Every year Wynk entered Fugue Fest, and every year ended the same way: Sorry Wynk. Better luck next year. Two centuries of schooling in Northwood University for Bards, endless performances for fops and dandies, Gold knows how many hours spent perfecting his craft and the best he ever got was a participation award. They laughed at him when he walked up to the registration booth. He expected it. They’d never seen anything like him from here to the Land of Nod, but after today, they’d never forget.
Wynk had his lute on his workstation refining it yet again for a less than marginal improvement of his sound when he discovered his true calling. It was how he was trained. His lead instructor, Schneebly, drilled it into his head. Never stop tinkering. Never stop chasing perfection. It’s the only way to be a better musician. He scrolled through his seeing glass for a technique that might help him gain any advantage when the distorted fuzz of a power chord made him blink. Loud. Angry. Raw.
The sounds were from another world. One he wasn’t familiar with. There was no magic there, at least not that he recognized. No monsters or fey. No blood pacts of mystic circles. But somehow the people figured out how to harness the power of their world to make horseless carriages and devices that washed their clothes. They also discovered ways to make different sounds. Music that as far as Wynk understood wasn’t possible. The more he heard the more he wanted to hear. Their clothes and mannerisms were in keeping with the themes of what they played. He listened to everything. And he loved it all. Art wasn’t removed from feeling there. It was deep and holistic and damned if it didn’t look fun.
He cast a few alteration spells on his lute to mimic the sound. And he added some strings. It took several tries, but Wynk was finally able to approximate the grungy noise that came from what the other world called a guitar. His heart leapt into his neck as he abandoned his delicate training for unique irreverence from the strange people of another world. Up to then, his career, his life, was about doing what everyone else did. Playing the same songs. Compulsory tunes that audiences expected. The differences between the players were so minute that only the most scholarly of minstrels would notice. When he heard the sounds and saw the skalds from a far-off place, Wynk knew he was ready to cause a stir.
He smoothed his dorsal fin of green hair (they called it a mohawk in the other place) and slammed his registration papers on the counter. “Oi.” He said with the accent of the bards he watched. He spent days practicing their words and mannerisms until natural. “Ain’t got all day, bruv.”
The pixie behind the counter fluttered over picked up the parchment and did a literal double take. “Are um…” the pixie hovered about nervously. “Are you sure you’re in the right place?” He asked.
“Come off it, geezer. Make your mark and let’s go, innit?”
The pixie looked Wynk up and down shrugged and stamped the approval. “It’s not a costume contest.” He muttered, eyeing the safety pins stuck through his ears and the heavy combat boots.
The queue of creatures waiting to complete their own registration for competition laughed at the pixie’s dig. A group of elves holding Feywood pan flutes inlayed with silver ivy looked down their pointed noses at him as Wynk walked by. “What does the A with the circle around on your jacket stand for?” One said in her holier than everyone voice. “Aberrant?” And her troupe laughed the laugh of the privileged.
“No.” Wynk said turning his head and speaking out of the side of his neck. “Anarchy.” Their laugh dwindled to uncomfortable chuckles as they realized he wasn’t joking.
He pushed past his peers backstage to await his turn. Every one of them gave off airs of cultured affluence. They represented the most educated performers in the land, yet they lacked the thing that Wynk didn’t know he was looking for until he found it: uniqueness. They were conformists. Going along with what they were convinced was the way things were done. In the other world, Wynk’s people, his new people, called them Posers. He liked it. They were posing as artists. It took him more than three hundred years, but he figured out that real artists aren’t afraid to take a chance. Three hundred years of being just like everyone else only to find out that perfection wasn’t the goal. Perfection was the enemy. Originality. Risk. Insolence in the face of the status quo. Those were the qualities he sought now. It would kill him or make him, just like it did to the people of the other world.
