The Teller

The year is 401 BC, a new art form is burgeoning, what we now call La Tene, or Celtic, spreading north from the alpine regions. Three years earlier Athens had finally been defeated by Sparta and her allies; Rome is but a fledgling city state; the Etruscan confederation is in decline; hordes of Gallic warriors are rampaging south over the Alps and through all this, two from the far northern Tin Islands, blithely wander. It is a tale related by a contemporary storyteller, thankfully unconstrained by words and phrases that had been off limits to the Teller when entertaining his Iron Age audience. Notwithstanding, the style of delivery remains concise, avoiding hyperbole and melodrama, with the narrator hoping, as the Teller had done, to paint pictures in people's minds. The dialogue is again fairly contemporary, minus anything too modern, such as current phrases, slang, or anything pandering to recent trends. Underlying all, is the tension felt by the Teller, bound by his pact with the all-powerful spirit world, those who had bestowed the gift to entertain by his words, on condition he never immersed himself in their world. To actually alter the course of a life, he felt certain, would at the very least, bring loss of the ability he'd been granted and at worst, he could not even begin to imagine the scale of retribution exacted. Breaking that pact, invited tragedy, but when would it strike? The not knowing was worse than the certainty it would.