Heavy With the Fruit of Prophetic Dreaming (GLOG Class: Bard)

Alpine forget-me-not via Wikipedia

There is no such thing as a new story. There are but endless retellings, ripped apart and sewn together again like ransom notes from a heap of unwanted magazines. Which is to say: your life is a faded diorama of a long-forgotten poem. Perhaps, if you try your very hardest, you can weave in an age-old theme which blossoms into a million tiny perfect flowers in the light of this dying age.

 

Class: Bard

 

Starting Equipment: Every song and poem and phrase and voice and word you've ever heard.

A: Clay; +1 reaction

B: Glass; +1 HP

C: Ink; +1 save

D: Ash; +1 reaction

 

Clay: Stare into the labyrinthine depths of the cruel golden Sun. He will shrive you of your innocence and your ignorance and your staring sparkling eyes that drink up light like an alcoholic drinks spirits. In return for your gift, he will place orbs of dull unseeing clay in your scarred sockets, scriven all over with writhing skeletal runes encoding beautiful secrets you can never read. Your new eyes will be blind as the dirt from which they were ripped, but they will whisper to you always, slender insinuations of the straw-bright threads which link all things. Masters and slaves, lovers and lovers, stories and themes, spells and mages, secret doors and hidden levers: you will know the tendons which weave the world. You need but ask. If you pluck a golden thread and sing to its thrumming with your sliver-sharp voice, all who hear must save or still in fascination as tears pour down their cheeks.

Glass: Stand before the vast, uncaring Sea and bare yourself utterly. Clothes, pretenses, personae, rhetoric, skin: you must shed them all to reveal the wet, pulsing flesh beneath, the veins coursing with carmine thoughts, the intestines convulsing with love and anguish. Your audience will know you, and they will love you. In return for your gift, they will lick you all over where your skin once was, your knees and thighs and wrists and shoulders and breasts and ears. Where the tongues, foaming and salty, have been, your new skin will grow. It will be hard and transparent and cool—strictly, it will not be glass but some strange unearthly metal—but when touched by aught other than yourself, it will scorch away fabric and flesh alive in a burst of heat. All the machinery that composes you will forever be exposed to the searching eye, breathing and pumping beneath your impenetrable skin. You will be immune to external physical harm, and any who lay hands on you will take 1d6 damage per round. If someone you loves cries out in pain and you can hear it, you can choose to take the damage instead of them.

Ink: Climb atop the highest peak of the land, whether it be stone or steel, and weep joyous tragic bittersweet tears from your blind clay eyes like handfuls of glittering gem-dust thrown into the laughing Wind. Tears are not all she demands; she will blend your courage and your bones and your teeth into a slurry and drink them down with a raw egg. You don't need them, after all, with your lovely corundum shell to keep you standing and protect you from harm. In return for your gift, your heart and glands and marrow will course anew with fresh fluid, their erstwhile charges replaced with black, indelible ink. Your blood will stain your veins, your saliva will stain your tongue, your lymph will stain your nodes, your tears will stain the corners of your eyes, your urine will stain your groin, your milk will stain your nipples. The very cushion in which floats your brain will stain every inch of your mind. What remains of you now but this sad muddy slime of organs in a perfect leaded-glass vase? All who look can see your dissolution—but your words can never be erased, for your ink is eternal. Put to paper the tale, heroic or tragic, of someone you love, and spread it. They may add +1 to any number they wish on their character sheet. You may not do this more than once per person, and each must choose a different number to affect. If you incite a crowd to action by invoking such a tale, they will not be quelled until their goal is achieved.

Ash: You have received many gifts, from Sun and Sea and Wind. This is not a gift. It is yours. You have learned—or perhaps created?—a new word, and this word is Truth. When you speak it, your perfect ink-stained song-singing tongue will burn to ash in an instant. Your effluvia will clear miraculously, no longer blighted by darkness. Your bones and teeth will grow again from naught in their proper places. Your skin will soften and warm and grow opaque. Your eyes will appear once again in your skull, untouched by unbearable brightness. In return for your gift, you may dictate one eternal fact, which will forever reign in heaven as on earth, carved into the firmament and the bedrock and all other stones that are and all other stones that will be. Your tongue will never return. Your new-written stories will vanish in time, as all mortal things do. But your old stories and your Truth; those will never die. 

Inspired by "Death Dance for a Poet" by Audre Lorde, which I cannot find a good transcription of online. It's in the collection The Black Unicorn (1978).