The Dragon Bone Flute by M Todd Gallowglas

Author:M Todd Gallowglas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: magic, dragon, music, sword and sorcery
Publisher: Michael Gallowglas
Published: 2011-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

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Over the next few months, I became quite the local celebrity. Rare was the night I was not at the tavern playing for at least a little while. Nothing happened like that first night; the smoke never came alive again. However, even without the extraordinary strangeness of my first performance, the townsfolk still loved the music I made with the flute. Well, all save for three, and the greater my small fame grew, the more those brothers glared at me from the back of the room or from behind everyone on the village green.

As time went on, Hugh, Eric, and Gregory grew grimmer and grimmer whenever we were forced to spend time together. They never did anything as blatantly hurtful as that day when they broke my flute, but they did seem to bump into me a bit more than anyone else, and while they were always quick to apologize, it seemed that I staggered from those chance encounters more and more frequently as time went on and my slight reputation grew. I took this all in stride. They weren’t really hurting me, and I made sure to avoid being close to them, especially those times when we might be completely alone.

Time passed. Planting came and went with nothing out of the ordinary. Summer gave way to autumn and harvest, which then went into winter. People got hurt, but no more than usual and in no extraordinary ways. Animals died. Babies were born. The only thing that really changed was my playing, and that took the better part of a year for me to notice. Over time, I’d stopped playing the regular songs I knew, and more and more I took to playing about emotions or the feelings that come with a particular event.

One evening, late in the harvest, the tavern was quiet. Normally, end of harvest was a joyous and boisterous time, and that year should have been more so. It was the most successful harvest in memory. But despite that, Hugh, Eric, and Gregory’s father had died. While their father had been working in the fields, a snake had startled his horse. The horse panicked, and while kicking about trying to get away from the snake and get free of the plow, it had kicked their father in the head. He’d most likely been dead before he’d even begun falling.

As was tradition, we held a wake for him in the tavern, body laid out on a white sheet, the one he’d be buried in. I didn’t even really feel like being there. Mother and Father had made me go to show my respects to a member of the town passing, regardless of my personal feelings toward his sons. He’d never done me harm nor wrong, and they were right. So I took my flute, paid my respects, and then went and played quietly in the corner, not really close to the fire, because I didn’t want to take the attention from the wake at that time. Songs and stories would come later, but not yet.

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