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The Blue Bard

Day 219 since nuclear fallout. Diary entry 259. Time: 4:13 A.M. Temperature 29 degrees Fahrenheit.

The ship, if it could be called that, finally came in.

It was more like half a ship—the thing was rusty and melted, birds flying off it when it ran aground on some unseen sandspit. It flopped over to one side, splitting the chilly night air with a noise most awful. Another failed promise.

I keep thinking back to something I heard once—the tale of Geraint Fardd Glas. They said he was a bard and a harpist from Wales around 1000. Then they found out that he never existed, that he was a figment of one man’s imagination. One man’s fantasy shaped an entire era of history.

Am I, like the bard, just a fictional construct of some sadistic mind? Am I to merely play until my strings snap from insanity? I make my noise in the king’s chamber, where the cup and the candle lie, gathering dust, singing a siren song to a corpse, only to find that it is only me. I am everything.

The cup runneth over, the candle snuffs out.

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