🎭 Arion – Eddga

Caravans burned beyond Payon, and pawprints smoldered with ember ash. When the villagers asked for a knight, a laughing wanderer answered—Arion Nightchord, a Clown whose songs bend fate as neatly as bowstrings.

Chapter I — The Tiger King’s Roar

The bamboo parted with a hot gust and the forest stepped aside. Eddga landed like a falling anvil, heat shimmering from his mane. A ring of flame burst outward—Magnum Break—and the nearest stalks turned to cinders.

Arion chuckled, plucked a bright chord, and pulled the world a heartbeat faster with Assassin Cross of Sunset. Fingers blurred; notes spilled like mercury as he set Poem of Bragi to quicken his cast. The bow came up; strings and string aligned. Arrow Vulcan detonated from the melody—impact flashes bit the Tiger King’s shoulder and sent embers spiraling into the underbrush.

With a rumble Eddga drove forward, layered with Provoke and a feral AGI Up. Packs answered the roar—Nine Tails and Yoyos broke from shadow. Arion snapped a cold, bell-bright chord and the air crystalized: Frost Joker. Mobs skidded, frost-rimed, and shattered under a sweeping Musical Strike. Still the Tiger King pressed, paws gouging furrows, flame licking his whiskers like banners in a storm.

Chapter II — The River Masque

Retreat carried Arion to a stone ford where water braided quietly between mossy boulders. There, a dancer waited as if the river had decided to wear a girl’s shape. Bangles chimed when she moved. “This way,” she said, stepping across slick stone as if she laid the path herself. “I’m Mira.”

She turned, and the current tugged at Eddga’s charge, slowing him without touching him—some trick of rhythm and water that answered her ankles. Arion layered Encore to repeat Frost Joker, catching a second wave of adds. He stitched a soft Apple of Idun into his breath; warmth pooled in aching ribs and steadied his laughter.

They danced the Tiger King along the river’s curve. At the ford’s center, Arion fired a staccato trio of Arrow Vulcan shots. Eddga staggered—and in the riverlight, Mira’s reflection flickered with tails, too many to count, curling through the water like ink. Her smile sharpened as if cut with a knife. “Keep him from the forest’s heart, minstrel,” she murmured, and the current obeyed her as she vanished into a tuft of fox-blue flame beneath the reeds.

Chapter III — The Rune Beneath the Fur

Alone again with the thunder of Eddga’s breath, Arion drew a card and let fate turn itself. The Tarot Card of Fate spun in his palm and landed cold—The Hanged Man. For a blink the world inverted. Beneath Eddga’s mane, a scar glowed with the shape of a brand—lines that pulsed to the beat of someone else’s drum.

He shifted songs. Bragi held the tempo steady while he worked the battlefield like a stage: Encore into Frost Joker to box the adds; a rolling sidestep under a claw; Arrow Vulcan chained on downbeats to bash open space; a flick of Musical Strike to keep the Tiger King’s focus on him rather than the villages beyond.

With each exchange the pattern clarified. The brand didn’t flare at pain; it flared at relic scent. The caravans that burned? Their tarps hid crates slick with oil and runed rivets—the poachers’ work. Eddga’s fires were warning pyres, the roars a siren for the forest spirits who were too slow to keep up. The Tiger King wasn’t the doom of the Payon wilds; he was its exhausted warden.

Finale — Tiger’s Anthem

Arion let the last card fall—The Star, lacquer bright with hope. He threaded the symbol into his bowstring; the line hummed like a silver reed. “One more,” he told the night, and sang a melody his grandmother swore cured storms. The final Arrow Vulcan wasn’t a spear so much as a chord driven into a lock. It struck the brand and the rune fractured, foxfire shrieking out like breath from a punctured bellows before racing for the reeds where Mira had gone.

Heat peeled off the Tiger King in sheets. He lowered his head until flame only sighed at the tips of his mane. Arion, still breathing Apple of Idun, set his instrument against his chest and offered a small bow. Eddga’s shadow stretched long across the stones and came to rest beside the minstrel like a second spine.

At dawn the road was quiet. The poachers had slipped away in the dark, their sigils cold. Travelers now tell of a laughing chord that sometimes drifts through the bamboo, and a low rumble that answers it from the underbrush—the jest and the warden, keeping time for Payon.