Opening Night:

Interior. A Blackbox theater in Gehenna.

The stage is set with a single figure standing still as the grave. Their head is down as they bow slightly, listening intently. Their right foot is pointed forward as the left sits flat against the ground, turned to the side form a ninety-degree angle with their hands resting, folded, behind their back.

Their eyes are closed, but their ears are pricking as they wait for the tell-tale shuffling of the feet of their audience members. A Bard without an audience is nothing more than a mad person, their minds spinning out of control as they try to think. Spewing nonsense to those who only listen in snippets and pieces with no time for conversation. And so, the Changeling Bard stands at the ready. Waiting for the sound of a heartbeat in the darkness to let them know that their thoughts do not go unheard. They are not rambling or ranting. They are simply monologuing to an audience of one. Should the gods overhear the words and mistake them for prayers, the Changeling will be grateful. But they will not bow, nor will they grovel, to a god that ignores their own devout to chase the newest star on the horizon. Reclusive as the gods may be, out of need or safety, they cannot ignore the prayers of their faithful. They’d seen, up close, what happens to those who are forgotten.

The Changeling’s thoughts shift from one subject to the next, trying to find their pace and their rhythm. As her thoughts spin around and around, the Changeling remembers.

She had done this before. It had turned out all wrong, but at least she had done it. She was the Stormwalker, once upon a time, a Peaceful in the Endless Maze. Signified, not by the storm, but the center where she stood in the calm with her beacon. Making her way across the wastelands. So dark in the Abyss that her lantern shined blue to keep it from blinding those that she sought out to give them safe passage. Blessed by Lucifer to be the envoy from the Darkness to the Light. To gather souls that don’t belong and guide them to where they should be.

She’d wandered the wastelands for centuries. At least, sometimes it felt that way. But her watch was never for telling time. It was the key to her portals, her escape hatch. With a click of the latch, it opened up a path to a whole new world. One that she could run to when the storm hit. One she’d wished she’d had back then. When she’d battened down the hatches to weather the worst of it while she rebuilt what had already been destroyed. Building anything in the storm was doomed to be destroyed to be rebuilt once the winds had died down. Perhaps those structures are still standing somewhere as forgotten ruins. But they were still there. Proof of who she’d once been.

She just needed someone to remind her, now and then, of herself at her best. Someone stubborn enough to give her a swift kick in the ass when she needed it. She waited, still bowed in the weight of the silence. Fear beginning to shudder in her breath as she began to doubt everything. Her reality as a person, let alone a Bard worthy of the gods’ attention. She allowed her hand to slip from behind her back to her pocket where she felt for the chain. One click of the latch and she could be gone. One last jump and she could be free.

She’d be on the run for the rest of her mortal life from the devils that were still owed their dues. But she could run with the best of them. She was a Changeling and a Ranger. Hiding in plain sight was in her blood, from family, and by circumstance. She could have gone Rogue, but they were too broody for her taste. Too much angst and not enough connection to the world around them.

Connections were crucial. Not just for her to be free to live and not just surviving, but to be free of the devils. The demons, she could handle. No silver tongues and bullshit were spewing amidst the demons. They made it clear what they thought of you by whispering it into your mind on repeat. But, at least with demons, she knew where she stood. She could live in Gehenna with no issues, playing with the demons and passing the time until she’d been forgotten. Even by Lucifer.

She’d been to the edge of existence and caressed it. Laid on her belly against the crumbling darkness, running her fingers through the Astral Mist and the Chaos. Watching all the ripples go by. She’d seen entire lifetimes of memories pass and cherished them. But they had always felt bittersweet. They were never her own. Entire histories reduced to daydreams that had no impact if they remained that way. And when she’d stood at the throne of an Elder God, her question wasn’t why. It was how to get home. There was work to be done and she needed to get started. She was already late as it was.

Lucifer had been expecting her, but she’d gotten lost in the daydreams. They were so much more beautiful than the world she had left behind. She wanted to show as many people as she could what she’d learned. So many different worlds to be explored. She’d absorbed as much as she could, but her brain was all squishy from it. She needed to go home so she could rest. The Elder God had touched her forehead and her mind went blank as Lucifer grabbed her painfully by the wrist. He’d yanked her up from the cold with rage on his face, but he’d hugged her tightly with tears in his eyes.

She’d been trying for so long to write a story based on the lives that she’d seen. But they never felt authentic. And she hates the idea of invading someone’s privacy, so she didn’t want to write for someone she didn’t know. Letting go of the chain in her pocket, she returns her hand to her back and grinds her teeth. Waiting for an audience was a killer. Wondering and waiting to see if someone else could see her world. To see if she still had what it took.

The creak of a seat in the darkness of the audience lifts her head with a snap to see the first soul. Little more than a flicker of light in the deepest darkness, she recognizes the rhythm of a friend there to remind her that she is not alone. Out of reach from the stage, she knows she needs only call their name and the world will right itself again. She can’t see the face, but she knows the soul. The echo to her own in another vessel. The other seats will fill with time as other versions of that soul arrive. She already knows of one in her life. Lucifer was backstage. Just as he’d always been.

As the seats begin to fill and the Changeling feels there are enough to call an audience, she begins to move and the fears of fucking up fall away.

