The Melancholy Machine

In the taxonomy of sorrows, there exists a particular species of grief that feeds upon itself—the melancholia that blooms in the aftermath of perfect beauty. It is a cultivated thing, this despair, as deliberate as any gardener's roses, and twice as thorny.

Edwyn Silversong discovered this truth piece by piece, like a man assembling his own gallows from driftwood, though he would not understand he was both architect and fuel for an engine that ground the very cosmos until the final nail was driven home.

The silence that followed his performance was not merely indifference—it was a void so complete it seemed to devour sound itself. His lute hung in his hands like a corpse, its voice strangled by the profound disinterest of his audience. Three tavern patrons nursed their ales with the dedication of monks at prayer, whilst a fourth had achieved that perfect state of drunken unconsciousness that renders one immune to both music and meaning.

In the six months since arriving in Port Haven, Edwyn had learned that genius in the Meddian Isles was a currency no one wished to trade. The Gravetide had seen to that. Decades of spectral incursions had taught the surviving populace that melancholy was a luxury they could not afford. They wanted drinking songs now, ribald ballads, anything to drown out the memory of loved ones dragged beneath green-black waves by things that had once been their neighbours. Prince Drystan's curse had made the very air taste of despair; who would pay a bard to add more?

But Edwyn's songs carried the weight of real sorrow—the kind that demanded acknowledgment rather than distraction. In a world determined to forget, he insisted on remembering. The Bardic Collegium had called it genius. The market called it commercial suicide.

"Magnificent work, son," said a voice dripping of honeyed bourbon and expensive smoke.

The speaker materialised from the tavern's shadows not through any crude magic of concealment, but through the more subtle sorcery of selective attention. The man was corpulent, his flesh speaking of appetites that had flourished in the decades of apocalypse. A rich suit of immaculate white draped his considerable form—expensive enough to suggest immunity to the Gravetide's economic devastation. When he smiled, it was with the warmth of summer evenings on a veranda where terrible things were discussed over minted drinks.

"Though perhaps," the stranger continued, settling his bulk upon a chair with surprisingly languid grace, "your particular artistry simply requires introduction to the right sort of... appreciative souls."

"The world has no taste for truth anymore," Edwyn replied, unable to keep the bitterness from curdling his words.

"Oh, but it does, dear boy. It purely does. The difficulty lies in understandin' that truth takes many forms, like light through a prism." The stranger's words cut with the precision pruning shears. "I am Rygnveth, and I represent certain... exclusive circles. Patrons who understand that the finest art springs from pure emotion—particularly the uncomfortable varieties. Most especially those."

Edwyn studied the man more carefully. Everything about him suggested not just success, but a particular kind of success that thrived in the aftermath of other people's suffering. "What sort of patrons?"

"Discerning individuals who recognise that your particular gifts—this ability to transmute genuine melancholy into melody—represent somethin' increasingly rare in our current climate of willful amnesia. There are those who hunger for authentic beauty, who would travel considerable distances for the privilege of hearin' music that doesn't flinch from the dark places where art is born."

From within his coat, Rygnveth produced a scroll that seemed to shimmer with its own internal light.

Edwyn leaned forward, reading the elegant script. Standard management contract language, flowery but familiar from his Collegium training. Performance opportunities, audience development, artistic recognition commensurate with talent. Though some of the phrasing seemed oddly ornate—decorative flourishes around the margins that made the actual terms dance just outside clear comprehension.

"This clause about 'exclusive spiritual representation'—what exactly does that encompass?"

"Simply that I handle all arrangements for your performances, includin' the more... esoteric aspects of audience engagement. You focus on creatin'; I ensure your art reaches those who can truly appreciate its transformative power." Rygnveth's tone carried the patient warmth of a professor of divinity explaining the finer points of salvation. "Some of my patrons have very particular requirements for how they experience music. Artistic enhancements, you might say."

"Enhancements?"

"Magical amplification. Your music already possesses remarkable emotional resonance, son. With proper presentation to the right audiences, that resonance can achieve its full potential. Nothin' changes in your composition or performance—merely in how profoundly the audience connects with what you're already creatin'."

Edwyn squinted at the decorative script curling around the margins. The ornamental flourishes were so elaborate they obscured portions of the actual text, making it impossible to determine where decoration ended and legal language began. "And compensation?"

"Entirely performance-based, naturally. The more your music moves people—the deeper the transformation you facilitate—the greater the returns. "

The parchment felt warm beneath Edwyn's trembling fingers, almost alive. The core terms seemed straightforward enough—. The decorative elements were pretentious, but he'd seen worse affectations in noble contracts.

"Will my music reach beyond this circuit of half-empty taverns?"

"My dear boy, with the right audiences, your compositions will spread naturally among those with proper sensibilities. Word travels like wildfire among true connoisseurs of beauty. You'll find your reputation growin' far beyond anything the current market climate would suggest possible. I dare say you'll touch more souls than you ever dreamed."

