My Music Journal 2025: October 22, 2025

 

Tuesday, October 21, 2025

Time: 6:05 PM
Song:  Windy
Artist: The Association
Mode of Consumption: Listening to The Association “Live” album

Note: Last night at Write On, we were provided with a Word Collage to inspire us to write something. Here is what I came up with. Below also is the collage.

The Exile

The three judges refused to hide their bias. The jury comprised of six elders probably cast their stones before Bela spoke even a word in his defense. The mere illusion of fairness and justice was nonexistent.

Still, he spoke, his breath stupidly wasted.

“Shear conspiracy!” he proclaimed.

“An unwillingness to see the approaching dangers!” he warned.

“Tiresome reliance on antiquated fantasies!” he finished.

None of it won sympathy from this lot. Any ears that might have bent to his cause were barred from the hearing, and even if they had been allowed in the gallery, any outward display of unity would have exposed the underground resistance, ruining years of patient planning and social jockeying.

Bela was screwed.

And so it was, on the third turn of the summer moon of his twentieth year, Bela Alum was cast to the wilderness by the colony of his father and his father’s father. Given nothing but two skins of water, a spear and rations that might last him a week.

**

His escort to the perimeter was comprised of two nameless guards, bulging men adorned with bronze breastplates and feathered helms. Leading them was Snick Rork, the court’s chief bailiff, a round man with thick calves below his burgundy robe. Bela’s hands were bound before him, behind a servant carried the meager possessions he would take into the wilderness.

“You know, my boy, the most dangerous muscle is the jaw,” Snick Rork croaked as they neared the perimeter. “Most other crimes, they might have just taken a finger or a toe, or maybe just put you on mine duty for a month, but if the old jaw weakens and the tongue gets running like yours, they can’t bear to have you around anymore.”

“I seem to remember the colony’s tablets saying something about man’s freedom starts with his tongue.” Bela said, keeping his jaw very tight as he said it. He’d not let a sniveling toad like Snick Rork see his fear.

“Aye, it does, my boy, but that’s why the jaw better be strong to keep it from getting loose.”

Ahead the thirty-foot stone exterior walls of the colony loomed. Beyond that, the wilderness. That’s all it was known as, and the tales of what lay beyond were as wild and unbelievable as the fantasies the elders told of how the colony arrived to this world on flying ships, exiles as it were, from whatever home they had once known.

“Why don’t they just execute me then?” Bela asked.

“To kill is against the code of the colony’s tablets,” Snick said, “you know that as well as I do. Not even the highest judge can shed the blood of the vilest man.”

“So, they exile me, and I die alone out there, probably soon,” Bela said. 

Snick didn’t hide his grin as he turned before the wall. They were in its shadow now; a stone staircase scaled the side to the top.

“Have you ever been to the top of the wall?” Snick asked.

Bela looked straight up.