At the very center of the Shardlands, beneath a perpetually paper-thin sky and nestled between two stacks of ancient permits signed in triplicate, sprawled the once-glorious, now-slightly-decaying metropolis of Vellittara—the City of Waiting. Its name, once whispered in reverent tones across empires, was now mostly muttered by postal clerks and misfiled familiars. Vellittara stood as the capital of what remained of the Bureaucratic Wastes—a region where ambition came to fill out forms and hope was only granted after receiving the proper stamp of approval from the Ministry of Probable Outcomes and Eventual Clarification.

  Rain fell not in droplets but in fluttering receipts. Forms drifted from the clouds like leaves that had failed efficiency evaluations. Even the pigeons wore clerical collars and filed their own droppings in triplicate. On the city’s western edge stood the famed Department of Eternal Wait Times, its queue visible from orbit. And yet, the true marvel of Vellittara wasn’t its paperwork. It wasn’t even the spectral census workers who still collected outdated population figures from the living and the dead alike.

  It was the colleges.

  On the eastern rise of the city, near the Docks of Misaddressed Packages, stood Haggleshatz—The Arcane Institute of Practical Wizardry, Magical Logistics, and Hostile Tenure Reviews. Its towers twisted like arguments, its windows shimmered with confused enchantments, and its student robes came pre-singed “for safety.”

  You might ask why a magical academy of international prestige would bear a name that sounded like a goblin sneezing into a brass kettle.

  To understand that, one would have to revisit a certain moment in time.

  Specifically, a single, humiliating lunch between Archmage Haggle—then young, proud, and deeply insecure—and a sarcastic, violin-toting bard named Dorellin Vint, who had only come to deliver a performance and possibly steal dessert. Haggle had intended to call his school The Arc Sanctum of Universal Insight and Flame, a title with dignity, weight, and exactly the right number of unnecessarily capitalized letters.

  But after a heated discussion about the relevance of metamagical metrics and an offhand comment about “wizards only being impressive because they explode when they’re wrong,” the bard composed, then publicly performed, a spite-song titled

  It charted. It became the tavern anthem of a generation. The name stuck. Naturally, Dorellin went on to found his own institution: The Silver Lyric Conservatory of Wind, Word, and Catastrophic Beauty.

  Where Haggleshatz was angular, charred, and constantly repairing its library, Silver Lyric was a cathedral of sound and chaos—dripping with ivy, doves, and questionable metaphors. Its amphitheaters were acoustically enchanted. Its halls glowed with stage-lighting. Students performed duels with rhythm and sarcasm. There were three operas a week, seven interpretations of tragedy, and an annual production of “Ode to an Improvised Sandwich,” which critics universally agreed was either genius or an act of artistic terrorism.

  Naturally, the two colleges loathed each other. Naturally, the feud persisted. And naturally, all of this would eventually lead to Calla Vint, who considered herself the proud spiritual heir of Dorellin—if not by blood, then certainly by vibes and wardrobe.

  But this is not the moment her story begins. Not yet.

  Because on a lonely street in a quiet part of Vellittara—where time passed slightly slower because no one had ever filed the paperwork to speed it up—a figure sat on a bench that leaned like it had finally given up on architectural dreams. The figure wore long robes faded by sunlight and steam. His beard flowed like memory. His hat, once fearsome, was now a housing development for persistent moths. He was, or had once been, a necromancer of some skill, though these days his magic mostly consisted of muttering at pigeons and animating crumbs to see if they’d fetch.

  His name was Gregor the Graven, and he stared at a bakery. Or rather, what used to be a bakery. Its windows were boarded, and a bright red notice had been nailed to the front glass. It read:

  Closed By Order of the Department of Arcano-Public Hygiene

  – Violations: Crust-borne Enchantments, Expired Yeast Spirits, Unlicensed Jam Familiar

  – Cause of Closure: Insufficient Sanitary Spellcasting

  – Comments: “The baguette tried to bite me. That’s a health issue.”

  – Reviewed By: Inspector Glinch, Bureau of Magical Mold and Muffin Safety

  Gregor sighed. He hadn’t bought a loaf there in ten years, but it had meant something. Still, this wasn’t his story, either. Because in that same city, just a few years earlier, in a rooftop dormitory of the Silver Lyric Conservatory, a girl was mid-pirouette, flinging glitter into the air with zero restraint and infinite confidence.

