall.

He did not breathe properly until he was outside.

Valdenmere at night was the kind of beautiful that felt like a lie now. Cobblestones slicked with evening rain. Lanterns burning amber in long rows down the avenue. Somewhere above the clouds the stars were doing whatever stars did while councils sold their people in candlit rooms and called it stability.

Dandy stood in the alley behind the hall and looked down at The Weave in his hands. His father had made it from a fallen tree. Something that had already ended, shaped into something that could still make people feel.

He thought about ten thousand people in the lower districts who had no idea what was coming for them.

He slung the instrument across his back and started walking north. Duskfen was three days on foot if you didn't stop. He didn't plan to stop.