Player Tales: Veran’s Journal

So, if anyone can read this bit of my writing, I must have died. Truly a shame, but it could not be helped. I was no hero, nor was I a villain. I was simply thrown into a situation, and did my best to make the right choices. I hope I have. 
For my own sake, I plan on burning this when I make it out. Only I would understand the joke about the priest , the goat, and the farmer’s daughter, which is why it’s funny only to me. The only reader.
When I get back home, I’ll tell my  Uncle. He and my father were writers, but my father died. My uncle Setherin is doing well, and he is sure to enjoy this. I hope his kids are doing okay. They were great friends. 

Well, I have nothing more to say. Here are the tales I have written.

Tales of Fallen Martyrs (Story One)
There once was a man—not the brightest, not the strongest—but with a heart that beat loud enough to shame the heavens. He didn’t have much. Not wealth. Not renown. But he had a home, and he had love. And to him, that was everything. But one day, misfortune fell through the cracks of the door. His wife, the light of his life, fell ill. There was a healer in town, yes, but healing came at a cost, and the man’s purse carried little more than dust and hope.
So he did what all desperate men do.
He turned to the old path. The one that led into the ancient hollowed hall ruins, crumbling stone and broken gods, older than time and just as cruel. It was the place that you would avoid as a child, scared that the creatures of the night would haunt you and yours. Into the dark. Into the mouth of the past. Into a place where no prayers echoed.
No one knows what he found there. Bandits, hungry beasts, or something worse, the shadows with teeth and old grudges. He did not return. He knew he might not. But he went anyway.
Not for glory. Not for fame.
Because love asked it of him.
Because need beat louder than fear he had at losing all he owned.
Tales of Fallen Martyrs (Story Two)

A story of two fish.
One big. One small. Both hungry.
They lived in the same river—a twisting thing of cold stones and cruel currents. Food was scarce. Mercy, scarcer still.
The big fish, strong and swift, took what it wanted. Every scrap, every worm, every fallen insect from the trees above—it snapped them up with the confidence of a creature born to win. The little fish tried. Fought. Darted in when it could. Bit back. Struggled. But always lost. Always came away with less. Or nothing.
And yet, it kept fighting. Not because it believed it would win. Not because it had strength. But because to give up meant death. A long time passed. A long, long time since the little fish had felt anything like hope.
But still-, every morning, it rose with the river,
every night, it went to sleep with hunger. The river continued to flow, unbothered by the fighting of the fish. The river could not care about the fish inside it, because long after the fish died, the river would flow. 
The fish have one more thing in common, and that is their curse they speak each day. “Stupid River!” they cry. The fish blame the river for the problems, saying it brought the other fish. And each night they both weep tears into the river. You see, the little fish wept because it could not win.
The big fish wept because it could not let the little fish win. If it gave up even a crumb, it would lose its edge. Lose its crown. It could never rest again.
Neither could give in. Neither could walk away. And so they fought. And fought. And fought. Not because they were fish. But because they were proud. The river never batted an eye. 
There was no end to the fighting, even when one fish died. Another would come to take its place, and the cycle would begin anew. Some would say if they had only compromised with another it could all end. Perhaps they were right in thinking this. It would not be so in the river. They would repeat the turnings of strife until the river was dry.

