Minstrel

A Minstrel is one of the Wanderers. Its core is long released, and a heart demon lives where the core was. Like every Wanderer, it keeps its memories from world to world. For its kind, memory is the whole of the craft. Minstrels carry the tunes of every Hallow that has been unmade.

It serves in Reverie, the affinity of dream, illusion and mind that Aefenna, the Lamplighter holds. It strikes from a distance at the mind, and it grows stronger the longer it serves. With service, its song lifts its own army and dulls the enemy's before battle. Later it draws recruits to its employer faster. The card shows how much each stage adds.

The coreless lineages have a particular fondness for it. Tellan, the Keeper of Tallies keeps each lineage's name and songs, and at the recasting a new heir is taught them; a Human heir does not remember. The lineages say their own songs sound truer from a singer who has outlived a world. Minstrels sing the Age of the Given Word more than any other story, and they always sing it from Ysme's side.

It costs geld and mana to keep, more as it grows, and it leaves when the pay stops.

Those of its kind say the demon wants one song nobody has ever sung, and that no world has given it one yet. Whether a minstrel can be freed of the demon is not known.

Player-visible facts