things to do when ur bored: plan out the order in which your OCs die
Gideon dies first, defending the queen he loves, turning into the blade with a grim sort of determination - glad it found a home in his chest instead of Razia’s, instead of Varsha’s or the kid’s. (Varsha reads the letter twenty times before the words mean anything to her - dead, dead, dead - and thinks that it will be hard to live with only half a soul. Eris simply cries and cries and cries)
Varsha dies a few years later, a wound turned septic - not really song material, she mumbles ruefully, words slurred, eyes unfocused, and she doesn’t sound like herself at all. (i want to see the ocean again, she tells Eris, but the sea is many miles away, and the best he can do is a halting, teary rendition of The Harbourmaster’s Daughter, clutching Varsha’s worn palm between his own shaking hands)
and Eris, king of bards, outlives them both, till he has more wrinkles than stories and more stories than hair, and his voice has echoed through every throne room in every palace and castle and citadel in the world. but he is tired nowadays, so very tired, and now there are stories about him, and isn’t that odd? Varsha would have laughed, he thinks. Gideon would have been proud. (when he drifts away in his sleep, at the grand old age of 97, the bells ring in every corner of the world)