Fenwick Larkspur

Halfling / Bard

Submitted character story

Fenwick's story is really the story of all the other members of his group the party of adventurers formed for a campaign and story in the world of Ersia. His story is that he knows and sings all of *their* stories, but not _all_ of all of their stories, for he holds in confidence the secrets of each; a confidence he would, and could never betray.

Fenwick started slow, having lived a different life before that of an adventurer. He's older than most of the others in the group, having spent decades on the road, first as an apprentice and then a minor player in a traveling troupe, breaking out only after his professional performance skills became a real craft of their own. Years before learning any Bardic magic he could read a room, hold a crowd, disguise his voice, and put a nervous stranger at ease. His bard levels are the newer, still smaller part of him. The performer is his first and most developed self. 

The performer is also why in most any town, and certainly any city, Fen either knows someone or has a name he can drop to grease the gears just a little: a back door, a fair price, a warning, a bed. It feels preternatural, but it isn't. It's the experience of a traveling performer who meets everyone, remembering each, and is the kind of man people are glad to see again. It's not perfect, of course; the further from the roads he's traveled, the thinner his web of familiarity, but you might be surprised how far a good tune or a memorable play can travel.

Fen has two gifts, that are really two sides of the same coin. He makes people comfortable enough to tell the truth, and then he keeps that confidence, absolutely. One by one, every member of the party has confided their secret to him, each on the same kind of oath: that he not write or sing of it until, and unless, they die. Coal's drowning-and-return. Beryl's curse. Millie's Map. He holds them all, and he is very, very good at holding them.

His own secret is that he holds so many. The comic-relief bard, the light and airy one, is quietly carries some of the heaviest loads of any of them, both in magnitude and number, because he holds many secrets beyond the party's as well, confidences shared in taverns, halls, shops, and even palaces and temples. He's the vault of the party's soul, and it has a cost the others don't see. He gives everyone a place to set their burden down, and has nowhere to set his own, because his burden is everyone else's, and sharing it would break the trust that defines him.

Each confidence from his own party, each song he's written for and of them, is locked in his head and heart until its owner is released from it, and there are two ways to be released. Death, if it comes, makes the song an elegy: if the campaign takes a party member, that is when Fen finally sings them true, the one time the mask comes all the way off. The alternative is liberation, which makes it a celebration instead: if and when Beryl lifts her curse and feels unburdened of her past, or when Millie finds what the Map points to and her story begs to be told, the lock opens in gladness, and Fen gets to sing a life set free instead of a life ended. This his forbidden repertoire is merely only a graveyard-in-waiting; it's a cellar of finished, perfect songs, each waiting for the day its person is free, one way or the other, and he's quietly rooting for the happy version of every one. 

Fen and Balgrin are the founding members of the party, haveing adventured for some time before accumulating Millie, and then Beryl, and finally Coal, making Fen and his stories and songs the ever evolving backbone of the group.

Fenwick has and plays several instruments, but his lute is special. Early on — when the band was just Fen, Balgrin, and Millie — a fight cost Fen his old lute, and it had been a really good one. A consummate traveler, Fen doesn't hold deep attachment to things that break or wear or get stolen; he took the loss lightly, the way he takes most losses. But Millie, an inquisitve, talented artificer, saw the sadness under the shrug and, almost offhandedly, built him a new one: part wood, part metal, a little clockwork, a little magic. Improbably, Implausibly for a thing that needs a soundbox and taut strings, she made it collapsible, folding down small enough for a halfling's pack. It isn't the Stradivarius of lutes. But it is good, and it's unique, and it's one of those rare instruments made exactly for the hands that hold it. For Fen it's a marvel and a kindness he'll never quite find the words for (which, for a bard, is saying something). For Millie it's the beginning of understanding what she feels for Fen, because building someone a bespoke, impossible instrument is not offhand at all, however offhandedly it's handed over.