The domain of the Story Keepers is a vast one, and often the tales overlap into each other. In particular there is one story that has been told many times over, and sometimes it is recognisable in more places than you might expect.
It is the story of a girl, a woman. An archer, a warrior. Someone born from humble beginnings (though even this is contested - sometimes she is born noble and falls to poverty, having to fight her way back out again) who meets a Prince, a Lord, a Captain - the stories are unclear, and vary considerably - who sails the stars. And the woman is given a kingdom.
It always starts in the darkness. With the girl fighting for survival in a place, whether it be in a city or a village, that does not take kindly to outsiders. Violence is the song they sing, but she takes no pleasure in it.
(Again, this varies: Sometimes she takes pleasure in the bow and arrow, the neatness of its flight, the distances it soars. But sometimes she sees only the blood on snow, the lives she has taken, and she hates it.)
The girl always has a mother, but the mother is always dead by the time the story commences. By sickness usually, but it can be anything. Sometimes the mother is kind and wise and lovely; sometimes she is the latter, but also cruel and hard and uncaring. It does not matter, in the context of the whole.
The girl always has a father, one with a rather plebeian pastime. Sometimes the father once held a greater position, was once a prince among his trade, before circumstances led to his taken up a more common job. Sometimes the father is a baker, sometimes a woodcarver, and sometimes he loves it.
The girl always has a sister, or sometimes sisters, who she loves with everything she is. Whatever names they bear - Nesta, Delara, Elain - they are there, and they are a large part of the reason she gets up every day and continues with her violent life. To protect her own.
Sometimes they scorn her efforts, or ignore them, or take them for granted. Sometimes, despite the love they share, there is a deep-seated bitterness between the girl and her family. Sometimes they are cruel to the woman and her lord.
Sometimes they welcome her efforts, encourage them, appreciate them for all that they are all but futile. Sometimes, despite the difficulty of the situation, despite the hatred they both face for being in a city that despises them, they are a team. They are one. Sometimes they are accepting to the woman and her prince.
Wolves are a common motif in the story. Sometimes the woman kills a wolf; sometimes the woman meets a shifter who has become a wolf. Sometimes the woman is a wolf, but doesn't see it until she looks at her own reflection, and both hates and loves it.
Another motif is often roses. Sometimes it's in the name - named after the flowers of a court bedecked in Spring to which the woman was dragged kicking and screaming. Sometimes it is a nickname for the woman herself, gifted by the mother: where will the wind take you, little rose?
That's another thing: names.
Sometimes she is called Wind-Seeker.
Sometimes she is called Cursebreaker.
The woman always leaves home - or her closest approximation of home - for adventure. Sometimes she is forced by an ancient debt older than she, other times she accompanies someone with whom she is intimately familiar. Sometimes she returns to the country from where she hails, other times it is an entirely new and dangerous experience.
He, too, is a constant, though his role is not. The woman is always in a sexual relationship with him to begin with, but they are always more friends than lovers. Sometimes he is of the same rank as her, and is left behind when she leaves home. Other times it is his story as much as it is hers, and she is shunted aside by the larger narrative to focus on him.
It is always her choice to leave him behind. He always finds love in another, one he marries and lives happily with.
Sometimes there is a bit in between, and sometimes the impatient or disapproving Story Keeper chooses to cut it out. Because what happens next is the true narrative part of the tale: She joins the peoples of the wind and skies.
She flies off with her prince, her lord, her captain, sometimes by the grace of another, a majestic beast the prince loves, and other times by the merit of his own wings. And she finds a land - a world - in the mountains, and she has never felt so accepted, so loved.
Sometimes, she denies that the land of her dreams is not - that she is not comfortable there, does not belong. Sometimes, she says things like Velaris is not my home.
But sometimes, when she walks around the aerie and talks about a father from Balruhn and a mother from Adarlan, she does not argue when the members of the tribe on wings murmur to her those powerful words seen in far more stories than this one: Welcome home.
The prince's companion - and, eventually, hers - makes this all much easier for her. Sometimes she is the lord's cousin, the prince's sister or hearth-sister, the captain's friend. Sometimes she is called Mor, sometimes Borte - but the "or" sound remains constant. Story Keepers have long ruminated of its correspondence with the word "awe", and how she is certainly awe-inspiring, kind and cheerful, but a warrior, and not one easily crossed.
Sometimes the evil they seek to defeat is right here in these mountains she now calls home - taking the form of spiders or demons or even trespassing spies from a kingdom (or a continent) across the sea, where a wicked king is rallying his forces to destroy all that the girl holds dear.
Magic is always an important factor in the story - as it is in every good fantasy story. The girl is always born without it, but how it goes from there is unclear: sometimes she gains magic through her own sacrifices and even her death, sometimes she goes without it the way, and learns to battle the supernatural darkness with only her wits and her heart.
Whichever way it goes, it is always enough.
The woman finds love - burning, brilliant love - with her prince, her lord, her captain, and is offered a kingdom by his side. She accepts, but they go off to fight a war first, and returns to the place that was once her home.
Sometimes this home is the same one she left at the beginning of the story, and she must fight to protect it, and all the people she loves there.
Sometimes this home is a different one to that of her father and sisters', and she must fight to destroy it, and all the people she hates there.
The woman always wages a war, on home turf and in her new kingdom, and she always wins. Sometimes there are steep personal losses (oftentimes there are steep personal losses) but she wins. She wins, and returns home, and the future is as bright as the stars she wished on so long ago, the foreign stars different to those she knew, back then on the night where she was told she was a legend.
Stories change, and the Keepers change with them. And so when you revisit a beloved tale, you may not realise you are doing it; when you think you're reading a tale for the first time, you don't realise that you're not.
Stories are based on the truth, and amidst the changes, it can be difficult to ascertain what that truth is - what actually once happened, long, long ago.
But there is one thing in all the versions that always stays the same:
There is always a girl, a women, a warrior. She always lives and laughs and loves and fights and cries and moves on and loves again and again and again until all the love is spent. She always runs along the ground until she's granted the wings to fly with, and when she does fly, she befriends the stars.
So what we know is this:
There was once a girl, as ordinary as you or I, who fired an arrow, and watched as it dragged her into a legend.