Chapter 3: THE TROUBLE WITH TRUTH
The Grinning Ghoul sat at the edge of Oxenfurt's respectable districts. Not quite criminal territory, but close enough that the city watch visited rarely and students with any sense stayed away.
I'd been coming here for two weeks. Building a reputation. Learning which patrons to charm and which to avoid. Getting comfortable with the rougher crowd.
Tonight, a merchant named Tomasz bought me a drink.
"You've got talent, bard." He was middle-aged, well-fed, wearing rings that spoke of money and a smile that didn't reach his eyes. "I have a business proposition."
I sipped my ale and waited.
"My wife visits next week. Her sister's name day celebration, hosted at our home." Tomasz leaned closer. He smelled of expensive perfume and cheaper wine. "I need a song. Something about... marital devotion. A husband's faithful love for his wife."
The barmaid across the room caught my eye. Young, pretty, and shooting Tomasz the kind of knowing look that told its own story.
Ah. So that's how it is.
"A commission," I said carefully. "What did you have in mind?"
"Something romantic. About how a man could travel the world and never find a woman who compares to his beloved. How he'd never stray, never even look at another." Tomasz's smile widened. "You understand."
I understood perfectly. He wanted me to sing his innocence into existence. A ballad proclaiming a faithfulness that was, if the barmaid's knowing glances meant anything, completely fictional.
The coin purse he slid across the table was heavy. Heavier than a month's worth of normal performances.
I thought about my dwindling funds. About the travel gear I needed to buy before I could leave Oxenfurt. About the boots pinching my toes and the winter cloak I'd have to purchase soon.
"I'll have it ready," I said.
That was my first mistake.
I wrote the song in my room. It took three drafts to get the rhymes right, another two to make the melody something memorable. By the end, I had a perfectly competent ballad about undying devotion and marital bliss.
Every word of it felt wrong.
I told myself it didn't matter. Plenty of songs were fictional. Plenty of bards sang about things that never happened. That was the nature of performance—creating beauty, not documenting truth.
But when I practiced the song, when I let myself sink into the music and reach for that deeper resonance, nothing happened. The power that usually thrummed through my fingers stayed dormant. The air didn't warm. The light didn't brighten.
Maybe it only works with real emotions. Maybe fiction just doesn't carry the same weight.
I decided not to push it. Just play the song straight, collect the payment, move on.
That was my second mistake.
Tomasz's home was a respectable townhouse near the merchant quarter. The name day celebration filled its main hall with well-dressed guests, flowing wine, and the kind of polite conversation that hid razor-edged social maneuvering.
His wife was a tired-looking woman with kind eyes. She smiled when Tomasz introduced me as "a special treat" for the evening's entertainment.
I hated him immediately.
The performance space was a cleared area near the fire. Good acoustics. Attentive audience. Everything a bard could want.
I played several crowd-pleasers first, warming up the room. The guests laughed and applauded in all the right places. I could feel the familiar pull of my power, the potential energy waiting to be released.
Then Tomasz caught my eye and nodded.
Time for the commission.
I started the ballad. The melody was pretty—I'd made sure of that. The lyrics praised a husband's constancy, his unwavering devotion, his eyes that only saw his beloved wife.
And I pushed.
I don't know why I did it. Maybe habit. Maybe I wanted to test whether fiction could carry power if I pushed hard enough. Maybe I just wanted the song to land well enough to justify the coin.
Whatever the reason, I reached for that deeper resonance and pushed lies into the music.
Something snapped.
Not physically—nothing I could point to. But inside my chest, something that had been building over four months of practice and performance suddenly broke.
My voice cracked mid-word. A lute string popped with a discordant twang that made everyone wince. My fingers stumbled on the frets, hitting wrong notes, the melody falling apart like a house of cards in a windstorm.
Heat flooded my face. My stomach lurched. I felt simultaneously too hot and ice-cold, sweat breaking out across my forehead.
