Oh my gods, calm down. Please—please—don’t hit me with that hurdy gurdy, you’ll damage it. I know how this looks but I’m not here to murder your family or burn your village—not my style. Just stay and listen a moment. I’ve got a tale for you, kid.
Where to start… Ten years gone, before the rise of the current regime…
Ever been to Nobolesk? No? ’Course not.
Infamous city of thieves and murderers. Statistically most of the crime was wage theft, but back then Nobolesk’s gentrification was not yet so advanced that it had lost its venerable reputation for dark but lucrative adventure.
Made my job a real bastard. For every hero looking to carry the torch of justice into Nobolesk’s shadowed alleyways, for every villain with a flair for cloak and dagger dealings, for every seasoned sellsword looking to get rubbed down with just a little more seasoning, there were hundreds of wannabes and posers.
Weary from a long day of fruitless searching, I picked a tavern at random, drawn by the smell of hot food and a sign in the window advertising drinkable ale.
First mistake: “Drinkable Ale” was a brand name, and it wasn’t. Second: it was comedy night.
I’d just sat down, gotten a pint, and ordered dinner from a bartender with aesthetically placed battle scars he’d probably put there himself, when the first assassin of mirth ascended the six-inch-high stage. Comedy in adventurer hotspots was always the worst. Every talentless rich kid in brand new but worn-looking armor thought they were witty enough to get picked up by a famous crew just so they could be the funny one. It was my job to sift this dross, but even I have limits.
I slammed back my Drinkable Ale and was about to flee before I could be made to pay for a meal I had no intention of waiting for, when by sheer luck I overheard a scrap of what I’d been looking for all day.
“…and if there are any other bards around, and they don’t leave immediately,” one patron was telling another, both ignoring the droopy man-boy on stage, “he beats them to death on the spot. Sets up to play right there beside the body—and you’ve gotta stay to hear his set. If too many people flee, he gets frustrated and burns the place down.”
“And it’s the worst music you’ve ever heard,” her friend guessed.
“Oh no,” the first said, wide-eyed. “He’s incredible. You ever heard a man shred on an accordion? I didn’t know it could be done. It’s almost worth all the bloodshed, just to hear him play.”
“You’re talking about Vrong Thunderbellows,” I interjected, pulling up a stool and prestidigitating a gleaming coin into the candlelight. “Any idea where I can find him?”
I entered the crowded taproom of a high-end tavern to mortified silence broken only by the …squonk! …squonk! …squonk! of a man getting beaten to death with an accordion.
There crouched Vrong, up on stage beside a motley-clad body and a frivolously feathered hat, a smear of red hair and redder brains on the floorboards between. Vrong was a broad-shouldered, leanly muscled man, shaven-headed with the nastiest ice-blue crazy eyes you’ve ever seen. Eschewing a bard’s colorful finery in favor of barbaric shirtlessness and cargo pants whose original color was indeterminable, his pockets and utility belt were stuffed with everything a real adventurer might need, except he carried no weapon but his steel-clad accordion.
“Right,” was all he had to say, once he was satisfied his smear-headed rival wasn’t getting back up again. He kicked the dead bard’s lute aside, took his place on a little stool, and scrupulously cleaned smudges of blood off his buttonboard before beginning to play.
Almost worth the carnage to see him play—inaccurate. It was well worth the price of one less bard in the world. Vrong’s dexterous fingers flew across keys and buttons, muscular arms rolling like ocean waves as he worked the bellows. Head bowed, his gaze burned a hole in the floor as he shredded, blistering fast and technical musicianship never slowing but conjuring an array of emotions from excitement to melancholy, triumph to tragedy, wide-eyed awe to slit-gazed fury. By the end of the first song, he’d won over the crowd—still terrified! But no longer did they seem to regret being there.
Vrong’s hour-long set ended without ceremony. He stopped playing, reversed his accordion straps so he was wearing it like a backpack, and said in a quiet voice that instantly silenced the applause: “I’ll have my dinner now.”
Panic from the tavern staff—clearly Vrong hadn’t ordered anything, yet expected their best now. As the staff scrambled and Vrong claimed a rapidly-vacated little table near the stage, I was the only one who dared approach.
“You’re even better than your reputation,” I said by way of greeting, taking the seat opposite him. Dangerously expressionless, he fixed me with that ice-blue murder gaze, but not flinching in front of scary people is my most important skill. I extended a hand, my crisp white card presented between index and middle finger. In case he couldn’t read, I recited, “Arli Appelstomp, Adventurer’s Agent, Talent Technician, and Procurer of Pugnacious Puissance.”
