74th Summer 517 AV
A gentle caress blew across Baran's face in his slumber. He was dead to the world, lost in his bewildering, maze-like dreams, in which drums beat and horns droned and a woman sang like a cuckoo. His dreams were out of his control, and as such were chaotic and freakish. Although there were many things about his dreams that frustrated him and made his head hurt, the chaos of them was natural. However, in the waking world, Baran was a stickler for some degree of cleanliness. His room, though, was unnecessarily untidy and random, and full of what his waking mind would call shyke.. He lay beside his bed, blankets fallen from bedtop to floor in an untidy heap. Several empty tankards lay sprawled across the floor, interspersed with the man's clothes. His gamba was half-out of it's case, and one broken string curled around a pile of crushed rosin.
Was it usual for him to be in such disharmony? No. Was there a reason for it? Yes. Despite still being apparently deep in contented sleep, the musician was being haunted by a series of reoccurring dreams, and as such was driven ever so slightly insane by them. First it had been the drum beat, etching a pattern into his skull. Then it had been the rich melodies of a horn, and finally now... a woman singing. It drove him crazy to hear these same three musicians each night, in some way or another, playing the same music, yet different every time. Constantly shifting so that whenever he wanted to imitate it, his fingers slipped on the strings and the melody hid and he cursed in frustrated anger.
His rented room had suffered the consequence, becoming as cluttered as his mind was. Yet there was a sliver of hope for his sanity, and that lay in his new purchase, that of a wooden pipe for the smoking of tobacco. It was small and far from being noteworthy, yet the methodical preparation of the tobacco and the calming puff of the heady smoke had helped to calm him the past few days. So it was that as his hand twitched in sleep, his fingers strayed into the ash pile knocked from his pipe the night before, and the man began to awake.
"Petch." It wasn't a good way to wake. Morning's light stung through the open window, effusing directly onto his face as he squinted with furrowed brows drawn angrily across his forehead. A headache was gnawing its way steadily and slowly across his temples and up to the front of his head, presumably where he'd accidentally knocked it in the night. Yet nevertheless, the man woke and tried to put the sweet song of the unknown seductress from his mind. It was an impossible task, but he tried.
Just before midday...
The Silver Sliver Tavern was a short boat ride away from the dump that was his room, and to drown out the clamour in his head, the tired man decided without much fanfare to spend the majority of the day inside the inn. Work was out of the question until he bought a new string, and he wasn't inclined to do anything else in the day, so the tavern's beckon called and he answered readily.
"Another ale, if you would."
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