One by one the players went on and off the stage performing the same songs as they’d done for a millennium. Wynk suspected that if he went back in time and listened to the bards of old, they’d sound the same as the ones today. That’s how far his fellow artists were willing to go: as far as doing the same thing because they were too scared to fail doing something different.
A satyr string quartet came off the stage after playing The Dirge of the Dragon (it was the fifth time it had been played so far), saw Wynk, and lifted their noses as if something smelled bad. They gave him a look like “Top that!” and Wynk thought to himself that they set the bar too low to be a challenge. The audience showed their marginal appreciation with obligatory and emotionless applause.
“Bollocks.” Wynk said at the spectacle.
The Orpheus Memorial Theater was packed with creatures who could afford to be there. People who weren’t there for the music itself. They were there to be seen as the enlightened few. They’d come from all five kingdoms. Only the citizens from The Outlands weren’t invited. Apparently, they didn’t know how to enjoy “real” music. Elves, centaurs, all manner of fairy-folk and sentient woodland beast made up the crowd. For them music was like a server in a tavern. Part of the atmosphere. When it does its job right, no one even knows it’s there.
The Outlands was the place where the undesirable fey lived. Respectable fey never ventured there. Wynk never had, that’s for sure. He was always told it was a savage bestial land without laws. A place where the strong literally ate the weak. A land where music and art didn’t exist, at least not in a form that anyone he knew would recognize.
A Brownie walked to the front of the stage. He was dressed in a jacket and shirt with so many multicolored ruffles shooting from his collar and wrists, he looked like he was half flower. A megaphone was attached to his shoulders as he read from a scroll.
“Lords. Ladies. Thanes, Dukes, Baronesses and Archfey. Please welcome our next performer,” He paused and cleared his throat while glancing to the side of the stage and seeing Wynk ready to come on. “Ahem…yes. Please welcome…Wynk Pebblekey.”
The crowd murmured to each other, hardly acknowledging they were even addressed. Wynk swallowed and wiped his hands on his jacket. He said a few magic words over his lute, and a prayer to Gold that he was doing the right thing, but in his heart, right or wrong, he was doing it. This was his final shot. If it didn’t work, he vowed, he was done. Forever.
He took the stage and the casual mutter from the audience died. A lone audible gasp from a young sprite sitting close to the front split the silence. Wynk adjusted his lute and plucked it making sure it was tuned, but not too much. He heard one of the greatest musicians from the other world say, “Only cowboys stay in tune anyway.” Wynk didn’t know what a cowboy was, but he knew he wasn’t one.
The wrought iron chandelier, complete with magical candles, illuminated the entire hall. Wynk felt his bile rise at the sight of thousands of spectators. It was the same amount as last year and the years before. How is it he only just noticed the overwhelming number? Because now, he mused to himself, it mattered.
Without thinking, lest he contemplate himself into inaction, he strummed a single chord. It was like a shockwave from an explosion over the audience. They yelled in unison a sharp scream of surprise. As the volume made them lean back and blink in near pain.
“Are you ready to rock!” Wynk asked. And strummed again. A dryad fainted into the arms of an anthropomorphic frog. A group of boggins made for the exit. The onlookers were speaking to each other wondering if this was a joke, but they couldn’t hear anything over the roar of Wynk’s amplified instrument.
He started with a series of simple powerful chords driving, grinding, abrasive sounds that approximated what the audience knew to be a song, but having no resemblance beyond that. After his intro he started the lyrics:
In the grove where fairies play,
We danced the waltz, but gone astray
No more arias or songs divine.
Tear the sheet music. Cross the line.
The look of horror on the gathered face of the audience was like standing on the edge of a knife. His schooling, his entire reason for existence abandoned, and the sense of satisfaction he got seeing all the sellouts clutch lace at his invading sounds made him want to play louder and faster and meaner. So, he did.
Dance on maestros’ graves of old,
Their lives were stiff and lame and cold
Sonatas inside magic runes?
Give me a demon screeching tune!
