Track 16: Attack on Tarir

Track 16: Attack on Tarir sits in a shallow cocoon of tarnished brass, its surface catching light like a coin warmed by a sunlit hearth. The disc itself is a whisper of time—slightly warped, with concentric grooves that map a siege rather than a melody, each ring catching on a memory rather than a finger. The label, a hand-scrawled transcription, bears the date in a script that looks part ink, part ash, as if someone pressed a final message into a shell of copper and felt the weight of history settle on their palm. The cover image is a vignette: the silhouette of Tarir’s gate, half-sunlit, half-sandstorm, with a banner that’s been torn free and flung across a pale horizon. When you tilt the disc, you swear you can see the moment the ground beneath the city gave a rattling sigh and the drums of an unseen marching force pressed forward, brick by brick, stone by stone. Texture speaks first here. The shellac is thick and weathered, a texture that seems to resist the touch even as it yields a voice. Scratches crisscross like the scars of a wall that stood too long, and there’s a faint scent of oil and old resin, the smell of a lantern’s last breath in a long tunnel. Hold it up to the light and the grooves resemble a map, a cartographer’s fever dream of a city under siege. The tone is metallic, yes, but beneath it sits a heartbeat: a rendered memory of Tarir’s defenders, a chorus that swells and falters with the same rhythm that the attackers would have used as they crossed the outer ramparts. Lore threads through the piece as surely as the strings thread through a loom. Track 16: Attack on Tarir is widely believed to be a chronicle rather than merely a tune—a recorded commemoration of the city’s last stand, filtered through the eyes of a keeper who walked the archives afterward and etched the siege into a playable form. Some say the faint echoes of a horn call and the distant crash of collapsing masonry are more than sound: they are a record of courage, a reminder that even ruined bastions have their own songs. Players who listen closely might catch a whispered vow buried in the percussion—the promise that Tarir’s memory would not sleep, that its story would be carried forward through music as through vow. In practical terms, Track 16 is a prized collectible that opens a door in your personal storytelling as well as in your inventory. When you activate it, the music can be played in your guild hall or private quarters, painting the air with a siege-lit atmosphere that makes a tavern feel like a lantern-lit courtyard where old friends share stories of valor and loss. It’s also part of a larger collection quest chain that ties together other tracks from Tarir’s era, rewarding patient historians with a final tale that ties the city’s fate to the broader march of the world’s survivors. Market life enters the tale here as a living thread. Traders in Saddlebag Exchange speak of finding rare pressings like Track 16 tucked away in crates from long-forgotten expeditions, where a dealer once traded a memory for a coin and a name. Prices drift with rumor and demand, but the scene remains vivid: a small caravan market that’s as much about introductions and whispered histories as it is about silver and gold. A buyer might pay a handful of gold for a clean pressing, a bargain for a collector, a premium for the archivist who believes that sound can save a memory. The track’s value, then, isn’t only measured in coins but in how it keeps Tarir’s flame alive—sound by sound, memory by memory.