#breandan as storyteller was never a thing I'd planned

[dragons-ire]

The Two Brothers

(as told at and for Bel Canto Winery - @wine-xiv)

Before this place was the winery it is today - before it was an opera house, even - it was just a bare expanse of tidepools and sandbar. A little higher up, maybe a few trees and grasses to keep the entire island from washing out with the tide. 

Until one day, a pair of brothers rowed over from the mainland. The eldest was called Merlgeiss, and his younger brother: Keltanth.

They'd heard there was a fortune, you see, buried somewhere on the dunes. And so they'd brought supplies and shovels, and a dream they'd packed for themselves in the bottom of their rucksacks, of becoming wealthy men.

So when they hit ground, they made camp, and got up at first light with their shovels to dig. And dig they did, from sunrise to sunset. For sennights at a time, until their hands were cracked and blistered and their backs stiff and stooped.  And at night, they ate hardtack and the freshwater they caught with the rain, and in the morning they began again.

They never found the pirate's buried hoard that had brought them there. Not in gold and jewels, at least. But they dug in the earth, and they turned over the sand all through the winter until the loam underneath began to show. 

And in the spring, they readied their shovels again, only to stop as they saw something winding through the soil that wasn't seagrass or the roots of a tree. 

Just a wild La Noscean grape vine, struggling for the sun. The seeds washed in by the sea, or carried there by some bird.

They knew then that, with some work, they'd found something just as good as gold.

It was several more long seasons of toiling before anything came of it. One single vine that turned into two, and three, and at last rows of them, green and purple in the sunlight. The first harvest, pressed and crushed and storedin the first barrel that's said to have been fashioned from the planks of the rowboat that had first carried them to the shore.

And when they decanted that first bottle, they knew that this had to be the treasure they had come seeking.

In the years before the Calamity, the two brothers' vintages were widely known up and down the coast. Pirate lords and rich merchants alike paid well to have bottles in their larders. The famous culinarians in the city competed to invent dishes to pair with them. And the brothers' made enough fortune that they could bring in workers to till the fields, and builders to build casks as well as buildings to house everyone. Before long, they had more money than they could count by themselves.

But as their fortune and fame grew, it seemed to eat away at the simple camaraderie that had brought them here in the first place. That which had seen them through all those days and nights of hardship eroded just as a seacoast will if it has nothing planted in it to keep it fast.

The workers would say, later, how they'd heard the pair quarreling late at night. Their raised voices constantly bickering about something - about the money, the business and what to do with it. The most anyone could report was that they disagreed about the place's future. One of them wanted to sell it and settle to an easy life. The other thought they were only at the beginning of what they could gain.

Unfortunately, the argument never resolved itself. One morning, the workers who rose early found the body of the eldest brother, Merlgeiss, lying on the sand, half-carried out by the tide. His body bore the marks of a violent struggle. The crabs and the gulls had already started to move in.

Not a day later, the Yellowjackets picked up Kelthanth, the younger brother, wearing his elder brother's jacket, trying to book passage out of Wineport with nothing but gil in his luggage. Whatever happened, he refused to say, but his guilt was plain to anyone looking. He went to the hangman without breathing a word as to why.

It wasn't so long after that that the Calamity washed the entire place out to sea. The rich earth was re-settled in the years afterwards. An opera house, and then, by some grand coincidence, another vineyard broke ground.

But it's said still that Merlgeiss' spirit is restless still, and wanders up and down the coast and in through the grapevines. And sometimes, even into the house itself, as if ceaselessly searching for that treasure he'd had and lost. Or at the very least, a glass of wine for his parched soul.

So: if you happen to wander through the winery late at night and find something out of place - let’s say a wine glass that someone seems to have forgotten. The staff seem to have neglected to pick it up. 

You should leave it alone. 

The guest will be by for it in his own time.