  “This isn’t just a rehearsal for my final exam!” she cried to her baffled classmates. “It’s a statement about the metaphysics of yearning!”

  Someone muttered something about interpretive dance not being a core requirement. She leapt onto a table and began to howl. And thus, Calla “Catastrophe” Vint began her journey. The world, quite frankly, wasn’t ready.

  Later that day, Calla stood center stage of the Hall of Accumulated Echoes, arms lifted, scarves trembling in a theatrical wind that did not exist. Overhead, illusion-lights pulsed like an anxious heartbeat. In the wings, her instructors exchanged resigned glances. Somewhere in the third balcony, a pigeon of minor prophetic lineage defecated on the rail, turned three times, and flew away screaming. This was it. Her final. Her moment. Her debut.

  “This,” she whispered into the silence, “is not a song. It is a soulquake in twelve movements. A meditation on abandonment. A lament in motion. A requiem for expectations.”

  She extended one foot dramatically. It landed in a small puddle of stage glitter she had personally smuggled in. The foot skidded forward. She turned the stumble into a full-bodied interpretive roll and shouted:

  “I call it—Yearning: A Descent into Whelm!”

  Several students leaned back in their chairs. The dance began. It included: Fourteen costume changes (all occurring simultaneously due to a spell she didn’t understand), two puppets made of soup ladles and old sheet music, a magical wind effect that reversed direction every six seconds, and a ribbon routine performed with such chaotic energy that it actually generated mild static. By the halfway mark, she had described—entirely through gesture and pantomime—the experience of being ‘left unread’ by the divine, and also the emotional arc of stale bread. Her finale involved spinning in place, flinging glitter infused with mild necromancy, and screaming “We are all echoes of our own potential!!” into a magically-enhanced soundscape of recorded sighs.

  When the smoke cleared, three instructors had passed out, one chair was on fire, and the enchanted piano had filed a formal complaint. And floating above her shoulder, arms crossed and wearing the spectral uniform of a long-dead troubadour-general, was her ancestor: Dorellin Vint, founder of the Silver Lyric Conservatory, minor war hero, and once-declared “Most Handsome Man to Ever Be Banished from a Rehearsal.”

  He sighed through his ghost mustache. “Calla, darling,” he murmured, “have you considered the plumbing arts?”

  “No,” she panted, glitter in her teeth, one scarf tied around her ankle like a bandage. “I am becoming.”

  “Becoming what, dear?”

  “Transcendence.”

  Dorellin rubbed his temple. “I gave up my immortality to found this place.”

  “And I will live forever through memory and misinterpretation,” she declared, performing a bow that involved doing the splits and knocking over a decorative obelisk.

  Later that evening, the instructors met behind the amphitheater with ash smudges still on their robes.

  “Well,” said Dean Mellicent, head of Bardic Performance and Diction, “we can’t pass her.”

  “She reanimated a tambourine mid-routine.”

  “She set the stage on fire with a bow.”

  “She gave three audience members existential vertigo.”

  There was a long pause.

  “But,” said Mellicent finally, “we also can’t fail her. She’s… she’s related to him.”

  “And she did hold the room.”

  “By the throat,” someone muttered.

  “Still counts.”

  In the end, they stamped the scroll with ‘Pass – Conditional (Uncategorized Artistry)’, sent it to the archives, and added a note that read simply: “DO NOT ENCOURAGE.”

  As for Calla? She spent the night performing a solo piece titled “Rebirth in the Form of Jazz Hands” in front of a curious squirrel and a passing tax spirit. She considered it her greatest work. When her parents received news of her performance, they moved quietly to another country. The forwarding address left at the conservatory redirected to a blank scroll that dissolved when read.

  But none of that mattered to Calla.

  Because the next morning, still barefoot, still glowing with stage makeup she insisted was “alchemical self-expression,” she stood on the parapet of the dormitory, hands on hips, and declared to the rising sun: “They said I couldn’t be a bard. So I became an EXPERIENCE.”

  ****

  Thus began the second year of the greatest bard who wasn’t a bard, as she marched inexorably toward the graduation that most sane folk feared, and the faculty felt couldn’t come soon enough. And while the world quietly prepared to regret her eventual involvement, Calla “Catastrophe” Vint found herself seated in the Hall of Comparative Lore—which doubled as a cafeteria on Thursdays—surrounded by inattentive classmates and one visibly nervous custodian who wasn’t sure whether today’s class was sanctioned.

  Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

  This particular class was “Stitch & Splinter: A Brief and Largely Unhelpful History of the Shardlands”, taught by Adjunct Professor Emeritus Skinthel Banderhaak, a moonlighting mage from Haggleshatz who had, depending on whom you asked, either lost a wager, a bet, or tenure, and was now teaching at the Silver Lyric Conservatory under a clause labeled “Cross-Disciplinary Detention.”

  Skinthel Banderhaak wore a robe that had once been blue but now resembled the color of forgotten obligations. His beard was neatly trimmed, likely by accident, and his left eye twitched in a way that suggested it had been through several dimensional incidents and had opinions about all of them. He rapped the lectern with a wand that looked suspiciously like a soup ladle.

  “Right, students,” he began, glancing around the room with all the enthusiasm of someone teaching interpretive geology to sleepwalkers. “Today we’ll be covering a completely stable and definitely not unraveling topic: The Shardlands—a world that is neither whole nor broken, but instead poorly patched by entities who meant well and left no forwarding address.”

  A quill floated up from the back row. “Sir, is it true the continents are stitched together with actual thread?”

  “Thread, magic, regret—whatever was handy at the time,” Banderhaak muttered, waving a hand. “The original gods wove the Shardlands together after a particularly nasty cosmological disagreement over metaphysical furniture. Couldn’t agree on chairs, decided to create a universe instead. Classic compromise.”

  Another student—a violinist with a mild curse of optimism—raised a hand. “Didn’t the world split again during the Age of Fraying?”

  “That wasn’t a split,” Banderhaak replied. “That was a shuffle. The seams came loose near the edges, gravity tripped over its own laces, and for three centuries the southern coast floated six feet to the left of where it should have been.”

  Calla, who had been upside down in her seat for dramatic effect, raised her hand without turning upright. “What happened to the Sixth Seam?”

  The room went quiet.

  Banderhaak’s eye twitched twice. “We don’t talk about the Sixth Seam.”

  “But why not?”

  “Because it’s currently missing, Miss Vint. You don’t talk about a seam that’s gone. You file a report and pray it doesn’t write back.”

  Calla nodded solemnly and pulled a scarf over her head like a hood of mysterious destiny. “That sounds like a metaphor.”

  “It’s not.”

  She scribbled it down anyway, under a heading titled: Potential Solo Performance Concepts.

  Banderhaak gestured to the blackboard, which illustrated the Shardlands as a rough patchwork quilt where some patches were labeled “Plausibly Real,” “Don’t Go Here,” and “The Soft Bits (Temporarily Unavailable).”

  “At present,” he droned, “the world is held together by a mix of intent, magical force, belief, and whatever’s left in the divine duct tape bin. The seams are… strained. Some scholars believe that if enough tears align at the wrong moment, the whole thing might… go.”

  “Go where?” asked a student with a lute and no sense of fear.

  “Not where. When. Or possibly why. Either way, there will be screaming.”

  Calla scribbled again. Performance title: “The Day the Seams Screamed.” She added glitter.

  A student up front raised his hand. “So what keeps the world from unraveling now?”

  Banderhaak looked around the room, as if someone else might answer for him. His mouth worked for a moment before settling on:

  “Denial. And possibly the Sandstitched Monastery. They patch the holes. Quietly. Badly. Reverently. They’re underfunded and over-symbolic.”

  “Symbolism is powerful,” Calla said.

  “Not when applied to dimensional physics, Miss Vint.”

  The class began to pack up as the enchanted bell tolled from the rafters with a noise that resembled a disappointed parent sighing into a flute. Banderhaak slumped behind his lectern, one hand on his temple, the other fending off a question from a student convinced the Grand Queue at the Ministry of Eternal Wait Times led to enlightenment.

  “It doesn’t,” he grumbled. “It leads to a vending machine that only dispenses expired licorice.”

  Calla twirled out of the classroom, arms wide, scarves trailing in her wake like streamers of chaotic ambition.

  “This world is a performance just waiting for a stage,” she proclaimed to no one in particular. “And I, Calla Vint, shall choreograph its finale.”

  Behind her, Banderhaak muttered, “That girl is going to dance her way into a temporal fissure one day.”

  To which the janitor replied, “Again?”