Smash the pipes and break the strings,
No more soft and pleasant things.
Betray the past and take a chunk,
Be the new: Rebel Punk!
Wynk played and bellowed his message at the top of his lungs over and over “Rebel Punk! Rebel Punk!”, his lifetime of practice and schooling told him it wasn’t singing. His heart told him to never stop. He felt the pain in his fingers pressing the strings harder than he ever had, forcing his beautifully crafted instrument to a place it had never been. And he felt it respond like it wanted to go further.
Wynk looked over the crowd and saw most of them covering their ears. those that weren’t had their hands cupped around their mouths yelling “BOOOO!” Various fairies flitted to the windows and banged on the glass to be freed from the auditory torture. A nelwyn wizard cast a spell erecting a bubble around himself as protection against the noise infiltrating the hall, but even he still had his fingers stuck in his pointed ears.
Wynk felt something wet and solid hit him in the chest. He didn’t stop playing but he saw a splattered tomato slough off his body and land on his boots.
Leave your traditionality,
Live your life, wild and free.
If you thought my music stunk,
Weel, Fuck you too. I’m Rebel Punk.
At that, the vegetables flew at will along with the most horrible epithets Wynk was ever subject to with a few rocks and metal tankards thrown in. He dipped and dodged the missiles while still trying as hard as he could to play until the stage went totally silent. Wynk tried to scream out the last verse but there was nothing. He strummed his lute only to hear eerie emptiness.
Wynk backed away from the crowd. Some were advancing onto the stage. Some were cheering in the silence. And some were still shouting and throwing food that landed on the floor in quiet plops. He spotted the MC brownie gesturing an incantation. Wynk was adept enough with magic to know a muting spell when he saw one. He suspected it would come. Though he thought it might come sooner.
A large lump of nearly formless clay stomped onto the stage and picked Wynk up escorting him off. The crowd erupted in approval. Wynk imagined it would have been very loud if not for the brownie’s spell, but still not as loud as his music. He smirked, content with that knowledge.
He was dropped at the rear door of the concert hall. He could hear the MC apologizing to the crowd for the “horrifying noise from our most recent participant.” The pixie organizer fluttered up to him flanked by three more semi man shaped lumps of earth.
The tirade that issued from his tiny lips was like music to Wynk’s ears confirming that the crowd and everyone else there was thoroughly engaged. “Who the Gold do you think you are disrupting our festival? I’ll see that you’ll never play another note the rest of your miserable life. What does Fuck mean? I’m writing to the guild and requesting your membership be revoked! Get out! And never come back!”
With that, one clay creature opened the rear door, and the rest threw Wynk out. He landed hard on a pile trash in the alley. “You don’t deserve that instrument!” The pixie yelled in his tiny voice one last time as Wynk’s modified lute came flying and hit him on the head with a melodic bonk.
The back door slammed, and Wynk was alone. He stood up and brushed himself off as best he could. His white t-shirt was stained to the point there would be no cleaning it. There was a new tear in his pants. He reached up and touched his head where the lute hit him, and his hand came away wet red. The worst day of his life as a classical upstanding musician. For a punk rocker, it was a normal day. The Sex Pistols would be proud.
He looked around the alley. There was nothing with him but garbage and solitude. That’s what he’d earned from his lifelong dream to touch people with his music.
He found a dingy rag from the trash heap he fell on and started cleaning his lute. It was older than him. His grandmother gave it to him when he enrolled in Northwood. “It’s a demanding place.” She told him. “You need an instrument that can handle it.”
He remembered the day like it just happened, and he ran his fingers over the fretboard feeling it as familiar to him as his own skin. It was worth a fortune. He could sell it and live off the money for years. The idea made him sick to his stomach. Wynk felt a tear seep from his eye. He sighed and plucked a little song he’d known since he was a child. It wasn’t a classical song or one of the hard charging punk tunes from the other world. It was just a popular gnome lullaby. He didn’t sing. Just the notes. A farewell to his life as a bard. If it was to be his last song, he wanted to hear his lute play it without the accompaniment of lyrics.