Edwyn hesitated, quill poised above the signature line. Something about the ornamental script nagged at him—the way it seemed to pulse with its own rhythm, forming patterns that might have been words if viewed through tears or fever dreams.

"These decorative elements around the margins—they're not part of the actual contract terms, are they?"

Rygnveth's laugh was bitter spirits poured over shattered glass. "Purely aesthetic, son. I have somethin' of a passion for illuminated manuscripts—old habits from my antiquarian collectin' days. The legal content is entirely contained in the main body of text, which you've read with admirable thoroughness."

Edwyn signed his name with cautious hope. The scroll dissolved into golden motes that settled into his lute like pollen, and for a moment he could swear he felt a cruel and patient entity stir within the instrument's wooden heart.

"Excellent," Rygnveth said, already beginning to fade like smoke from a distant fire. "I'll arrange for your first proper audience immediately. Simply play as you always have—your natural talent will handle the rest. And son? Soon you're goin' to discover what it truly means to command a room."

* * *

The first sign came three days later at the Bronze Anchor Playhouse. Rygnveth had directed him there with a message about "particularly receptive patrons"—travellers who had specifically requested his style of music.

His performance of "Lament of the Broken Prince" had been unlike anything he'd experienced before. The music seemed to pour from his lute with an almost physical weight, each note carrying resonance that penetrated bone and settled in the marrow. But more than that—for the first time in his life, Edwyn felt what it meant to truly captivate an audience.

They didn't merely listen; they surrendered. He watched their faces transform, saw the exact moment when his melody reached something deep and hungry inside them, witnessed the beautiful agony of recognition as they understood what they had been missing their entire lives. When he finished, the silence stretched so long he wondered if he had somehow stopped time itself.

Then a woman in the front row began to weep—not the gentle tears of someone moved by beauty, but the raw, desperate sobbing of someone who had discovered they were starving and been offered a single morsel of divinity.

That night, Edwyn slept the deepest sleep of his life, drunk on the intoxicating memory of absolute power over human souls. His music had mattered. Not just entertained, not just impressed—it had reached inside people and fundamentally changed them. He had tasted what gods must feel when mortals pray.

But when he returned the next morning to retrieve a forgotten music sheet, he found the woman still there. She sat in the exact same chair, humming his melody with mechanical precision whilst tears carved tracks down her cheeks.

"Mistress? Are you well?"

She looked up at him with eyes that seemed to reflect a deep and terrible emptiness. "The song," she whispered. "Where is the rest of it? There has to be more."

"That was the complete piece."

Her face crumpled as though he had snatched her heart from her. "But I need more."

The intoxication of the previous night soured in Edwyn's stomach. "You should go home. See your family."

"Family?" She stared at him blankly. "I have no family. There is only the music, and the terrible space where the music used to be."

* * *

In the ‘Seaman’s Shanty’, another carefully curated audience awaited him. A prosperous grain merchant attended his performance of "Dirge for the Gravetide," then abandoned his shop the following day to pursue Edwyn from port to port. The man abandoned his home, sleeping rough in gutters, begging for coins to pay admission fees. His wife arrived a week later, hollow-eyed and pleading.

"Please," she begged Edwyn. "He won't speak to me anymore. Won't acknowledge our children. He just hums your songs and stares at nothing, and when I try to touch him he flinches like I'm causing him pain."

Edwyn wanted to feel only horror, but underneath it lurked something darker—the terrible pride of knowing his art could reduce a successful merchant to a wandering shadow of desperate need. His music had achieved what no bard in history had managed: it had become more important to someone than their own family.

In Esperanza, three young people took their own lives the week after Edwyn's performance, leaving notes about the unbearable contrast between the transcendent beauty they had experienced and the grey meaninglessness of ordinary existence. Their families spoke of how the victims had tried desperately to recreate the music themselves, growing increasingly agitated when their amateur attempts failed to recapture the precise emotional resonance they craved.

In Thornwick, a mother sold her children to slavers to pay for a private performance, then sat motionless for days afterwards, humming "Yseult’s song" whilst her husband screamed at her to remember their names, to remember her own name, to remember anything beyond the perfect, terrible hole his music had carved in her soul.

Each new horror chipped away at Edwyn's intoxication, but never quite extinguished it. His music was spreading like wildfire, creating a trail of beautiful destruction that was simultaneously the most terrible and most magnificently powerful thing he had ever witnessed. He was no longer just a bard—he was a force of nature, a walking catastrophe of sublime despair.

* * *

In time the collective events were too much for the bard to bear. Edwyn stopped performing, but the damage was propagating beyond any hope of containment. His songs were a spiritual contagion, carried by the afflicted from town to town. Each person who learned one of his melodies became a vector for the same desperate hunger, humming the tunes to family and friends who then developed the same hollow-eyed obsession. Across the Meddian Isles, his music was creating an epidemic of beautiful despair that made the Gravetide's devastation seem almost merciful by comparison.