  ****

  It was the last day of classes before the Great Tilter’s Turn, that sacred annual moment in which the World-Loom paused, shifted one metaphysical gear to the left, and caused everything from tide cycles to bureaucratic renewal rituals to glitch half a degree sideways. Though originally meant to mark a cosmological recalibration involving thread tension and the orientation of dream ley-lines, it had, in most academic institutions, come to mean “two weeks off and mild cake.”

  In the Hall of Abstract Sound & Unintended Consequence, students packed themselves onto wobbling bench-rows carved with musical runes and at least one limerick about flatulence in F-sharp. At the front of the room, perched atop a heavily modified lectern, sat Professor Ariaquint the Third, a blind, sentient parrot who had long ago transcended mere squawking and now lectured in near-operatic tones of ancient melodic wisdom.

  Today’s subject was, naturally, “Resonant Harmonics in Quantum Causality: How to Sing to the Fabric of Time Without Tearing It.” Professor Ariaquint cleared his throat—an operatic sound somewhere between a cough and a piccolo solo—and spoke.

  “Welcome, little dissonant ducklings, to your final descent into understanding this term. Before the Great Tilter yanks us into a new cosmological posture and the faculty retreats into ceremonial nap cycles, let us discuss how sound—specifically, the persistent resonance of intention—affects probability threads.” He paused. Not because he needed to, but because dramatic silence was important in avian pedagogy.

  “When properly attuned, a melody can nudge fate. A rhythm can echo across adjacent realities. A bard—a true bard—can cause a coincidence to blink twice.”

  The students scribbled, nodded, or stared blankly, depending on how much sleep they’d traded for inspiration.

  Professor Ariaquint fluttered to the edge of the lectern. “Now then, who among you can name the three known Causal Keys of the Chord Realms?”

  Calla Vint’s hand shot up with the energy of a firework that had recently been disappointed in romance. “Emotion, Embodiment, and… Existential Wobble!”

  There was a pause.

  “That is,” said the parrot, tilting his head, “not entirely incorrect.”

  Calla beamed.

  After forty-seven minutes of swirling sound diagrams, emotionally charged scales, and an unfortunately timed euphonium demonstration that collapsed a minor pocket dimension, the class came to its melodious end. The enchanted bell above the door rang in the tone of “Release,” and students gathered their books, instruments, and loosely sketched destiny outlines. Voices rose in shared joy, laughter, and post-exam relief.

  “I’m heading to the Mirror Lakes!”

  “My aunt’s translating ancient lullabies in the Resonant North!”

  “I’ve got a gig with a sound cult—no screaming this time!”

  Everyone, it seemed, had a plan. Or people. Or somewhere they were expected.

  Except Calla.

  She stood alone, surrounded by conversations that did not include her. Her arms wrapped around herself, just briefly. The scarves hung more still than usual. Her foot tapped not in rhythm, but in hesitation. Her ancestor, Dorellin Vint, shimmered into visibility beside her—translucent, well-dressed, and deeply uncomfortable with her emotional vulnerability.

  “You alright, dove?” he asked softly.

  “I’m fine,” she said brightly, too brightly. “I just… had an idea.”

  “Oh no.”

  “A vision, actually.”

  “Sweet stars, no—”

  “A new performance piece. I’ll call it…” She turned slowly, dramatically. “‘The Silence of Invitation: A Solo in Shimmering Absence.’”

  “Please, child, go for a walk. Take up cheese sculpting. Pretend to be a cloud. Anything but—”

  But it was too late.

  She hurled a scarf into the air. It landed on a confused trombone. She leapt onto a bench with the grace of a startled goat and flung her arms wide. The rest of the class, still packing, froze in the familiar posture of oh no not again.

  “What are you doing?” one brave student whispered.

  Calla closed her eyes. “I am becoming absence.”

  She began to spin.

  The performance involved five scarves, one chair, a tambourine she hadn’t checked out, and an interpretive sequence of falling slowly to the floor while narrating her own emotional journey in minor key humming.

  A fellow student looked around, panicked. “Can we leave?”

  “No,” said another, resigned. “If you move, she thinks you’re part of the piece.” Someone whimpered.

  Professor Ariaquint sighed deeply and muttered into his feathers, “And that is why spectral bardic tenure is a cursed idea.”

  At the end of her dance—now surrounded by silence, indifference, and a single applause from a janitorial homunculus—Calla dropped to her knees, lifted her arms to the rafters, and whispered, “I am alone… and that is the art.”

  A pause. No one moved.

