#138 The Fiddler's Bocardo

Age: 300 Years

Hidden or Lost?: Lost

History: If you listen closely to the night winds flowing through the twisting streets of Five Waters you may hear the haunted tones of distant strings. They are sometimes cacophonous, sometimes harmonious, but they are always playing the same forgotten song, ‘The Fiddler's Bocardo.’

The song, and the legends surrounding its origin, get their name from the folktale of Paquette the Bard. Hundreds of years past, the musician Paquette rose to become the most renowned bard in Five Waters and the lands beyond. The Executor Regent of the city commissioned from him a love song for his bride-to-be, but Paquette denied him, loudly and publicly. The musician declared that he could write no such song because he saw no love in the Executor’s heart. For this humiliation, the Executor locked the bard away in an fearful, ancient dungeon to either write the song or rot.

Paquette was locked away with naught but his fiddle and the promise that he would be released if he finally penned the Executor’s song. With no plan to give in to the Executor’s demands, he resigned himself to death in the crumbling bocardo. Each night he would compose a new song, each one a mournful new ballad to memorialize his fate. Then one night, as he played his saddest composition yet, a small, secret door opened in the wall of his cell. Within, Paquette discovered an older, forgotten section of the underground prison which had originally been built to imprison the indigenous serpent folk who were eradicated in the founding of Five Waters, and the bard’s stirring songs had woken their ophidian spirits. The hissing phantoms lead Paquette into the deepest catacombs where the colossal bones of their matron worm, captured and left to die in the secret prison a millennia before, were still entombed.

With the spirits’ guidance Paquette composed a song to awaken the matron spirit, his final song, ‘The Fiddler’s Bocardo.’ The song woke the matron spirit and for one night, the titanic, slithering ghost rampaged through the city, murdering the Executor in the process. Yet even as he was able to unleash that avenging spirit, Paquette eventually perished in his dungeon, sapped from his musical efforts.

Today the spirits are still said to sing his tune in the hopes that they can lure another to their underground halls. One who can pick up Paquette’s now enchanted instrument and release them from their deathless prison for all time.

1. The Old Cells

2. Paquette’s Cage

3. Fang Brambles

4. Warden’s Purgatory

5. The Old Snake Cages

6. The Breeding Well

7. Paquette’s Fiddle

8. Hall of the Old Skins

9. The Crushing Phantoms

10. Snake-Hunter’s Armory

11. Paquette’s Grave

12. Venom Rains

13. Mausoleum of the Scales

14. Bones of the Matron

15. Voices of the Ophidian God

16. The Hisstories