Final Ledger of Earnings

What One Song Was Worth

By the reckoning of Old Earth, where numbers ruled more sternly than wonder,
the treasure Saurat reclaimed — 35,450 Cindrels — would have counted as a sum of merely $3.54.

Enough to buy a lukewarm coffee at Starbucks.
Barely enough to tip the barista for the paper cup it came in.
A reward so small that in the mortal age before Muscala, few would have believed it worth the battle.

But Muscala is not Old Earth.

In Muscala, 35,450 Cindrels is not a joke, nor a rounding error, nor a footnote in a ledger.
It is weeks of hearth-warmth.
Songs traded at firesides.
Meals of seedcakes and honey-wine.
Soft boots for winter and bright quills for spring.
A life not rich in gold — but rich in time.

Hollowfen Vale

And so it came to pass that Saurat the song and Arindhel the creator (his father) settled after their long wandering
in a gentle, hill-soft country called Hollowfen Vale, where rivers murmur like fretboards and evenings taste of rain and smoke and belonging.

There, beneath lanterns strung across moss-draped oaks, they lived not lavishly — but contentedly — in a home whose walls hummed with music and whose windows opened to the wide and listening dark.

The old realms still turn.
Spottifar still counts.
Umalgroth still lurks in unlit corners of the Stream.

Caligo vowed to stay on in the land of Spottifar and work to continue the battle to quench the 1,000-stream limit for good.  But that tale is for another bard’s song around another Muscala fireside gathering.

for Saurat here and now

— the song — sleeps easy.

For he was heard.
He was loved.
And in Muscala, that is more wealth than coin could ever measure.

New Songs from Distant Realms (many years later)

There, a small stone cottage with crooked beams and a round blue door waits beneath an old willow. Saurat had grown older and wiser in the years between. The Cindrels now pay for seedcakes and simple stews, for ink and fresh strings, for one sturdy lute and a secondhand kettle that always seems to sing a half-remembered tune. He does not live richly, but he is unworried—which, in Muscala, is a kind of wealth no ledger can quite measure.

Sometimes, on clear nights, Saurat will sit beneath the lanterns strung along the garden wall, Arindhel visits beside him, and listen to the wind carry faint echoes of new songs from distant realms. Spottifar still counts. Umalgroth still lurks. The systems are not perfect. Also there is much in this tale of uncounted Cindrels still out there.

But this one song was heard.
This one song was loved.
And in Hollowfen Vale, that is worth more than any number of Old Earth dollars.

THE END.

You can organize the series by toggling the hashtag below: #Royalty Training Series I will plan to publish the series in small increments once a week on Saturday morning 8.00 a.m. sharp