  Dorellin, spectral hand over his spectral eyes, mumbled, “I should’ve cheated at fewer spectral poker nights…”

  The bells had stopped ringing. Even the enchanted ones—the little crystal glockenspiel that usually rang out whenever someone felt emotionally validated, or the tambourine that celebrated proper filing etiquette—had grown still. The students were gone. The halls of the Silver Lyric Conservatory whispered with leftover sound, the kind that clung to walls like half-spoken promises. From the open windows drifted laughter, magical firework fizzles, and the warm, off-key strums of final-term freedom.

  But Calla Vint walked alone. Up seven flights of stairs. Past a “Do Not Open—Possible Alternate Timeline” door. Through a long-disused hallway that reeked faintly of glitter glue and defeat. And finally, into the attic. It wasn’t officially her dorm. Not really. It had been meant for storage—old pageant sets, broken metronomes, dusty statues of long-canceled deities. But at some point in her first year, after accidentally turning her first roommate into an interpretive mural (the paint eventually wore off), it had become clear she needed… space.

  And so, with very little ceremony and exactly zero signatures, the attic became hers.

  The walls were lined with boxes labeled “DO NOT INSPIRE,” “MISC: Regrets,” and one that simply read “Holiday Pageant ’77: Burn Later.” A fake wreath wept softly in one corner. A failed magical snow globe replayed an awkward breakup loop every thirty minutes. Calla stepped inside, tugging her scarves off one by one and draping them with careful reverence across the antlers of an old theater prop elk that now served as her coat rack-slash-confidant.

  The silence up here was different. Not heavy. Just… honest. Dorellin appeared near the window, drifting in like a sigh from another life. He looked tired, which was impressive for someone without a circulatory system.

  “My dear,” he said, folding translucent arms. “You were doing so well. You’d almost gotten through the term without a full interpretive collapse.”

  Calla pulled her boots off and dropped them with the determined clunk of rebellion. “They needed it. They just didn’t know it.”

  “They also didn’t ask for it.”

  “That’s art.”

  “That’s trespassing with flair.”

  She lay back on the creaky stage trunk that served as her bed. The ceiling angled steeply above her, filled with spiderwebs that glowed faintly when no one was watching. Somewhere in the rafters, a mouse hummed the melody of an old folk tragedy in a minor key.

  “I’m not meant to be small,” she whispered.

  Dorellin groaned softly. “Then don’t be. But must you always be large in front of witnesses?”

  “I can’t help it,” she said. “When the world aches, I ache with it. And when it forgets itself, I must remind it. Through movement.”

  “Through interpretive jazz coughing?”

  “That was experimental breath-work.”

  A pause.

  Dorellin hovered lower, his expression softening. “Calla. You could be anything. A magical interior designer. A shadow puppeteer. You could run a nice little nightsoil delivery service out of the back of a singing wagon. It doesn’t always have to be… this.”

  “But it is this,” she whispered. “Because this—whatever it is—is me.”

  She sat up slowly. Moved to the window. Looked out over the moon-skein streets of Vellittara, where festival lights flickered and illusion-balloons bobbed through the dusk like dreaming soap bubbles.

  “I’m not meant to stay in this attic,” she said. “I’ve memorized every creak, every ghostlight, every echo. My next movement… needs a bigger stage.”

  “Oh no,” Dorellin muttered. “You’ve got that tone again. The walkabout tone. The bound-for-destiny-by-way-of-a-mishap tone.”

  She smiled.

  “I think,” she said, “I’m going to go find the world. And maybe, if I’m lucky…”

  “You won’t meet anyone impressionable?”

  “…I’ll find someone who needs me.”

  Dorellin floated in front of her, face haunted with ancestorly foreboding. “Calla. Sweet spiral of embarrassment. Please think this through. What if you wander into danger?”

  “I’ll turn it into a duet.”

  “What if you break something important?”

  “Then I’ll stitch it into the finale.”

  She packed lightly: six scarves, a theater dagger (very real), a fork that sang lullabies, and a notebook titled Ideas to Emotionally Dismantle a Room. The door creaked behind her as she stepped into the stairwell, humming a tune only she could hear. Outside, the Tilter moon was beginning to shift. The stars flickered in sympathy.

  Far away—unseen, unmentioned, and currently battling a weasel for rent money—Derrin of Drizzle would soon begin a journey of his own.

  The threads were moving.

  The seams would tremble.

  And somewhere in the margins of fate…

  A scarf fluttered like a warning.

  Or perhaps, a bow.