New and strange dangers tied to energies that effect fate

Hello friends,

So something is up tied to the energies of fate. Some may have seen it on the road. There's a corruption that caused individuals on the road to.... for lack of a better term, burn, or combust. It's not discordant or involving fate itself, just the energy that effects fate. Specifically said magic is abhorrent.

Searching has come up with a song/story that's popped up in multiple locations, Kormyre, Amon'zad, and other places. Some of the details are different, but the story itself is the same. I'm sharing it here for the curious, or those who wish to begin guessing.

"If your ever walking alone at night and you hear a silent song,
You better clasp your ears real tight,
Or lest you wind up gone,

Across the song enlays it,
Of morrow noon and plight,
It strains their cords to play it,
With flash their out of sight.

Sad sad is the story left not told,
It sang its song but not for long,
For grimacing hands take and rake,
To tether their bow long.

Once was a small boy of no name,
Whom saw a man atop a hill,
He called the man to inquire,
Whether he seeks life or shill,

The man turned unencumbered,
And answered with a song,
His mouth lay hanging like a drunkard,
As silence befell the hole above his jaw..

The boy went home quite frightened,
The boy went home unkeen,
For he grew up to nothing,
And nothing vanished so it seemed."

Straining cords for a tune whose effects are beyond paralysis and pain may not be discordant in nature, yet vanishment or combustion seems well beyond it.

We cannot begin to discuss this without bringing each other up to speed on the history of discordant power before The Curse befell the world.


~Nalick DeMarche

I can understand the impulse to think this of a discordant nature, sadly the world is not willing to be convenient enough to make all threats come from the same source. A thorough look into it has yielded that it is abbhorent, and not discordant. It is a far more common problem than that which would draw the attention of the Lorestri, or their kind. This is a threat yes, but one that involves energy that manipulates fate, such as a bard's ability to rest a trap.

Delving into that well, would be akin to reviewing the full history of black sorcerers simply because the problem was arcane in nature.

The invitation was to guess and mine was that the power is greater than the discordant but somehow related considering the vast overlap in manipulation and effect of magic. If it is altogether strange, new, and too common, the riddle may have eluded me.

~Nalick

Raxas and I went to look for claims of this song, and in doing so we found nothing. When I say this, I mean the absolute silence of any noise. Raxas heard this noise first and when Raxas tried to telepathically send me the noise it wasn't something that could be made sense of. So he described how to hear it to me so I could under stand it. The noise seemed to be a horrid crackling noise at first. In trying to listen deeper, we experienced...a "noise " "sensation " there is no sensible way to describe it. It caused some sort of lightheaded feeling. We experienced bleeding from our ears and temporary hearing loss. However, things around us such as the trees, grass and each other were vibrating slighty off from everything else with this thing.... After hearing this noise we were overcome by this feeling and blacked out, and when we came to the noise and the silence appeared to have dissipated.

There is more out there then just this song. Everyone needs to be careful, much more research needs to be done.

So, I attempted to sing this song. I understand this was probably a bad idea, but I tried it anyway. Nothing physically happened around me as I sang, but I got a feeling like I was missing something as I was singing. Like, I needed to sing to a certain tempo, and or I needed to sing with the power of bardics. But there is certainly some kind of power behind this song, I just can't access it with my skill set.

A student acquired an interesting document on the situation at hand. If you are interested in reviewing it, the document is called 'On the Disnature of Bardics' and I have left a copy of it at the scholar's table.

Stay Warm
Ilana Darkwood-Zero
Lady of Pendarvin
Headmistress of Darkwood Academy

docs.google.com/document/d/1TIDK3lD6G0zm...dhQ/edit?usp=sharing

Several elements of this document match with the encounter we had with this manipulation of fate last moon, not only with the combusting of the people, but with the creator of whatever this energy is. Following the encounter I went looking for the origin point of the noise which all those present had heard, as well as the wildlife in the vicinity. I was able to locate it, and there I found what appeared to be bipedal footprints. However the footprints were distinctly odd in that there was no weight behind them. Rather than being imprints in the ground, it looked almost as if someone had drawn footprints on the ground, making it impossible to determine anything about the individual besides their shoe size, which could easily be faked. I attempted to follow the tracks, but they almost immediately began to twist and wind around themselves as if who or whatever made them had become aware they were being followed.

I added more papers so notes could be added.

If anyone is willing to add their information there, it would be appreciated.

The snow has caused quite a bit of trouble and some individuals seem trapped out there.

Be careful and keep an eye out if anyone else is trapped.

-Ilana

(OOG: I made a copy of the original document so we can edit it. Link edited above)

Honestly, the only thing I could think to add, is piecing together the meaning of the song verse by verse. I don't have a lot of experience figuring these things out, but given what we I know about bardics and with our current combined information, I'm gonna take a shot at it.

The first verse is obviously a warning, mentioning the sound being a sort of warning of the oncoming attack.
The second verse seems to be explaining how the magic works, straining cords is most likely in reference to the threads of fate.
The third verse seems to reference the person playing with the strings of fate, and how what happens to the individual targeted by whatever magic this is.
The fourth verse seems to begin a tale of this power being used before, on a child.
The fifth verse, I can only assume is the individual casting the bardic spell previously mentioned on the child, and the child becoming possibly deaf, or the person just stopped. We don't know enough to say for certain.
The last verse, this one troubles me the most. The child ran home, and never grew up, or had no enthusiasm. The last two sentences make this more interesting, and worrying, since it said the child "grew up to nothing." I don't think the verse is speaking metaphorical here, but maybe a literal sense, like the child had dissappeared, but nobody noticed. I can only assume this means the kid was taken out of time, out of history, and the world corrected itself by making everyone forget about the childs existence, in order to continue the story.

This is just my interpretation of the song, and I might be way over thinking this, but I think we need to be careful of any strange tunes when traveling at night.