Terlalecyn Marthane

I can remember almost to the day The Lake Arya School for Musicians and Creative Writers was built in our town of Lake Arya.  From that day I wanted to be a Bard. To play music and tell stories that people would be enthralled by; that would be the life.  I was five years old, and even then I knew that that could never be.  I was the second son, and in the Marthane Clan the second son is always pledged to the clergy of Lathander, The Morning Lord.  My brother, Arthur was five years older than I was, and he was free to be anything he wanted to be.  The only thing our father, the Mayor of Lake Arya, expected of him was to marry well.  We have two younger sisters: Cecily and Elizabeth.  My mother died giving birth to Eliabeth.

I spent all my spare time at the school, following the dean, Mansy Staw around.  I idolized him.  He was an adherent of Akadi, Queen of the Air.  It didn’t take much urging for him to regale me with stories of Her exploits.   As I got older, I would do odd jobs for Mansy, he let me pick a musical instrument (I chose the zither) and he taught me as much as he could about it, even though we both knew my destiny lay elsewhere.  We planted an orchard near the school and by the time I was 13 I was driving a cart filled with apples to market every week to make money for the school.

As one might expect, my involvement with the school (and Mansy) didn’t sit well with my father, but he had other things on his mind that year.  Arthur was now 18, and my father had found a match for him.  She was a high elf named Miranda, the daughter of Valum Helvig the Lord Protector of Melinir.  The wedding was set for spring on the shores of Lake Arya.  As the ceremony drew near, everything else plodded along at its regular pace.  Two days before the wedding, I was making my usual run to market when a squirrel skittered across the road, I plowed the cart into a tree, trying to avoid the little guy. Apples went everywhere.  I jumped down from the cart and started picking up apples.  I was met with a gruesome sight as I turned back to the cart.  A leg was protruding from beneath the apples. A leg I recognized.  The leg of my brother. I had heard rumors that Arthur might have gotten himself involved with some unsavory characters, but now I had the proof.  I drove the cart back to town and solemnly reported my brother’s death.

The next morning, I found myself in my father’s office and to my astonishment he was telling me that I must take Arthur’s place at the ceremony tomorrow, I must marry Miranda, for Arthur, for the family.  In the hallway as I left I overheard my father tell a guard to arrest the dean.  My mouth went dry.  He thinks Mansy has something to do with Arthur’s death because the body was found in the apple cart.  Then I had another horrible thought.  What if he (or someone) had the body put there to frame Mansy. All of this went through my head as I sprinted to the school to warn my friend.  Thankfully, this was not necessary.  Mansy had already left town.  Somehow he had gotten wind of what my father intended.  He left me a letter on his desk telling me that he had long neglected a precept of Akadi’s teachings:  One must not stay too long in a single place.  “if I stayed in Lake Arya for too long, it was because of you Terl.”  My eyes filled up with tears.  “You must go out and see the world son.”  I found the address of a school that was out in the desert pinned to the letter.  I set out the next day to find it.

There was no wedding that day.  Neither the bride nor the groom showed up.

I spoke to many bards on my journey and heard rumors of a goblin and a Kordian Statue.  I don’t know what to make of this but it doesn’t matter.  Someday I will find out what really happened to my brother.  Today I go to the desert to become a Cleric of Akadi.