Sampo

He has no stated title. The frontmatter of this entry used to give him "elation" in the position the archive uses for a Virtue or a Sin. Ch. 15 does not award one. "Joy Bringer" is his own word for himself, and "Jester of Elation" is the chapter title. See ../lore/the-fourteen.md.

A fiddler who taught a whole town to forget what sadness meant, and could not remember the last time he felt anything himself.

What he was doing

Brightwater Hollow was drunk on him. His laughter made the ground vibrate at frequencies below hearing, made birds forget to fear hawks, made flowers bloom in impossible shades. Time moved wrong there and colours bled at the edges (ch. 15).

SMP: Dance like the world is ending tomorrow and you want to give it something beautiful to remember!

What it was actually doing

The cracks show in the second page, and they are the point.

WMN: I can't, I can't stop, why can't I stop?

MAN: My feet hurt but they won't stop moving. This is wonderful. This is horrible.

And his own eyes: "Empty windows in a house where all the lights had been left on but no one was home."

A child trips, scrapes her knee, and stops laughing for one instant. The spell breaks from there, and people walk away "moving like people walking underwater" while he plays faster and shouts at an emptying square.

The question that broke it

BLK: When did you last feel what you give them?

SMP: I feel it through them. When they're happy, I'm happy. BLK: That's not the same thing. SMP: It has to be! If it's not the same thing, then what am I? What have I been doing all these years?

The grandmother

Asked for the smallest happy thing he could remember from before the gift, he gives it: seven or eight years old, an old wooden fiddle, getting it wrong and getting frustrated, and his grandmother putting her hand over his.

"Music isn't about perfection, Sampo. It's about sharing what's in your heart."

He played it through badly and off-key, and she smiled, and he felt complete.

What makes this chapter different

Blook intervenes. Everywhere else in Act 1 he watches, names, and moves on. Here he argues, and the argument works.

When weeping starts in a nearby house and Sampo says he could fix that, Blook gives him the alternative:

BLK: Or you could just play. Not to fix her, not to change how she feels. Just to let her know she's not alone.

Sampo sets down the magical instrument and takes out his grandmother's. The melody "didn't create emotion. It simply acknowledged it." The weeping quiets, not because the sadness is gone but because it has been heard.

SMP: She's not happy now. She's still sad, maybe sadder. But she's, okay with being sad. How is that possible? BLK: Because you didn't try to fix her. You just witnessed her.

That is Blook's own function, handed to somebody else. He is the witness, and what he teaches Sampo is how to witness.

The fiddle

Sampo hands the magical one over because he is not strong enough to destroy it himself, and Blook dissolves it into motes of light.

SMP: I think maybe I've been confusing volume with value.

The naming

BLK: Let that elation drive you forward.

The ninth soul. The only one of the Fourteen so far whose chapter ends with him better than it found him.

Open questions

• Whether the gift is gone with the fiddle, or only the amplifier.
• What Brightwater Hollow is like afterwards.