He stared at the bane and liberation of his life. The instrument that trapped and freed him all at the same time. Maybe someone would come along and pick it up if he left it atop the pile of garbage. Maybe it would end up as firewood for a group of homeless monsters. Maybe he should smash it right now and end all the wondering.
A failure. That’s what he’d been. And he tried. He tried so hard, but it wasn’t meant to be. He took a deep breath and raised it over his head wiping his eyes.
“Hey! Don’t smash that.” A growly voice said from under another pile of garbage several yards away. Wynk stepped back and held his guitar like a sword. In the back of his head, he remembered an image of another one of his favorite players named Richards swinging his own guitar like a club at someone that rushed the stage.
From under the pile of trash crawled a trio of goblins. That was strange enough. Outland residents weren’t welcome in the city. They were tolerated when they had to get supplies or come for trading, but they weren’t treated like part of the kingdom. That’s probably why they were hanging out in a dirty alley. Couldn’t get service at an inn.
“How ‘bout if I smash it on your nuts!?” Wynk said holding the guitar high so he could reach where he wanted. He was surprised to hear he hadn’t abandoned his punk affect.
They towered above Wynk and looked down on him over their wide flat noses. “Did you just perform?” One of them asked. There was a hole where his right eye should have been. He smiled showing rows of jagged yellow teeth.
“So? What of it?”
“Was that you?” Another goblin said scratching his ear. It looked like part of it was bitten off. “Rebel Punk? Are you him?”
“That has got to be one of the craziest performances I’ve ever heard!” The third said smiling. Drool dripped off his lips and he ran his forked tongue around the edge of his mouth making a sucking sound.
“Yeah.” His friend with the jagged ear said. “I don’t know what Fuck means, but I liked it. Where did you learn to play like that?”
One-eye added. “When’s your next gig? They would love you in The Outlands.” He snapped his green scaly fingers. “You know what? My sister is throwing a party tonight to celebrate killing her husband. You should come and perform!”
“We’d pay you.” The drooling goblin said jangling a purse of coins. Wynk agreed and left with the trio for the Outlands.
There were about a hundred people, goblins, at the party. He played all the hits from his favorite other dimensional bands: The Clash, Fear, Black Flag, The Dead Kennedys, and The Ramones. And he played the song that made him get kicked out of Fugue Fest. The goblins danced and cheered and hoisted him up on their shoulders “Rebel Punk. Rebel Punk.” They chanted.
An ogre walking by the goblin party asked the host who was making such wonderful and relatable music. He introduced himself to Wynk and asked him to play another gig, paid of course. It went like that for weeks. Another horrible beast heard him and offered a job. Rebel Punk became a minor celebrity among the monsters of The Outland. Wynk’s connection with his formal training was all but forgotten.
***
The opening acts were done, and the crowd roared. “You ready?” Wynk’s manager said. He was a greasy little weasel of a redcap, but he was ruthless. Wynk appreciated that. “You’ve never done a show this big.”
“Are they ready, you mean?” Wynk said and ran his hand over his mohawk. His manager smirked.
“All you foul disgusting beasts out there. The time has come.” The MC, a naked minotaur said to the collection of at least one hundred thousand ghouls, ghasts, demons, and every other unmentionable creature in The Outlands. A roar so vicious rose in made the stage quake. “Here he is! Denizens of the dark, I give you…Rebel Punk!” His magically exaggerated voice boomed over the crowd as Wynk walked out.
He made a face of pure defiance as he raised his hand above his head, guitar pick in hand. He didn’t wait for the crowd to die down, riding the wave of their energy. “Are you ready to rock?” He screamed and strummed a chord. The crowd screamed, “Yes!” And chanted his name “Rebel Punk! Rebel Punk!”