Bozmaroff stared at the pile of paper for the better part of the day. He walked around the room he now called a home, thinking about all the stories he had told about princess and princesses held hostage at foreign courts. All the jokes about being forcefully fed grapes in a well-furnished castle bedroom now didn’t seem so funny. There was no hero to come and save him.

He was a prisoner, no way around that. But his sentence didn’t depend on his past wrongdoings but on how well he could drag the quill across the pages. They had left him plenty of blank paper and a lifetime supply of ink. He couldn’t imagine that any of the guards have written even a word in their lives, after seeing how much they thought he’d need.

“They’re still books, stories, albeit unnamed ones” - Bozmaroff said to himself - “Imagine you’re reading a book and you have to retell it”

His hand reached out to touch the stack, sheets crumpled, edges bent, ink stretching from end to end, even in the margins. The czar had a lot to say. The bard’s hand trembled as if the book would open like a beast’s jaws and swallow him whole.

“There’s no way I can do this…” - he started

“I write stories… not biographies!” - he yelled but his voice quickly sank in the pillow covered furniture.

Had the czar known Bozmaroff better, he never would’ve picked him to immortalize his story. For once, the bard didn’t remember the last time he finished writing a new tale. Fear quickened his heartbeat, and made his hands sweaty, for the only way to get out of this room was to write one - from beginning to end.

And for the last few years, this seemed impossible.

“Alright, here we go…” - Bozmaroff encouraged himself.

He snatched the top book, hoping they were at least arrange in some order, and opened it wide, the threads holding the pages together screamed against his ruthlessness.

“There has to be some order in them. I’ll take some of this, some of that, sprinkle some of me, and it’s done!”

But he was out of luck. The scruffy old journals had no dates, no titles, and at times, no coherence. The bard send the journal flying with a yell. Ill-tied pages flew in the air before the book hit a wall and disappeared behind a couch.

“I don’t want to sift through this garbage!” - he yelled as tears of anger pressed his eyes from the inside.

Any other bard in the capital would’ve seen this as the ultimate honor. Only he saw it for what it was - milking his creativity. But was there even a drop of it left? Touring the nobles left him little hope that his works would ever get the appreciation he thought they deserved. What was another work in the pile of stories thrown in the bin?

“I’m a creator, a wordsmith, a master of the quill…” - he cried.

But above all that, he was a man who loved his freedom, and sometimes even the quill seemed like a chain. If he was so devoted to the craft why wasn’t he working on a new tale? Why wasn’t he gathering inspiration, talking to people to learn a small town’s legend? Instead, he was whoring and drinking himself asleep every night, resting on his laurels. But soldiers who don’t volunteer get drafted, and writers who stay idle write memoirs.

He dug out the book he threw earlier, patted the dust off, and started reading.