“I should kill you for your abuse of alliteration,” Vrong said in a low, emotionless rasp. “What the hell’s an adventurer’s agent?”
“You’ve seen the dregs that infest this city,” I said. “They overrun every not-quite-terminally dangerous place where one might earn renown. How’s a distressed damsel or violated village supposed to find a real hero with all these posers hanging around?”
“Do I look like a hero to you?” Vrong asked.
“You do!” I said, my best smile plastered on my face as Vrong shifted to unsling that lethal accordion. “I’m hardly the only one in this business willing to sweep a few minor crimes under the rug for the sake of such prodigious talent. It’s my passion to connect talent like yours with those who need it—for a small cut of the reward, of course.”
Vrong’s stony face twitched, and I suspect the tension would’ve burst into murder if a brave waitress hadn’t chosen that moment to bring him a huge platter of steaming hot food and a towering tankard of dark ale. Vrong froze her with a glance, murmured, “You’re too good for this shithole,” and slipped a hefty chunk of gold into her hand before turning back to me.
“You’ve got a job for me,” he said, using his hands to rip open his steak and pop a chunk into his mouth. “Start talking.”
“You must know,” I said. “That the sole weakness of the Dread Necromancer Sundorax is that control over his skeleton minions can be subverted with the power of music.”
“The power of xylophones, specifically,” Vrong shot back, not looking up from his food. “Sundorax destroyed every xylophone in the known world, killed every craftsman who knew how to make them, and burned every library with books that mentioned them.”
“There are theoretical thaumaturgists who say any instrument could do the same, if played with sufficient skill,” I said. “I think you have that skill. The Kings of Balsk, the Democratic Commune of Yllor, and the Exalted Overconsciousness of Ub have put their differences aside to pool an emperor’s ransom, promised to any hero who can rid them of the existential threat Sundorax represents to their bottom line.”
“Sit there and don’t talk while I think about it,” Vrong said.
For an hour he thought, meticulously picking apart his feast and depleting his enormous ale one tiny sip at a time. I sat patiently, disciplined as a monk as I resisted the urge to fidget in front of such volatile talent. Finally, he said, “All right. Let’s go.”
Real adventurers don’t bring an agent along—that was the popular line that Vrong, thankfully, didn’t bother with. It’s true an authentic Guild-licensed adventurer’s agent had all sorts of charms and gadgets that let our parties skip most obstacles. Having one of us along deleted eighty to ninety percent of the adventure, but shortening the time commitment was the only way to make a sustainable living on quest rewards unless you were in the top one percent most sought-after professional peril-facers.
So it went that Vrong and I didn’t have to deal with most of the obstacles standing between Nobolesk and the dark lands of the world’s most formidable necromancer. We snuck past the roving band of land pirates. We glitched the living statues who’d only let you pass if you answered their riddle. We levitated over the poison swamp and the plague swamp and the tentacle swamp. We walked straight through the walls of the haunted labyrinth, conjured a magic door that took us past the mountains where dragons roosted, and avoided boats entirely. I even blew a damnably rare amulet to dodge a fated encounter with someone from Vrong’s past who might have changed his soul forever.
But cheating can only get you so far when you’ve got your sights on a villain of Sundorax’s caliber. There are narrative laws to the universe, enforced by otherwise-inscrutable gods who are transparent about not liking it when sufficiently dramatic situations end anticlimactically. One by one my tricks failed and my gadgets crapped out as we trekked through once-populous lands turned to ash and empty graves by Sundorax’s energetic foreign policy, my last failing just as the necromancer’s citadel appeared in the distance. I’d hoped the levitation girdles would hold out at least until we were past the murmuring fields of human bodies that blanketed the rolling hills to the ever-nighted horizon, but no such luck.
As the horrors of a necromancer’s domain go, Sundorax’s flesh fields were pretty tame. All the twitching bodies were brain dead from conception to skeleton harvest, so it’s not like there was any suffering save for my own offended sensibilities. Your typical tryhard necro might insist on building their skeleton army mainly or even solely by killing actual people, but those guys burn out early. It’s a slow-going, unsustainable horde accumulation strategy constantly undercut by losses in battle, and such necromancers inevitably get hunted down by enterprising heroes well before they become a threat on the same graph as Sundorax. Our target never cared about the “unholier than thou” game, and was content to quietly accumulate power the sensible way. By the time anyone noticed, it was too late to save the xylophones.
