THE WANDERING EYE

A Forgotten Realms Tavern Tale:

(The sort of thing a minstrel or bard might tell to families in a tavern, early of evenings)

THE WANDERING EYE

Far away and long ago, there was a small town that stood on a busy trade-road in the Border Kingdoms called Drundown. You will seek it in vain on even the best maps today, but back then it was full of folk who considered themselves important because wagons groaned past their doors all day heaped high with exotic things from far places.

One of them was a red-faced, greedy, rather pushy merchant named Haligo Mree, who saw himself as a baron in red velvet some day. The baron of some much larger, grander place than Drundown. All he needed was seven times as much coin as he had, and a tall castle, and tall handsome sons, and RESPECTABILITY. Haligo was increasingly fat, and had just built himself a big new warehouse, so he was on his way to a baron’s coronet.

He even had heavy gold rings on some of his fingers, a wife who was still beautiful but getting plump and looking increasingly tired, and a son—just one—who was neither tall nor handsome, but was instead a bumbler and a dreamer, and went off alone into the forest FAR too often.

Yet Haligo could SEE that shining baronial coronet, and for the most part, was well pleased.

Dawned there a day when Haligo fell angrier than usual at his bumbling son, who was named Dantar and who had a secret: he had the Gift. Not just the ability to feel and smell and so presumably to wield arcane magics, if properly trained, but a wild talent that bubbled up within him unbidden at times, to leak forth.

Violently and spectacularly, whenever he knew strong rage or grief, so Dantar son of Haligo learned young to withdraw, to slip away, to look out over the trees at the distant mountains and open his heart and yearn, to find calm. Or forlorn melancholy, or nothing much at all.

So his father judged him a do-nothing, too gentle dreamer, or perhaps someone who slipped away to try to seduce...

**Please find the full script attached in .docx and .txt formats