“Saw a bird once,” Badger said, and I let the words themselves pass through me as I paid attention to the structure and the implications.

The first round of the bird had been simple and descriptive. A mottled, scarred bird, crippled of leg but still wide of wing, it had flown in from the seas to the north. Now, just as he’d recast the story of the great beast, the story of the bird stopped being about the bird and became something else entirely.

A wounded warrior came upon a vast bird, with a wingspan wider than the warrior was tall. The bird had, despite trial and tribulation, made it to a safer place—but its limbs had failed it, and it could only circle overhead in an equilibrium that must someday end. The warrior struck with blinding speed, stunning a fish that had breached the water, and threw it into the air; the bird stooped, becoming a streamlined, blurred streak of feathers, and snatched the fish out of the air with its beak.

A story about Hitz became a story about how Waselle, the great warrior, had been wounded in the heart and looking for a new cause and a new life. She’d found it in Kibosh, a village that had been founded through trial and tribulation, a village not yet stable or healthy that needed… not strength per se, but the wisdom to know exactly the least amount of help needed in this one particular way. A village that needed her, not to fight and kill, not to nursemaid, but to create a context where thriving was possible.

The story of the beaver—previously about Badger himself—became the story of a rushing river, rendered inhospitable by the combination of its speed and the jagged stones at every turn of the rapids. The work of the beaver, now a stand-in for Shemmai social mores and civics, turned shallow rapids into a series of deep pools whose measured flow allowed for a complex ecological microsystem.

Not exactly the most flattering picture of my emotional and mental state when I arrived on Yelem, but I couldn’t exactly say it was wrong.

Badger had left the water-flower for last. What had originally been a pointed accusation that I would disrupt what were well-functioning, stable systems became a parable about Hitz. A small plant with narrow roots became an anchor for a new, more diverse system as the shade it cast enabled the thriving of new species.

Hitz, casting a wide shadow despite being firmly rooted in Kibosh—Hitz, leaving in their wake a flourishing of something that hadn’t been able to flourish before. They grunted at that one, looking as obviously pleased as I’d ever seen them, pleased enough that Badger seemed almost flustered and the others at the table made approving faces.

Waselle tapped her left shoulder with her right hand, then rapped her knuckles on the table. Hitz’s eyebrows drew together for a moment before they shrugged and launched into their own iteration on the stories.

“Deep water, that shadow.” Hitz’s voice was mellower, more flowing, but their words were still sharp and their sentences curt and blunt. “What’s there ain’t for the surface. Reaches, holds, strikes. Sheltered, it’s settled; reaches, holds, strikes, none of its old worries. Deep pools, too, but too slow—what settles is surface, looks static, looks new-growth and green. What’ll grow will grow down under, or something’ll come to settle the score and make a different balance.”

Waselle and Flame—I idly made a note to actually figure out why it was offensive to call him that, and find a way to refer to him that was neither offensive nor thirteen syllables—both looked a little perturbed, and Badger didn’t react. The best read I could get on what Hitz had said was that Waselle was content to just be her profession and that the Novice was pond scum in need of either heretofore-unseen depths or a good shellacking, but there was probably more there.

“Bird’s from afar, doesn’t know crop from weed, doesn’t know tree from seed. Shits on it all—what a bird does, shits, turns fish into nitrogen concentrate, potassium, phosphate. Doesn’t need to know soil for that.”

Hitz’s face shifted in what was for them an outrageous wink at me, and I snickered in appreciation. I did not, in fact, know anything about Yelem; but that didn’t have to stop me from, heh, fertilizing the metaphorical soil. Spread it around, I thought they might be pointedly saying, and make other peoples’ work more productive.

Though the specifics of the birdshit was… well, I didn’t know much about birdshit. Maybe that was just its composition, and anything more risked overthinking it.

