The Extra's Transcension

The Festival had Started.

Music also Started playing in the Village.

Not the kind of music carved in ritual or born from arcane rites.

Not the hollow chants of the old towers, or the warhorns that once followed him into fire.

This was string and reed and voice. A lute being tuned poorly.

Someone humming off-key.

Children shrieking laughter in rhythm with wooden spoons smacking pots.

The Festival had begun.

He stared at the wooden ceiling above him for a long time, listening to the sound of a village reminding itself it was still alive.

Then he rose, dressed in the plain brown tunic someone had left him, he suspected Maret again, and made his way outside.

The square was already transforming.

Cloth streamers tied between rooftops fluttered like shy flags.

Baskets of dyed eggs, flowers, and salt bread stood at every corner.

Someone was painting a sun on the side of the old well.

"Ash!"

Arya's voice called out from the bakery porch.

He sat with his boots off, chewing on a roasted nutcake, cheeks already flushed with warmth or mead or both.

"You're late."

"Late for what?"

Ash asked, stepping over a crate full of apples shaped like hearts.

"To help set up the stage,"

Arya said, hopping down.

"You've been drafted. Tradition. All newcomers work the Festival, or the gods curse your socks to never stay dry."

Ash raised an eyebrow.

"I didn't realize the gods cared that much about footwear."

"They don't,"

Arya said, shrugging.

"But the cobbler does. And she is scarier than any deity."

They spent the morning carrying benches, fixing a torn tarp above the performance platform, and hauling barrels of something that smelled like cider and regret.

Children followed them, giggling every time Ash nearly tripped or misunderstood some odd village saying.

"Watch the greening knot,"

One warned as he passed a crooked branch.

Ash blinked.

"The… what?"

She pointed. A small vine with silver-veined leaves curled delicately around the post near the stage.

"It's a luck charm,"

She said.

"Touch it the wrong way, it stings."

He looked at it.

The thing shimmered slightly, pulsing with some soft natural magic.

No spell lines.

No sigils.

Just… alive.

"Everything here is alive,"

Ash murmured.

"Well, yeah,"

She said, blinking.

"You're weird."

He didn't deny it.

By midday, the scent of baking honey bread and roasting root vegetables had coated the entire square.

The elders arrived next, wearing flower crowns with thorny pride.

Maret passed around mugs of spiced tea and declared loudly that no one was allowed to cry today.

"It's a rule. We did enough crying last winter. This one is for dancing, even if you dance like goats with arthritis."

Music started again, this time with intent.

A fiddler and a flutist took the stage.

A boy banged a drum with more enthusiasm than skill, and the square began to sway with a rhythm born more of memory than mastery.

Ash stood at the edge of it all, watching.

He wasn't the only outsider anymore.

There were others now, faces he didn't know.

Stragglers.

Survivors.

People drawn by rumors of peace in a forest that once swallowed souls.

They were quiet, like he had been.

Watchful.

Unsure.

But the villagers didn't keep them at the edge.

They pulled them in.

Handed them bread, laughter, bad jokes, and warm cider.

Children wove flower crowns and placed them on heads like offerings.

The past, it seemed, didn't matter much here, not if you were willing to be present.

"Ash!"

Arya again, now red-faced and dancing with two old women who seemed determined to outspin him.

He staggered toward Ash, grabbed his wrist, and tried to pull him into the square.

"No,"

Ash said.

"Yes,"

Arya replied.

"I don't dance."

"Then walk in circles and pretend. It's tradition."

"I have no rhythm."

"Neither does the drummer. You'll fit in."

But Ash stood firm.

People were watching now. Not with suspicion, but hope.

Expectation.

And he wasn't ready.

Arya must've seen it in his eyes, because he let go of his arm and said more gently,

"You don't have to. Just don't vanish, alright?"

Ash nodded slowly.

"I'll stay."

Arya gave him a mock salute and stumbled back into the music.

Later, as the sun dipped low and the lanterns began to flicker to life, glowing jars filled with fireflies and soft crystal shards, Ash found himself sitting beside an old man playing a slow, meandering tune on a weather-worn lute.

"You're the one with the quiet eyes,"

The man said without looking up.

"I've been called worse."

"Hmph."

The man kept plucking the same few notes.

"You've got the look of someone who's survived a hundred wars but forgot how to survive peace."

Ash didn't reply.

"Most people don't know what to do with stillness,"

The man went on.

"They think if they're not suffering, they're wasting time. But sometimes, the hardest thing is to let yourself be… ordinary."

"I don't know if I can."

"Doesn't matter if you can. Just matters if you try."

He played one more chord and stopped.

"Want to learn?"

Ash blinked.

"Learn what?"

"The lute."

The man handed it to him.

"Only has five strings now. Easier to fake talent."

