Some people are only monsters by the light of a torch.
Auberic Krenn walks into the camp of an army that sings his songs. He carries three things. A broken lute. A tattered journal. A pendant made from the tusk of a child.
He is the only survivor of the raid that killed Regent Marguerite Valcourt's brother. He is not asking for mercy. He is asking her to listen.
What he tells her is the life of Aesh: an orc child who becomes the greatest warlord their people have ever known. Aesh was born into a culture with deep roots and a home carved from stone and dark. Then the torches arrived, and everything Aesh had chosen to love was taken in a single night.
The war that followed is what happens when we make weapons of the dead.
Auberic knows what it costs to have the truth and say it too late. He has lived with that weight for years. Now he sits across from the most powerful woman in the empire and tries one more time.
He is a bard. He knows how to make people feel things.
