The Water's Edge

Long ago, three siblings had a dream. Their family had lived by the river’s edge their whole lives, watching the boats pass by as fishermen caught their daily hauls, or merchants traded between boats. These siblings longed for a chance to leave behind their lackluster lives and see the world in all its beauty.

Their names were Antero, Gabriel and Viola. Well known by the fisherman and merchants travelling by boats, the three siblings spent most of their childhoods learning the names of each and every sailor that passed along the river's waters. They became so familiar with some of these sailors that one day the sailors gifted them with a boat of their own.

Many sailors claim that they were the ones to start Antero, Gabriel and Viola’s journey by gifting them with the Water's Edge. Whether these claims hold any truth is another matter, though the siblings never care enough to actively go out of their way and dispute them.

It was a small thing - a river boat with room enough for three people and a bag or two of their belongings. Antero, Gabriel and Viola were so excited by the gift that they immediately rushed to their parents to tell them the news. Though their parents were devastated that the three siblings would be leaving, they knew that there was no stopping the three of them and gave the three siblings their blessing to leave home.

They set sail as soon as possible. But soon they realised they lacked certain basic survival skills. None of them were capable of hunting, their fishing skills were poor as their parents were leather workers, and they didn’t dare to try and eat the berries growing in the bushes along the side of the river.

Price

20 gold crowns (original), 750 platinum crowns (current)

Cargo & Passenger Capacity

3 passengers plus 2 large bags of cargo (per passenger)

Design

Overtime, Antero, Gabriel and Viola have each added their own little flair onto what would have been an ordinary wooden boat. They painted over the original colour, so now the wood is a dark red with silver painted patterns on the side depicting the trio's adventures. The name of the boat is etched onto the left side and filled using gold paint.

They needed a way to either gather food or make money. When they stopped at the next village, they desperately searched for a way to make money, but the siblings weren’t capable of completing any of the jobs offered to them and they had no way of obtaining trade goods.

Luckily, Viola struck lucky before the day was done. She spotted a few old instruments on one of the stalls, weathered from age and disuse. With the last scraps of their money, she bought three instruments: a lute, a pan flute, and a small drum.

“Viola! You’ve bought us broken instruments! What are we supposed to do with these?” Antero shouts. There’s a moment of pure rage where he wants to smack the instruments out of his sisters hands - how stupid could you be? - but decides against it. Afterall, they’re the only things of worth the three of them have left, unless they want to sell the boat.

“Everyone loves music, Antero!” Viola replies, passing him the mud stained drum. She doesn’t wait for him to take it, just continues dealing out the next instrument to Gabriel. “If we learn to play, we can be a travelling band. The people will pay us as we pass.”

“And if they don’t?”

Viola turns to her brothers, her eyes alight with determination.

“Then we might as well head back home. And I would rather die than go back to being a nobody on the water's edge.”

Learning to play the instruments got off to a rocky start. Most of their original income came from passing merchants or fishermen who paid them out of pity. Some of them even paid the siblings handsomely to stop - they were by no means prodigies in the musical arts when they started out.

Eventually, they got the hang of their instruments enough to pick up more complicated tunes. They would mimic music they had heard other minstrels play until finally they started coming up with songs of their own. The three of them would even work up enough courage to take it in turns singing.

As they travelled the rivers of Valissa, the three siblings became more and more popular. It helped that they tended to circle back around to villages, towns, or cities that were receptive of their initial performances there. As they grew in popularity, they began to form a bit of a following and whenever they left a community, the people would follow them along the river for as far as possible, hoping to hear one last note from the Water’s Edge.

It sparked something new for the trio. Gabriel - ever the perceptive brother - took note of the people following them and proposed to his siblings that they should announce their presence by playing a tune as they sailed down the rivers and neared any form of community.

Eventually, sailing the rivers of Valissa was not enough for them. They wanted to see more of the world and spread more of their joy and music to the other kingdoms as well.

For most people outside of Valissa, they had already heard rumours of the ‘minstrels of the river boat’ and were eager to see if they were as good as the rumours made them out to be. However, not everyone was so eager, particularly those in Yondar. Given the current climate, they were very suspicious about the idea of allowing a Valissan river boat to sail their waters.

Kingdom politics were not about to stop the trio though. They sailed along the rivers of Yondar anyway, with a number of death threats coming from the Yondarish citizens, but eventually their music won the people over. They were so popular on their travels through Yondar that even King Ronan sought them out in order to hear them play. He took his children - a then four year old Alexandra and eight year old Percival - to the River Aven to watch a Water’s Edge performance. Since then, Yondarish nobles have paid handsomely to watch the Water’s Edge as well, and King Ronan has invited them to play at the Avenwood Docks just west of Tiraven on several different occasions.