“Got a beast quiescent, got a boy with a stick who’s scratchin’ its itch.” Hitz paused, and I struggled not to snicker again, this time at the fact that they were blatantly stalling for time. “Big and loud, all of it, draws the eye. Look past ‘em, you find what’s happy not to have the limelight.”

“Nah.” Badger’s response was immediate and drawn out, a long, nasally naah. “Dropped, too weak a’ya, and it’s too much y’own.”

“Seconded,” Waselle said with a barked laugh. “Hitz, you know I’m not one to lay the roast down, but that was pathetic by your standards. Sear my eyes, that was barely passable by mine.”

Hitz waved a hand irritably. “Dropped,” they muttered. “Time’s short.”

“Not that short, surely?” Waselle frowned. “Hitz, your fire stoked for something?”

“Drumming.” Hitz’s eyes narrowed, as if daring anyone to say something objectionable. “Soft for Yarovi, maybe.”

Waselle’s palm slammed onto the table like a thunderclap hitting an immovable object. “Dropped! I’m yielding, can’t make me not, it won’t be me who steals a Trickster’s hesitation out of that, we’re done.”

“The time is not so short that we cannot hear our new friend’s response,” came the immediate response from my not-technically-sesquipedalian nemesis of the day. “Well, Miss Nadash? Surely you’ve had enough time to compose a spin on these tales.”

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“Just the three, right?” I glanced around, looking for confirmation. Hitz’s words had meant something, and I wanted to ask about it, but it didn’t feel like the right time. “The beast’s tale is dropped, so I recontextualize the others—and I don’t do Hitz, because they’re the one who had the drop.” I got the nods I was looking for and took a deep breath. “Alright. Alright.”

Is a story reforged not an act of synthesis? Balance an equation of exothermic nature upon a tongue, and one might spit fire.

I almost lost any control over my expression at the thought bubbling in from Spark, and sent it a wordless wash of appreciation. Okay, I thought to myself. You’ve got this. You were already thinking of the stories. All that’s left is delivery.

I hadn’t, in fact, thought of all the stories. I only had one of them solidly in my head, and it was the one I was saving for last. But I’d make do—I’d done enough ad-hoc improv to handle this, not to mention outright bullshit sessions.

“There’s this cephalopod, right, in deep, dark water,” I start off. I keep my voice calm and steady, slow but rolling forward. I’d done a substantial amount of deliberate voice work in my day, starting as a child and continuing on for different purposes through my adulthood; it was enough, if barely, for me to stay in the storyteller’s cadence. “It’s got a quiet life, a steady stream of food. Thriving in the darkness.

“But things don’t stay the same. They never do, you know? The composition of the water shifts as the flowers spread, and as the things that eat the flowers thrive. It shifts because the ecosystem shifts—and the ecosystem shifts for a lot of reasons. Maybe it woulda been different with a dry season, but it was a wet one, and the water overflowed the banks.”

I paused for a moment, glancing around, sort of gauging the overall reactions. It was… not exactly tepid. Gracious, maybe? Not quite condescending, not quite indulgent—willing to give me the benefit of the doubt, more like. But Hitz was making a get on with it gesture, so on with it I got.

“Water’s always a balance of pressure, for those that live in it, and it’s always a shifting thing, as currents change. Now the water’s rushing faster, and what was deep, sheltered water isn’t—it’s too deep, too fast, and more importantly the stalks of green that the fish were feeding on are over there.

“So this cephalopod, it moves. It goes somewhere else. It’s not sure where, but it knows there’ll be another place for it, and it’ll build itself a home that suits it, and reestablish itself somewhere new. And there, it’ll thrive.” I quirk my eyebrow at Badger. “And maybe if it’s further downstream, might be another comes on by, one compatible in that best of ways.”

“You insinuating something ‘bout Via, girl?” Badger tried to keep a glare pointed my way, but I just grinned back at him, and he eventually shook his head in despair. “Yeah, well, you ain’t wrong, not even a little.”

