Expedition Post Urk Expedition: The Bard and The Poet.

[Silvertongue Songfox]

Date: Merry 26, 1765

Dear Sir and/or Madam,

On behalf of the Royal Navy of the Vupline Imperium, I extend my deepest sympathy to you and to each member of your family on the recent loss of your son, Crewbeast Solomon Cunningham. Solomon contributed significantly toward the unified mission of Her Majesty's Royal Navy. Solomon was a fine crewbeast who will be sincerely missed by his shipmates and those with whom he came in contact.

Your son died the evening of Merry 25, as a result of Her Majesty's Ship the Golden Hide, engaging in combat with hostile natives of Urk.

I am very proud to tell you that, although I didn’t personally know Solomon, he was a well-liked and dedicated Crewbeast who honored his country and the Naval service by the work he did on the Golden Hide and throughout his naval career. His distinct personality and expertise made an immediate impact on those around him. He quickly gained the friendship of peers and superiors alike. This is an important and positive certainty that we all can appreciate as we wrestle with the mysteries of life.

Again, I extend to you my personal sympathy and understanding in your great loss.

Sincerely,

T. Ryalor
Captain of the Golden Hide, Minister of Innovation of the Vulpine Imperium.

Silvertongue sighed, and he sat the letter aside to dry. He had already written at least a dozen of them. On a separate piece of paper, he marked Solomon's name off the list. How many more of these were there to go? Too many to count. Each stroke of the quill caused his heart to ache. So many beasts had lost a son. A brother, a nephew, an uncle, a... a father.

He shot up from the chair, setting the quill down and rubbing at his eyes as tears had already started to spill forth from them. He needed to step away from all this misery. Seeing as how the Captain was asleep, he didn't bother to excuse himself and instead just quickly vacating from the quarters. He strolled across the deck, stopping at the bow and staring out into the sea, taking deep shuddering breaths.

He knew what he wanted, no. Needed to do. In order to do so, however, he would need to locate Darragh.

 

[Darragh Harper]

Darragh had found himself the unwilling custodian of a marine’s jacket.

It was all because he had fallen out of the boat, when they’d landed on Urk. He’d been wet and shivering, stripped to his skivvies and fur, turning blue at the nose and pawpads. There had been a marine about his age, a brown-furred rat with a friendly face, big for his species as Darragh was small for his. Private Terik had let Darragh borrow his red jacket, since the marines were busy working up a sweat setting up camp anyway. Everything had moved so fast, Darragh hadn’t even gotten the young jack’s name. He was going to meet back up with the rat that night, so the marine would have his uniform ready in case of a morning inspection.

Then the battle had put a stop to that, and put a stop to Terik, too.

Darragh wasn’t sure if Terik was a first or last name. The five letters were sewn haphazardly into the collar of the rat’s jacket, T ER I K. Given the oddity of the sewing, Darragh wondered if the rat had truly been literate, or if he had only recalled the shape of the symbols that made his name. Most of the marines had fallen to defend their comrades, and the very few left living and willing to talk to Darragh (he had received a blow to the head from one distraught marine already) could not remember the rat being called anything other than Private Terik. It wasn’t unheard of to only go by the one name, but it made Darragh suspect Terik had been an orphan. Hardly unusual in the Imperium, either.

Darragh knew there would be families and friends waiting at the dock when the Golden Hide returned. They wouldn’t even receive Terik’s remains, as he had been buried at sea. His weapons had been abandoned on Urk, along with his mess kit. If he had letters, or memorabilia, nobeast could find them. It was possible Terik had already been robbed, if a covetous crewbeast had known of anything valuable in the rat’s possession. Darragh simply did not know. All he had, all that seemed to remain of Terik outside of a name on a register, was the jacket.

It hadn’t fit him very well. Darragh’s body was long and lanky, and Terik had had broader shoulders. The stoat didn’t want to wear it again, anyway. Darragh sighed as he patted his paw through the inner lining once more, as he sat cross-legged in the middle of his gently swinging hammock. He had been hoping that there would be a secret pocket somewhere in the jacket, containing a letter, or a journal entry, or just a scrap of paper, even if it was just a receipt. Anything that could be a clue about Terik’s life. Anything that would make Terik more than just a name and a momentary act of kindness.

Life wasn’t always a mystery for the solving, though. The jacket remained as firmly absent of clues as it had when Darragh had checked the first three times. He had even spent time just staring at it, willing that… that vision thing to happen. The odd quirk only Darragh seemed to have, when he could be awake and dreaming at the same time, when objects whispered their secrets to him. Darragh wasn’t sure if that was just the overactive imagination his mother had always tutted about, or if it was magic, or if he was just unwilling to admit he was crazy. Whatever the case, the poet had seen and heard nothing from the stubbornly silent jacket.

Darragh brushed the rat’s inexpert needlework with the pad of his thumb, and thought. Terik…

Cleric. Spheric. Hysteric, numeric, esoteric. Come on, Poet, are you kidding yourself? Do you think Terik would have wanted to be remembered by a poem that somehow managed to rhyme his name in a way that made sense? The marines are not exactly a well-known pipeline to the Unsmudgeables. There’s few artists or aesthetes that wear the red jacket. Terik probably didn’t like poetry but… who wouldn’t like to be remembered in a good song?

At that thought, the poet’s mind inevitably turned to the ship’s very own bard. Darragh himself liked to sing, of course, but there was more to the art than carrying a tune. As much as Darragh enjoyed rhyming, it was Silvertongue Songfox that could turn mere lyrics into the lyrical, and silent scribbled words into soaring, heart-swelling sound. The young stoat grabbed his hat from the hammock and perched it over one ear. He quietly slipped from the hammock and found some spare paper in his sea-chest. Patting his pocket for his trusty charcoal pencil, Darragh began to pad his way aft, towards the officers’ cabins. He wasn’t sure what he would say to Silvertongue exactly, but for now, he trusted his feelings. This was important.

 

[Silvertongue Songfox]

The two beasts, drawn together by fate, or destiny? Were they puppets, pulled along on strings by the gods above, or were they beasts of their own volition, kindred in both mind and spirit? Regardless, the two of them ended up running into each other at the halfway point.

"Ah, Mr. Harper. If you aren't too busy, I'd like a moment of your time." Silvertongue spoke clearly and professionally, trying to lean more into his 'officer' status. "Please follow me to my quarters."

He turned about on his heel, and he walked back towards the Officer's cabins. Once the two of them arrived, Silvertongue closed the door behind him. He placed his ear against it, as if listening for eavesdroppers. Once he was alone, he turned to Darragh. Tears were already streaming down his face.

"Oh gods, Darr- am I the only one here wracked by the weight of my sins? I can feel my guilt- as if it wants to crawl underneath my skin!" He took his hat off and ran his paw over his head. The reality was, he had barely been keeping his composure. "There is no possible reward- nothing that can compensate for what we did. For the lives we lost. No amount of power- no amount of gold- I haven't gotten a single good nights sleep since that battle!" He collapsed onto the bed, sobbing into his paws. "We've become monsters!"