The Tenth Lute's Demise

It was Ryheric's most important lute. The one he had requested from Greengrove. As a gift and favour, given freely and for no obligation or debt. Only compassion.

Gold was compassion's colour, and it was rarer than the precious metal. It was the colour Ryheric had chased for so long, without knowing fully what it meant. A good omen, a refreshing enigma.

After two years in the west, the man had come to brush the surface of understanding what family and unconditional love meant, and the ones most critical to that understanding had been both Greengrove and Silverstream.

Unconditionally they had invited the dark bard into their home. Offered him food, offered good will. Music, dancing, speech and merriment.

Every conversation built morale and left - Ryheric had always hoped - both parties a little better for the moments shared.

The lute had been given him by Greengrove to enable Ryheric to gift his ninth lute away to someone who seemed to need it more than he did.

Now, the pale and finely made tenth lute sat, unattended in its eventual grave, with several strings decayed and broken from the weather, some way off behind the Hunters' Lodge in Archet, hidden in overgrown vegetation, in amongst a cluster of rocks where the summer rains had washed it down a grassy hill.