* Authors : Thomas Ha and Stephen Granade * Narrators : Stephen Granade and Lucy McLoughlin * Host : Matt Dovey * Audio Producer : Eric Valdes * Discuss on Forums “Gentler Things” is a PodCastle Original “The Sigilist’s Notes on the Fell Lord’s Staff” was previously published by Baffling Magazine Content warning for the death of a parent in “Gentler Things” Rated PG Gentler Things by Thomas Ha   Of course they don’t tell you about the Prince Who Lost. Theirs are only the stories of victories. It’s true they once described the steadiness of the Prince’s hands when raising the three-bladed spetum, the potent poise and power he possessed when clearing the fields of invaders rising from oceans of the dead. Or the celestial runes inscribed along the fuller of his sword, the very same weapon wielded by his King-father, before the weight of years kept the old man to the warmth of the keep. Or of Abhainn, the Prince’s flare-steed, who carried him unfathomable distances, a blood horse gifted from the apogeic families, so conjoined with his thoughts that the two moved like a curved leaf on gusts of wind, slipping past walls and abatises and outstretched hands. But all of the stories stopped after the Ossean Caves, when the Prince sought the Last Wyrmlet and never returned, because grim tales do little to fill the purses of poets. Men preferred to hear of the Conqueror — the knight-rough who later did what the Prince could not — the one to finally slay the Wyrmlet and carry its bloodied body to the sun at the surface. Better, they thought, to speak of him than dwell on all of those men before, whose bones were ground beneath his boot-heel in his advances through the hollowed caverns. This is what they want to hear, my father always told us: the ones who win, not the ones who lose. And who could blame them? My father would laugh whenever he said this, brushing the tangled mane of our old mare, patting her gently along the throat and whispering to her before cleaning out the stable-shed, then returning to his work in the fields. And later, when seated by the hearth he’d tell us more, about the Prince Who Lost and others, those warriors and kings, while mother would separate locks of our hair to braid along our crowns. We, his daughters, would listen closely to the waves of his voice, that timbre that seemed to descend from the thatch and settle in our ears. Those ever-shifting stories of his, about faraway men and their monsters. On occasion, when we thought to ask what became of the Prince — the one who, by all accounts, should have won in the Caves but did not — father told us that there was no way of knowing with certainty. Perhaps the Prince had suffered from tragic wounds, succumbing to the venom sloughing from the underjaws of the beast. Or perhaps he had been eaten in the dark, deep down, consumed by that final scion of the ancient races, his soul suffused in the ichor of the creature’s albine scales. Or — and I can picture our little faces, enrapt, as he spoke — perhaps the Prince had been felled by something else, deep in the Caves that once had been the heart of an exhausted world, that place where he expected to find a fearsome titan and discovered, instead,