15 Cylus 716
It was cold, and dark. It was to be expected of course, given that it was still Cylus. Seira supposed that she should be used to it by now. This was the twelfth Cylus she had lived through, after all. But she still hated the dark season. She hated the cold with a passion. Everything felt so much worse when she was miserably cold.
The dark was bad for business, too. People tended to rush around about their business, not wanting to endure the cold longer than they had to. Few were willing to take the time to stop and listen to a bard sing, or watch a street performer put on a show. Fewer still were in a good enough mood to part with a few coins for a tip even if they did stop.
Seira shoved those thoughts to the back of her mind, and tried to focus on her lesson. They were studying poetry. One of her classmates was reading a verse in the poem the class was studying. Seira hadn't been paying enough attention to the lesson to know what part of the poem they were discussing. She had read the assignment, of course, but she wasn't familiar enough with it to identify the location of the verse within the poem based on a few lines. What she did notice was the pleasant sound of the poem. Some of the words rhymed, but not all of them. It didn't sound forced the way some poems did when the last word of each line had to rhyme with something.
After a while, Seira's thoughts began to drift, lulled by the words of the poem. Poems were meant to tell stories. In that, they were like songs. Songs told stories, too. The difference being that a song was put to music and sung while a poem followed its own rules, and was meant to be read out loud. It could even be said that a song was a poem put to music.
