The Bard’s training took twelve years. Twelve years of memorizing genealogies, legal precedents, mythological cycles, hundreds of complex verse-forms. Twelve years of learning to improvise in perfect meter, to weave allusion and metaphor seamlessly, to speak words that created reality rather than merely describing it. And at the end of those twelve years—if the student survived, if they mastered the impossible curriculum, if their voice proved worthy—they graduated.
But this was not diploma ceremony or academic formality. Bardic graduation was transformation—the student dying and the master being born, the individual voice subsumed into the collective voice of all Bards past, the threshold crossing from learner to teacher, from receiver of tradition to transmitter of it.
The graduation was ritual, test, and public demonstration combined. The community witnessed the new Bard’s emergence, evaluated their worthiness, accepted or rejected them. Because a Bard wielded terrible power—the ability to praise or destroy with words, to preserve or erase reputations, to speak truth so sharply it wounded physically. Such power required proven competence, demonstrated character, and community validation.