Vrong didn’t seem fazed by trudging across miles of softly breathing bodies. He didn’t seem to hear my warning to step between Sundorax’s “crops” lest we damage them and attract attention, but it seemed he already knew better. He moved quickly but carefully, and unnoticed we passed by a score of skeletons with pitchforks and flensing knives. These servitors ran on an automated enchantment, their gross labor too routine for Sundorax to attend to personally. Attacking or even noticing intruders, short of specific stimuli, just wasn’t in their programming.
Sundorax’s citadel loomed as we cleared the last of the flesh fields. It wasn’t the basalt and obsidian knife festival you’d get from a lesser necro. The walls ringing the central tower were white to camouflage the skeletons built into the sides to push over siege ladders and attack climbers—not that you could climb without magical assistance. There were no handholds that didn’t fight back, all those intimidating but eminently climbable thorns and blades replaced by smooth, rounded expanses of stone, seamless as an eggshell.
Not that breaching the walls was on the docket just yet. First, we had to get past all the skeletons charging out of the main gate. We’d been spotted.
I’m not too proud to admit I pissed myself—just a little—when I saw them swarming toward us in their hundreds. All my tricks were spent. Nothing could save me but Sundorax’s mercy—ha—and Vrong’s accordion. If I’d gambled wrong on his prowess, I was screwed.
But Vrong strode forward, unafraid as he faced the undead horde with his accordion in his hands. His usually-expressionless face twitched into a gurn of superior disgust as he slowly worked the bellows, not quite shredding but winding up for an onslaught of dooting and tweedling. For a moment the horde closed in, a tide of bleached bone brandishing swords, spears, and axes of well-maintained steel.
Then the barbarous bard’s fingers flew with breathtaking precision, and his accordion shrieked into the catchiest battle song I’d ever heard.
The skeletons wheeled and cavorted, not slowing their momentum but forming a jigging gyre around us, moved to dance by some essential human quality that no necromancer could purge, not even from bones that had never been people. But even in such skilled hands, an accordion was not as effective as a xylophone, and a few skeletons shrugged off the enchantment and attacked. Not fumbling a single note, Vrong shattered one’s ribcage with a powerful side kick. He spin-kicked the head off another, and a third got its jaw shattered by a kick that sent Vrong’s leg nearly vertical before he executed it with the descending smash of his follow-up axe kick. One by one the skeletons came at us, and one by one Vrong’s kickin’ boots ended their unlives, his ceaseless shredding keeping them from breaking through in numbers enough to overwhelm him. Shattered skeletons twitched on the ground amid their circle-dancing fellows, too damaged for Sundorax to waste energy putting them back together.
Before long Vrong broke through, not just fending off the horde, but seizing control. The shriek and doot of his accordion took on a triumphant tone as the hundreds of friendly skeletons—still dancing—formed up around us. Vrong marched them toward the citadel and, at his accordion-keyed command, the frolicking bones climbed atop each other and linked arms, forming a wobbling wall to shield us from undead archers atop the walls. We closed in and soon, as the skeleton garrison heard Vrong’s song, they danced away from their posts to open the gates. The drawbridge lowered across a moat full of flesh-peeling acid and yet more dancing skeletons, and we were inside the first ring of walls. There were three concentric rings, and you had to circle around to the other side to access the next gate, so even with our advance unopposed, it was a hike. I was panting for breath by the time we reached the base of Sundorax’s tower, and though Vrong’s iron thews weren’t slowing, I could see sweat glittering on his shoulders, forehead, and ridiculously cut abs.
But Vrong was a survivor, not too prideful to avoid wearing himself out. Just as I was tempted to complain, Vrong’s shredding took on a bouncy beat and the dancing skeletons scooped us up, carrying us on their shoulders like conquering heroes as they jigged their way up the broad, ever-spiraling stairs of Sundorax’s tower.
Sundorax’s hold on his minions became unbreakable as we got closer to his chambers at the top of the tower, but Vrong’s hold on those he’d already taken was only getting more secure the longer he played, and between osseous white walls, our skeletons clashed with the tower’s defenders. Bones clattered as steel rang on steel, but we had the beat, we had the rhythm, and our skeletons destroyed their opposition with inspired enthusiasm and progressive tempo changes. Reaching the top, our skeletons set us down before great white doors lit by flickering corpse-green fire, and I slunk along behind Vrong as he strode inside.
