Page 153 of Cursed Shadows 5

There is a tavern in Cheapside with plaques for the dead and secrets in the corners.

The one-legged cook tells stories from lands all over.

If one has a story or a letter to a fallen one, they can write it on parchment, then fit it into a vase.

Each Quiet, parchments are plucked from that vase by the cook’s hands.

He tells the stories.

Sometimes, he tells the story of the tavern—and the male who it is named in honour of.

Sometimes, a different story is told, but only in the hours or the phases that the owner is not at the tavern. It is only in her absence, and in the absence of her dark male, does the cook tell The Ballad of a Halfling and Her Darkness.

That story is small, but it is agony—and it is beauty.

It goes something like this…

THE BALLAD OF A HALFLING AND HER DARKNESS

††††††

To look upon them is a startling, charming thing.

In the heart of Dead Comlar, the ruins pile high. The remains of a tower are a tall, uneasy slope.

It is on those ruins the halfling female stands.

Her arms are spread at her sides, a bird prepared to take flight. She never does fly.

The bringer of shadows watches her, always watching her. He sits at her feet on the pile of ruins, surrounded by the thick darkness of the spiral, darkness he himself cursed the lands with.

He does not let her fly.

His hand is firm on her ankle, his thumb tender in its caress of her skin.

She watches the darkness swell.

He watches her.

If one stops in town, and looks up at the ruins, and sees the halfling and her darkness, they will see how he loves her.

And how she loves herself.

The whispers of their tether carry in the darkness.

Haunted, folk say.

Mother cursed the halfling and her darkness on a cold mountain in another realm, she severed a bond between them, but haunted them both with the soul of the other.

It is only if they are apart that they suffer this curse, this haunting.

The halfling sometimes wants to fly.

The halfling sometimes wants to fall.

The darkness keeps her standing.

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