Ouverture: Nessun dorma

As I made my way to the Market of Melodies this fateful day, I kept checking my pocket for that ominous vellum card time and time again. A supremely useless gesture, of course - I did not need to see or feel it to be sure of its continued presence. I could hear it perfectly fine - its ceaseless siren call of intrigue and foreboding; of mystery and danger and, quite possibly, death.
Nevertheless, I knew I had to go - as sure as I knew that night followed day. The Great Music called to me, louder and more unyielding than ever before, and it was time I played my part, however minuscule, in its grand chorus.
I was not terribly surprised to learn that others had followed the call much the same as I had, even though some of them seemed to remember the circumstances surrounding their respective invitations a lot clearer than I did. I did not pay that fact any particular mind at the time - there would, after all, be plenty of opportunities to make heads or tails of this nebulous situation later.
Gond help me; never have I been so wrong.
I paid the ferryman not in coin but in song and dance, as is my wont. Silver is precious for simple folks such as myself, of course, and dad could certainly use a new set of tools sometime soon, but primarily I wanted to use the opportunity to observe my temporary travelling companions. The good part of being a bard is that everyone around you tends to view you as nothing more than a mobile piece of light entertainment clad in fanciful robes. (The bad part, as it were, is the exact same thing).
We were a colourful bunch, to say the least; a dazzling array of wildly different melodies that seemed to have been haphazardly thrown together without much rhyme or reason. But of course, life - much like music - is seldom this random and never this easy. I really should have known better - listened better - even back then.
When we arrived at our destination, a magnificent tent was conjured in front of us. I had heard of such magic before, but this particular phenomenon honestly took my breath away for longer than I care to admit. There was a notable shift in the Great Music at that point - we were on the precipice of something grand, indeed.
Inside the tent, the Blind Storyteller awaited. He spun a tale reminiscent of the fairy tale of the Forgotten Prince, well-known all across Shal'Azura and beyond, but with an air of verisimilitude and, for lack of a better term, finality, that had been unknown to me before. The tale ended in a suitably dramatic fashion when one of the audience members, a woman named Diamanté, slew the storyteller on the spot. (Now that I reminisce about this, I recall her calling him a "traitor" before freezing him from the inside out, presumably via magic. I wonder why this gruesome and vivid memory only now makes its way to the forefront of my mind?)
At any rate, we exited the stage left, pursued by ̶a̶ ̶b̶e̶a̶r̶ a sudden onslaught of snowflake-like creatures eager to welcome us to an early and decidedly cold grave. My humble self and several other attendees of the Blind Storyteller's final performance manned one of the boats and rowed/roasted/panicked our way to safety. Beating a hasty retreated seemed even wiser in retrospect, for it was not long after our departure that Shal'Azura deployed appropriate countermeasures against the sudden elemental incursion (read: fiery death and destruction from above).
Improbably, two of my new-found acquaintances turned out to be the proprietors of the famous Ta'alaq, where we finally found a few brief moments of respite. There was not much sleep to be had, but there were stories to tell, memories to share and experiences to ruminate on. I have certainly fallen in with a fascinating crowd today, and I will try to briefly characterize them in the follwing few paragraphs – although they really must be seen and heard to be believed. What a day, indeed!