When he found Rygnveth again, the demon was waiting in the same tavern chair, wearing the satisfied smile of a farmer reviewing a particularly successful harvest.

"What have you done? You never mentioned this happening," Edwyn said, his voice steady despite the tremor in his hands.

"Didn't I? I was quite explicit about transformative experiences and deep spiritual resonance." Rygnveth tilted his head with faux quizzicality. "Your music now possesses exactly the power I promised—the ability to create profound, lastin' change in those who hear it. Some might call it... consciousness expansion."

"They're destroying their lives. Abandoning their families."

"Now, son, let's not get bogged down in the mundane details of human attachment. These souls have been elevated beyond the grey mediocrity of their previous existence. They've tasted somethin' transcendent, somethin' real. Is the brief discomfort of transition not worth liberation from the spiritual poverty that was consumin' them?"

The demon leaned forward, his eyes bright with evangelical fervor. "Look around you, boy. Before your music touched them, these people were already dead—shufflin' through their little lives, clingin' to drinking songs and ribald ballads to avoid confrontin' the beautiful darkness of existence. The Gravetide has made them cowards, afraid of real emotion, real art, real truth. You and I have given them the gift of perfect, crystallised sorrow. We've made them feel somethin' authentic in a world that clamors for anesthesia."

"You're talking about them like they're art pieces, not people."

"Art pieces?" Rygnveth laughed, a warm suffocating sound. "Oh, my dear boy, they're so much more than that. They're notes in a grand symphony, brush strokes on a canvas larger than you can possibly imagine."

Edwyn stared at him, ice forming in his veins.

"The beautiful despair your music creates doesn't simply vanish when your victims reach their breaking point. It accumulates, son. It pools and concentrates and eventually flows into somethin' far greater than individual suffering." Rygnveth's form was beginning to shimmer, revealing glimpses of an evil, eternal and patient wearing a human shape like an evening coat. "Every soul that surrenders to the perfect emptiness your melodies create becomes fuel. Their despair powers the very waves that have been scourin' these isles."

Understanding crashed over Edwyn. "The Gravetide... it feeds on what I've created."

"Feeds on it? Dear boy, it is powered by it. The trauma of the incursions creates a populace that shuns real sorrow, which creates artists whose authentic emotions are commercially worthless, which creates opportunities for artists like yourself to seek... alternative means of achieving recognition." Rygnveth's smile was radiant with terrible pride. "And when those artists begin harvestin' beautiful despair from their audiences, that despair flows directly into the engine. It's a perfect system, son—a closed loop of exquisite suffering that sustains itself for eternity."

The scope of his complicity settled on Edwyn's shoulders bearing the weight of all the oceans. "The entire world... it's your farm."

"Oh, that's far too crude. It's a garden, carefully cultivated to produce the finest quality spiritual agony. The Meddian Isles are merely one patch in a much larger enterprise." Rygnveth stood, his human facade dissolving rapidly. "And you, dear boy, have proven to be one of my most efficient cultivators."

"End it," Edwyn whispered. "Take my soul now if you must, but end this."

"Now why would I do that? You've barely begun to explore your artistic possibilities." Rygnveth's tone flooded with disappointment. "Though I suppose, if you were to terminate your mortal existence, the resonance between your living soul and the music it has infected would be severed. The propagation would cease, the harvesting would stop, and I'd be forced to find another artist to continue the work."

The demon's eyes gleamed with something that might have been affection. "Of course, you'd be destroyin' more thann just your own life. The music flowing through you now represents the most beautiful art ever created. Your magnum opus, son. The songs living inside you are transcendent in ways that no purely human music could ever be. Ending your life would be like burnin' down the Solarian Cathedral to prevent people from startin' at it too long."

Edwyn felt the music stirring in his chest—melodies of such perfect, terrible beauty that they made his original compositions seem like children's rhymes. The power flowing through him was intoxicating beyond description, a creative force that could reshape the emotional landscape of the entire world.

"The choice is yours, naturally," Rygnveth continued, "continue as my partner in this grand artistic endeavour, or sacrifice the most magnificent music ever created to save a few thousand souls who were probably goin' to die to the Gravetide anyway. I have complete confidence in your artistic integrity."

The demon vanished, leaving only the scent of burnt magnolias.

Outside, his choir of the damned had found him. They pressed against the windows with faces made hollow by impossible longing, humming his melodies in perfect, terrible harmony, waiting for him to emerge and play again. Their voices rose together, beautiful and destroyed, a symphony of souls he had personally delivered to damnation.

And beneath it all, he could feel the vast engine grinding—the melancholy machine that had been using his desperation to fuel something far greater and more terrible than a single bard's tragic deal. His music wasn't just destroying individual lives; it was feeding the cosmic horror that had been consuming his world since Prince Drystan’s terrible choice.

In the distance, thunder rolled without clouds, and the Gravetide stirred, hungry for the beautiful despair that kept its ancient gears turning.