"I—" I tried to recover, to find the melody again, but my hands wouldn't cooperate. The music died in stuttering half-phrases.
The room had gone silent. Tomasz's wife looked concerned. Tomasz himself looked furious, his investment crumbling in front of his guests.
I mumbled an apology—something about feeling unwell—and fled.
I made it two streets before I had to stop and vomit into the gutter.
The nausea came in waves. My head pounded like someone was driving nails into my skull from the inside. My hands shook so badly I could barely grip the lute case.
What the hell was that?
I found a doorway to lean against and tried to breathe. The cold night air helped, but only slightly.
I'd pushed lies. I'd tried to make people believe something I knew was false, and the power—my power—had rejected it. Violently. Comprehensively.
Truth amplifies. Lies...
Lies didn't just fail. They caused backlash.
I stayed in that doorway for a long time, waiting for the nausea to pass. When I finally felt steady enough to walk, I made my way back toward the Academy, stopping twice more when the dizziness got too bad.
In my room, I collapsed onto the bed fully clothed. The ceiling spun above me.
The power runs on truth. Not objective truth—I've sung plenty of fictional songs that worked fine. But I have to believe them. I have to believe what I'm singing has meaning, has emotional reality.
The faithfulness song was a lie I knew was a lie. The power rejected it.
I turned on my side and curled around my lute case.
What happens if I lie again? The same backlash? Worse?
I didn't want to find out.
The next two days were miserable. My voice rasped when I spoke, raw and unreliable. When I picked up the lute and played, the music was flat—technically competent but utterly devoid of that deeper resonance. Like trying to light a fire with wet kindling.
I could still play. I just couldn't do anything with it.
The power had shut down. Protecting itself, maybe. Or punishing me.
By the third day, the headaches had faded. By the fourth, I could feel the faintest hint of resonance returning when I played.
I sat in my room with a half-eaten piece of bread and a new understanding of what I was working with.
Rule one: emotional influence on willing and neutral targets.
Rule two: hostile minds resist.
Rule three: truth amplifies. Genuine belief gives the power weight.
Rule four: deliberate lies cause backlash. The power punishes dishonesty.
How do I handle commissions for songs about things that aren't true?
The answer came slowly, forming in my mind as I picked at my bread.
I don't have to sing objective truth. I just have to believe in what I'm singing.
The soldier song hadn't been about anyone real. But I'd believed in the emotion behind it—grief, loss, love that outlasted death. That belief had been enough.
If Tomasz asked me again—which he wouldn't, after that disaster—I could have sung about faithful love in the abstract. About what devotion should look like, what it meant as an ideal. I could have believed in that.
But I couldn't sing his specific lie. Not without my power turning on me.
I set down the bread and picked up my lute.
I need more authentic material. Real stories. Real emotions. Things I can believe in.
The Academy was full of dusty books and secondhand tales. That wasn't going to cut it anymore.
If I wanted songs that carried power, I needed to find the truth they could carry. I needed stories worth singing about. Adventures worth believing in.
I needed to stop hiding in Oxenfurt and go out into the world.
My fingers found a melody—something new, something that had been building in my chest since I'd first woken up in this body. A song about a man far from home, seeking purpose in a world that didn't make sense.
The music resonated. Faintly, but genuinely.
Yes. Like that.
I had two and a half years before Posada. Two and a half years to travel, to collect stories, to build my reputation and understand my power.
Time to start earning the truth.
I stood at the window, lute case packed, my few belongings stuffed into a traveling sack. The Academy stretched below—spires and libraries and students hurrying between lectures.
I'd learned everything Oxenfurt could teach me about being a bard. Now I needed to learn what the world could teach me about being this bard.
Somewhere out there, a white-haired witcher was hunting monsters alone. Somewhere, a princess was growing up in a doomed kingdom. Somewhere, destiny was weaving threads that would bind us all together.
I shouldered my pack and headed for the door.
Time to find some adventures worth singing about.
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