Then his accordion exploded in his hands.
With a shout of shattered anguish, Vrong fell to his knees. Blood leaked from shrapnel wounds on his face and chest as he stared at the charred scraps of keys and buttonboard in his burn-mottled hands. A wounded animal mewl slipped between his teeth as skeletons that were no longer ours surrounded us with weapons poised to kill.
I cowered, afraid I’d made my final fuckup, but the skeletons didn’t attack. Instead, they parted to admit a diminutive figure robed in voluminous black. It was a testament to Sundorax’s charisma that he was such an intimidating presence, despite being such a short prettyboy. Your typical necromancer might be withered and hideous, but those are the burnouts. By unholy sacrifices uncounted, Sundorax had kept twink death at bay, and at the age of fifty he was as pallidly gorgeous as the day he raised his first skeleton. Thick wavy black hair framed a face whose pouting lips and knife-edge cheekbones seemed almost a porcelain mask around eyes burning with the kind of hatred that can only come of long years of suffering.
“Come to kill me at last, eh Vrong?” Sundorax asked in a carrying whisper that seemed to writhe and circle through the air, each word coming from a different direction.
Vrong Thunderbellows let out a long breath, discarded the remains of his mighty accordion, and rose to face Sundorax. “No.”
“Then why are you here?” Sundorax demanded, face flashing fear.
“To apologize,” Vrong growled.
Sundorax clasped a hand over his mouth, eyes bright.
“I know now,” Vrong said in a plain, honest rasp. “I know you only cheated on me with that fiddler because I’d grown so distant. I’d gotten too wrapped up in my craft. I’d stopped making time for you, for us.” Tears glittered on his expressionless face. “You hurt me bad, but maybe I’d earned that, and either way, I’ve killed enough bards that I don’t care anymore. I never stopped missing you. I never stopped loving you, even when I hated you, and I think I worked out the last of that hate smashing up your toys. Now I just want you back. Will you take me?”
The Dread Necromancer Sundorax let out a tearful little wail and ran into Vrong’s arms. The barbarous bard embraced his osseous old flame with all the strength of his mighty arms and the two kissed with a ferocity to match Vrong’s shredding. For a long moment I watched in suspense—were they truly reconciled, or was this a clever ruse on Vrong’s part? A chance to cut Sundorax’s throat in a moment of vulnerability?
But the kiss ended without knifeplay, Sundorax resting his beautiful head on Vrong’s sweaty chest and saying, “I wanted to apologize too. I have a new accordion for you, a much nicer one I meant to give as a gift before I… did what I did. I’ve been holding onto it in case I ever saw you again.”
Vrong kissed him on the brow, then glared at me. “Want me to kill the agent? I’ve been wanting to beat Arli’s head in since—”
“By all the gods in the abyss, stop!” Sundorax laughed. “Arli’s been working for me the whole time. It was a real bitch tracking you down.”
Relaxing, I grinned. “I do confess, Vrong, a good adventurer’s agent plays it from both sides. Whether you decided to kill Sundorax or reconcile with him, I was set to collect a cut—but I’m glad it went the way it did.” I gave Sundorax my best courtly bow. “Your infernal majesty is far more generous than the tedious hypocrites who want you dead—and besides, who doesn’t love a pair of mass murderers who are all squishy and sweet with each other? There are angles to consider here, gentlemen. The monetization of your story could be quite lucrative for everyone involved!”
So that’s how I got where I am today. Yes, you could make the argument I was instrumental in helping our Dark Lords conquer the world through the power of song, skeletons, and officially licensed smutty comics, but I’m still an adventurer’s agent at heart. Don’t let all the bone jewelry and human leather fool you—when your Dark Lord gives you a gift, you wear it.
But I’ll tell ya, Vrong and Sundorax are getting pretty bored with total domination. I can’t think of a better way to stay in their favor than helping some callow youth rise to become the kind of hero capable of giving them an entertaining fight. And if you and your exquisite hurdy gurdy somehow defeat them… well, all the better for everyone, isn’t it?
And let me tell ya, kid, if anyone can do it, it’s you. Trust me. It’s my job to know who’s got what it takes.
R. Lochlann is a fantasy writer from Connecticut. He’s full of chill opinions on extreme music and aggro opinions on historical fencing, for which he will cheerfully face all comers on the field of honor. If you enjoyed this, his debut story, you can follow him on Bluesky @runesword.bsky.social.
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