Cantor

You were born - or perhaps awakened - with access to the Song of Creation, the primordial current from which the Progenitors shaped the world. You don't borrow power from a god or master a discipline through study. The song simply flows through you.

Benefit: You have the following ability.

Mending Verse

You breathe a few bars of the Song of Creation, knitting flesh and mending spirit.

Magic	Maneuver
📏 Reach	🎯 One ally

Effect: The target can spend a Recovery.

Limit: Once per respite.

Drawback: Your Mending Verse is perceivable - a faint hum, a shimmer in the air, a warmth that has no source. Whenever you use it in the presence of witnesses, the Director may have a faction become aware of your nature.

On Cantors

The road was dark and the stones were uneven and he could feel every one of them in his side.

"I can walk," Aerr said.

"The doctor said you should not," Myr'tana said. She did not slow down.

"The doctor was being dramatic."

"It would be easier to knock you out."

"Be cool," he said.

She carried him the way she did most things: without complaint, without making it feel like a favor. The wound had been packed and wrapped but he could still feel the heat of it, a tight, specific heat, like a coal pressed against the inside of his ribs.

After a while, he asked about their next job. "Are you going to sing?"

"They asked me to."

"You can say no."

"I am not against it," she said.

He watched the back of her neck, the way her hair caught no light at all. "Would you sing something?"

"Why?"

"Because I almost died for you."

"I did not ask you to."

"Yet you came back for me."

A long pause. The stones kept coming under her feet.

"I think I would be sad," she said, "if you died."

Silence. Then she began to sing.

It was low, barely above breath, something that sounded like it had been old before either of them had names. He opened his eyes. He opened his mouth to say something and thought better of it.

For a moment he was aware of nothing but her: the lavender smell of her hair, the vibrations of the melody moving through her back and into his chest, the steadiness of her under him despite everything.

Then he felt something more than beauty move through the wound. Not numbing it. Warming it. Warmth spreading outward from the packed cloth like a tide, and the deep coal-heat of the injury quietly banking.

The bleeding slowed.

The Song of Creation. The Progenitors had shaped the world with it. Cantors could touch it still, born to it, carrying it the way lungs carry air. Fabled. Rare. Hunted.

Does she realize?

Is this why her people got killed?

Is this why they want her?

He let them wait.