“You’re pushing her pretty hard,” I agreed genially. “She’ll go Journeyman soon enough. Teaching me enough to fulfill my bargain should put her over the edge.” He didn’t respond, just grinned wider and nodded at me, and I took that as a win, mind whirring as I tried to compose a story that fit what I knew of Waselle.

“So, there’s this pond, right, and it’s kinda shallow, pretty slow. Drains low, the surface is pretty still, so you get algae and scum growing on the surface.” What did I even know about Waselle? Striker, in fantastic shape, trauma that she was struggling to work through, sleeping pills. No romantic attachments, most of her friends were other crafting folks in Hammer. “But you gotta ask yourself, why is it choking out the surface? Why isn’t anything eating it?”

I’d started to lose them, just like Hitz had—I’d, frankly, been stalling, just as Hitz had. But they were intrigued now, at least a little.

“There’s plenty of stuff that eats algae, and in a slow-flow stream, in a place where there’s beavers and other life, why isn’t it thriving? Well, there’s a gardener. And her garden’s big as a world, in that way that every person’s life is a world, and her garden’s no smaller than her reach. She tends the pond, keeps it exactly how she wants it: picturesque, in exactly the way she wants.

“Tall grasses that make you second-guess where the banks are, and algae past that—you can’t trust your footing, and you can’t get close enough to safely get a look deep inside. But there’s pure water down there, in the quiet darkness.” Because, I didn’t say, you have your reasons to hide your depths and make it hard for anyone to get close.

Waselle frowned at me for a couple of beats. “You think I’m pretty, huh?”

That is not the face of someone who feels complimented, I thought to myself in a dry semi-panic. “I mean, yes, I’m a sucker for muscles, but that’s not the point?”

“I was giving you an out, girl,” she growled, a little less happily. “I pick up what you’re putting down, and I’m not saying you dropped the pivot, but that’s personal in a way I don’t appreciate.”

“We all hold our traumas close,” I said before I could think about it. “We cling to the things we feel made us who we are, and at the same time, we don’t want to broadcast how this bit or that bit of the painting was built out of pain or sorrow. Even though we know intellectually there’s no shame about it.” I blinked a few times, flushing. “At least, um. That’s how it was back home. That’s… more than a little how I am.”

Waselle gave me a long, searching look, thawing a little—I wasn’t sure what she saw in me that made her change her mind about what I’d said, though maybe it was the simple fact that I was being entirely genuine. “Not the time,” she said eventually, more kindly than I’d expected. “But maybe let’s be less strangers to one another, and be at least fellow crafters in flame.”

My head bobbed in three rapid nods, clasping my hands and setting my body language in a fleeting statement of gratitude for the olive branch. I took a deep breath, letting it out, and turned to the subject of my last story, the person who knew he was the subject of my last story.

It would be easy for me to take the parable of the bird shitting fertilizer everywhere and tear the young man down with it. I could even look good doing it, come off as clever and witty and able to improvise this kind of thing on the fly.

I didn’t want to, was the thing. If someone was going to be nasty, maybe I’d riposte by reflex and score a point off of them, like I had more than once with Matron Zeva and a few others. But I didn’t want to be at odds with more people than I had to, and I had gotten the impression that I’d genuinely misstepped when I’d called him Flame.

It might not, I knew, be possible to mend fences so easily, especially just over an exchange of stories. But I wanted to raise a flag of parley, even in response to him having been nasty—wanted to try to at least be on good enough terms that he’d explain to me why what I’d said was offensive, even if we couldn’t be friends..

So I composed myself and my story, in a way I hadn’t for the other two. Shifting my body language into something more deliberate—not deliberately anything, just deliberate, a statement of being present in the moment—and passing my future self a deep breath, I looked straight into the eyes of Devoted Acolyte Cataclysmic Burning Faith.

“There was once,” I began, “a new bird, come to a place where a thousand years of birds had come before her. She was a stranger in a strange land, and she knew not its ways.”