She’s stirred the rhythm of her thoughts enough that she’s created a calm in the storm that was large enough to allow her to move. She rolls her neck from side to side slowly in a motion that creaks in her skull. Following the same deliberate movements to flex her fingers and her wrists, she reaches her hands back and rolls her shoulders until her arms are out to the sides, feeling the movement of the muscles and the flow of her blood. It reminds her that she is real. That she is alive and breathing and, therefore, capable of anything. From her somewhat twisted position in the darkness, she begins to speak, using Thaumaturgy to project her whispers.

“A Bard is a very strange creature. They can be a poet, a performer, a puppeteer pulling the strings behind the scenes to ensure the entertainment. They can fit any role needed to see the world they weave made real. They are a storyteller at their core. A truth, unchanging. They can paint with musical notes to stir the heart or sculpt with words to ensnare the mind. They can dance to the beats of silence that capture the spaces in between to keep the attention of the audience and move the soul. But when the stage is removed and the lights have gone out, the Bard becomes something unseen, unheard. What has become of the Bards when they have no audience?

The writers.

The actors.

The directors of thought.

They become the pieces of the mind of a novelist who weaves their tapestries in imaginations.”

With a shake of her azure hair to reveal two obsidian horns that curve back behind her hairline like scimitars and a snap of her black clawed fingers, the light above slams on with a loud bang. With a smile, she snaps upright and turns her hips to the side to adopt a pose with her hand, palm up, at eye level while the other rests on her hip. Her skin is the color of moonlight. She has darkened her lips to black, making them easier to see. As she begins to speak again, she is much more animated and she allows herself to move with the beat in her head, keeping her focus locked on the gaze of her soulmate.

“But, what of the novelist whose imagination has turned against them?” she asks, widening her eyes before covering her mouth in mock horror. “No one wants to read about that,” she says, waving her hands with a dismissive chuckle.

“They want to read about True Love,” she says, clutching her chest and standing with her back curved like a romantic heroine, batting her heavy lashes at an invisible hero.

She allows herself to turn a little, curling her body up to twist in a slow roll. “The smutty bits, anyway,” she adds in a dusky voice with a smirk and a flirtatious eyebrow in the air. “And boy, aren’t they fun to research,” she says through the side of her mouth in a stage whisper and winks.

“But I’ve always been partial to adventure,” she says, putting her hands on her hips and rocking her feet out shoulder-width apart. “Journeys taken and lessons learned, friends to be had and chaos to be stirred. And I have never been a fan of the phrase Happily Ever After,” she says with her chin in the air as if to say she knew it was an unpopular opinion. “But not because it doesn’t exist,” she adds shaking her finger. “Shame on you for jumping to conclusions. It should have never meant the end of things. It should have been used as the first sentence, but nobody ever writes about that.”

She shakes her head and waves her hands to dismiss the thought carelessly.

“Or, better yet, give me a good mystery,” she says with a slightly manic grin, steepling her fingers together and running in place a little as genuine excitement bubbles up. “Play with my imagination and give me clues to solve a puzzle. Challenge me. Make me think.”

The sigh she heaves this time is real as her eyes roll away for a second and a smile settles easily on her face. She’s forgotten the next line in the monologue and needed to stall, so she fans herself and looks back at her soulmate. She couldn’t say his name on stage but thinking of him was enough to calm her. The masculine to her feminine. Her balance. Suddenly, she remembers the words, but the animated movements are gone and she stands looking directly at him.

“So many clues have been floating in my mind for the key to it all. The greatest cosmic puzzle to be solved by a hopeless romantic in every sense of the word. The romantic who gave up on hope looking for the hopeless who gave up on romance,” she says with a wistful smile as her eyes look away.

She puts her hands behind her back and bows at the waist slightly with a smile full of secrets. She cocks her head to the side as if someone called her name before turning around to walk a few steps and stopping.

“But the key to the mystery was not the identity, it was the definition of love,” she says with that same grin as she turns and looks back at the audience. “Not who is my soulmate, but what is a soulmate?” she asks, putting her forefinger to her lips and thinking for a moment. “If soulmates are not a romantic definition, then what are they? If I were a scholar, I would write a thesis on this. But, I’m not. I’m a Bard. So, I will simply state the obvious. Soulmates are the reflections of the self. To find your soulmate, you must first understand what love is. And I know, for a fact, that love is a spectrum because I have found the definition for it. Love is Light in its purest form.”

She puts her hands out to the sides and turns her head, waiting for a rebuttal. Hearing nothing, she smiles a little and continues.

“Once you figure that out, the rest should be easy, right?” she asks and then slowly starts shaking her head. “Now that you have gotten the easy part out of the way, the work begins. Because, to know them, you have to know yourself. And that’s just the research phase. That’s the stuff that stays behind the scenes because it can get really ugly very quickly. Especially with a Bard-Brain like mine,” she says, tapping her temple with her forefinger. “Thankfully, what you see before you is the finished work,” she says with a smile and a shrug. “Well, in progress.”

“So, please allow me to introduce myself,” she says, giving a flourishing bow with her eyes on the audience. “Repeat offender of racing to the end to get to the beginning. I. Am Lilly.”