Ash hesitated.

Then, slowly, he reached out and took it.

His fingers fumbled.

The sound was awful.

The old man chuckled.

"Good. Means you're starting from truth."

The stars came out in slow layers.

The moon rose fat and golden.

The music shifted from wild to wistful.

Dances turned to slow shuffles, heads resting on shoulders, laughter becoming softer.

Ash sat with the lute long after the old man fell asleep beside him, hands idle but heart still humming.

No one asked him to perform miracles.

No one begged him for prophecy or power.

They offered him soup, and a seat, and the simple mercy of being included.

And for the first time in a long, long time, Ash didn't brace against joy.

He let it happen.

Let it be real.

Let the pieces of himself he'd once shattered sit quietly in his chest, not whole, but held.

He wasn't a legend here.

Just a man.

And that, somehow, was enough.

*****

The firepit crackled low in the village square as the festival waned.

Children slept curled on their parents' laps, flower crowns slipping sideways.

Couples leaned into one another, murmuring, sharing old griefs beneath new stars.

Someone began humming a lullaby, off-tune, but warm, and the night settled soft as wool.

Ash sat cross-legged near the edge of the embers, the five-string lute still resting across his knees.

He hadn't played it since the sun dipped below the horizon, but he hadn't let go either.

His fingers traced the worn wood absentmindedly, as if memorizing its story.

"Looks like it likes you,"

Maret said, settling down beside him with a blanket draped over one arm.

She tossed it over both their shoulders without asking.

"I don't think lutes have preferences,"

Ash murmured.

"Everything chooses,"

She said simply, sipping from a mug of dark root-tea.

"You chose to stay. That lute chose not to splinter in your hands. It's practically a marriage."

He huffed a laugh.

"By that logic, I'm married to a frying pan, a mule, and the squeaky door at the apothecary."

"Sounds like a passionate life."

They sat in silence for a few minutes. Around them, the village dimmed, like a lantern being slowly lowered into sleep.

"People don't ask who I was,"

Ash said quietly, staring into the fire.

"They know better,"

Maret replied.

"Everyone here came from something that tried to ruin them. They know digging too deep means you might find something still burning."

He turned to look at her.

"And you? What burned you?"

She didn't answer immediately. Just sipped, swirled, set the mug down.

Then said, softly,

"My husband died in the Winter Blight. My daughter followed a year later. Sickness. We tried to bury her under the thawed oak. Ground was too frozen. Had to wait days."

Ash's chest tightened.

"I'm sorry."

"I'm not telling you for that,"

She said firmly.

"I was tell you because grief shouldn't be a locked box. It festers that way. Here, we open the lid a little. Let it breathe."

He nodded slowly.

"And you?"

She asked.

"What's the smallest piece of yourself you still believe in?"

That question stopped him.

Ash searched himself, sifted through the old roles, the tyrant, the student, the savior, the exile.

None of them fit anymore.

None of them were small enough.

True enough.

He finally said,

"I still believe I can learn. That not everything good has passed me by."

Maret smiled, slow and soft.

"Then that's where you begin."

*****

The days that followed were quiet, but not empty.

Ash began to help where he could.

Nothing dramatic. Just… real things.

He chopped wood with a half-sharp axe that bit his palm once a day.

He fetched water from the deep well that creaked like an old throat.

He helped the baker's boy measure yeast by hand because the scales kept sticking.

He laughed once when flour exploded in his face and didn't realize until Arya pointed it out.

"You're smiling,"

Arya said, grinning.

"Stop it. You're ruining your brooding mystique."

Ash wiped his cheek with the back of his sleeve.

"Mystique's heavy. Thought I'd try… ease."

"You wear it well,"

Arya said, tossing him an apple.

"Just don't forget, people here talk with silence. And they remember with work."

Ash bit into the apple. Crisp. Clean. Not poisoned by history.

Each night, he returned to his small rented room above the seamstress' shop.

He kept the lute by the window and played nonsense chords in the dark.

They didn't make songs.

Not yet.

But they made peace.

The villagers, for their part, began to include him in ways that mattered.

One morning, Elsin the blacksmith invited him to breakfast without ceremony.

"Because no one should face oats alone."

Another day, the children asked if he could teach them shadow puppets.

"You've got those long fingers. That's shadow master material."

Ash knelt in the dirt, showing them how to shape a wolf, a raven, a rabbit.

They giggled every time he failed to make a dragon that didn't look like a snake with asthma.

He didn't mind.

One girl, small and sharp-eyed, asked suddenly,

"Are you magic?"

He hesitated.

"Not anymore,"

He said honestly.

She considered this.

"You can still do good things, though, right?"

Ash looked at her.

"I hope so."

"Then that's better,"

She said, and ran off.

"Haa.... "

*****