Tales of Fallen Martyrs (Story Three)
He had no name. Or, more precisely, the name he once had slipped through his fingers like smoke, burned away by years of wandering beneath moons that never looked the same twice. What remained was a figure etched in shadows, a man whose pale skin shimmered faintly under the cold light of dawn, whose eyes held a glint not quite human—an iridescence like oil on water, a flicker of something ancient and untethered. His fingers were long and slender, nails slightly too pointed, his voice carried a melodic cadence that unsettled those who heard it, as if every word was laced with an unspoken magic.
He was the Teller. A Martyr of Stories.
For centuries—or what felt like centuries—he wandered the world’s fractured edges, carrying in his mind the weight of countless lives, histories, and tragedies. Every tale he gathered clung to him like thorns beneath the skin, whispering in the dead hours, haunting his soul with the screams and silences of the forgotten.
“They haunt me,” he once told a weary traveler by a dying fire, his voice low and heavy like a mourning bell. “These stories do not rest. They cling to my bones, curl around my breath. I carry them because no one else will. Because if I do not speak them aloud, if I do not bear their truth, they will rise again—those dark sins, those bitter betrayals, those broken promises. They will happen once more, and the world will drown in its own forgetting.”
This burden was no accident. He had chosen it. Or perhaps, cursed himself with it. A penance self-imposed for a sin no one else remembered. A sacrifice to keep the cycle from spinning madly out of control.
He traveled first to the ruined forests where once great kings had been crowned and slain beneath towering oaks now blackened and dead. There, he told the tale of a kingdom that destroyed itself in thirst for power, a story heavy with greed and fratricide. The trees whispered their grief, but no one listened.
Next, he crossed barren deserts where the sun burned with a hatred so pure it seemed to boil the very air. He spoke of caravans swallowed whole by the shifting sands, of betrayals under the merciless gaze of the stars. The wind carried his words away, scattering them like ash.
He sailed storm-ripped seas, telling the stories of ships shattered on reefs, of sailors lost to madness, of promises broken beneath unyielding waves. The sea roared in response, uncaring and eternal.
In each place, he was met with suspicion, fear, or indifference. Some called him the cursed one, others whispered that he was a ghost, or a trickster sent to steal their memories. Children darted away when he approached; elders averted their eyes. Yet, he did not falter.
His strange  traits—the slight unnatural glow beneath his skin, the unsettling melody in his voice, the unnatural patience that stretched on beyond human limits—marked him as both outsider and eternal witness. 
One night, in a forgotten village where the stars barely pierced the ever-present mist, a young woman dared to ask him why he carried such weight. She was fierce, curious, and unafraid.
“Why do you tell these stories, when no one listens?” she demanded. “Why carry this endless sorrow like  shackles?”
He looked at her with eyes that had seen millennia unravel and folded again.
“Because,” he said slowly, “if I do not, if the stories fall silent, the world will repeat its mistakes. The blood spilled once will flow again, the betrayals will poison new hearts, the sins will rise like ghosts from graves unmarked. I am the martyr of memory, the penitent who bears the unbearable so others need not.”
He paused, voice dropping to a whisper, “This is my sacrifice. My duty. My endless pilgrimage.”
His journeys stretched beyond human reckoning. He crossed frozen wastelands where time itself seemed to stall, where the echoes of forgotten wars rattled through the ice. He ventured into tangled cities drowning in smoke and lies, where the living walked as shadows, and the dead whispered in forgotten tongues. Always he spoke—the stories of pain, loss, hope, and ruin—bearing witness so that no tale, no matter how small or monstrous, might be lost to the abyss.
And always, the stories clawed at him. Sometimes he dreamt of them as voices rising from every corner of the world, calling to him in a chorus of grief and warning, a cacophony that no mortal ear should bear.
His mind frayed at the edges, and sometimes he wondered if he was still fully human, or if the stories had remade him—part fae, part myth, part shadow.
On one evening when the sky bled crimson, he came upon a child sitting beneath a dying tree. The child looked up at him, eyes shining with a mix of fear and wonder.
“Will the stories ever end?” the child asked.
He smiled—a sad, knowing shift of hoe lips—and knelt beside the kid.
“No,” he whispered. “Not until the last breath leaves me, not until I am no more. For if the stories end, so does the chance to change the future. I am the martyr who carries the past in my bones, so that others might walk freer paths.”
The child nodded, and in that moment, the Teller felt a flicker of something he had not felt in ages—hope. And so he rose again, the endless roads calling him forward, his footsteps light yet eternal, a faint glow in the gathering dusk. 

There was one day the old man would come to a long road, one that stretched farther than he could see. The Teller knew what was before him, and it was the road to death. He tried to turn around, but found he could not. He screamed to be let free, but it was only he who could let himself free. The Teller stayed in that spot for years, refusing to die.
He held his stories tightly, knowing that when he was gone, the evil of the world would eventually return, when all his stories were forgotten. When the people came back to hate one another, forgetting the love their ancestors had, the world would fall to ruin. So he stayed put, unable to walk back, and unwilling to die. In this his stories were not forgotten, but began to become twisted by time, and turned unrecognizable to him.
It is whispered through years that his stories encased him, and that he became unable to move at all. If one walks far enough, they will find the remnant of the Teller, and hear the whispers of all his stories. They will hear them raw and untarnished, as they were told so long ago. There is a small hope in the Teller’s heart that his stories will be found, and the world would find its way to peace once again.


-Henry B., 2025