Fake Ass Bards
Tags: dnd song campaign night-song
Kind: Song (original) Performer: Isilrod Gurglestrom First performed: Session 11 — Old Tin Top’s, Midsommer Night’s Song, round three
Isilrod’s winning song: a lament for hollow performers who borrow instead of create. It doubled as a trap. Mid-song Isilrod slipped the word “Symposium” into the room to flush a reaction, and Eoin Cooper, Vesper, and Gus Galloway all flinched in recognition. Faf’s advocacy carried it to victory.
Lyrics / Transcription
Composited from the Deepgram and Google transcripts; noisy audio, so treat wording as approximate. The middle verse survived only on the second mic.
The Symposium folded itself like paper skin, and I drifted down the river behind Tin Tops. Someone said it was over. Someone said it never happened. Wrote it down wrong anyway, on a broken, blued string. This fret still hung. God, I remember it being useful. The summer night song is happening again — a field that might not exist.
Bards are all wearing borrowed faces, singing through their teeth. Fake flowers in their pockets, fake grief in their lungs. There’s a bard in the woodpile, holding its breath like it’s part of the verse. Every note sounds like a memory someone paid for twice. They forgot how to stop.
All these fake guys singing borrowed light to their broken crops. Holy fake ass bards, and their hands are full of nothing.
Nobody believes in the rot. It started showing up everywhere, reflections in the space in between the plots. LeGrand says it’s just politics. Lilith says it’s hunger. Shago says it’s just another thing you can style. Might be right, or maybe it’s nothing. Just depends if the song remembers us. Or not.
All these fake ass bards, singing to the empty air. The world is a song, and we’re all just misheard lines.
The Symposium’s still happening. It’s just a little bit quieter now, inside the walls, inside the wrong parts of our sleep. I keep hearing applause. No one is there. I keep on writing it down, because otherwise it disappears.