The tavern buzzed with its usual evening crowd – merchants drowning the day’s failures, adventurers embellishing their latest quests, and in the corner by the hearth, a bard sat with his lute across his lap, quill hovering over parchment. Melody Windweaver, known across three kingdoms for his silver tongue and golden voice, contemplated the question posed by his fellow performers during their monthly gathering.
My dearest colleagues in the art of verse and song,
You ask which word I’d strike from every tongue and scroll in all the realms? I’ve given this more thought than perhaps befits a simple traveling bard, but words are our magic, are they not? We shape reality with them as surely as any wizard with their spells.
The word I’d banish, seal away, and strike from memory would be “impossible.”
Let me tell you why, through a tale of my own…
Last winter, I sought shelter in the Frost Giant’s halls (a tale for another time, involving three cheese wheels and a magical badger). The giant queen’s daughter was practicing her harp, her massive fingers struggling with strings made for hands thrice the size of mine. “It’s impossible,” she sighed, ice crystals forming in her silver hair. “These songs weren’t meant for giant-kind.”
I spent a fortnight there, teaching her to adapt the songs, to create new instruments that would sing beneath her touch. Now she performs for the northern courts, her music causing avalanches of joy rather than snow.
In the Spring Court, a young faerie refused to dance because her wings were shaped differently than her sisters’. “It’s impossible to perform the Spring Ritual with wings like mine,” she whispered. Together, we created new dances that made her unique wings an advantage, not a hindrance. Now she leads the dawn chorus with movements that make the morning glories weep with envy.
Even among our own kind, how often have we heard apprentice bards claim, “It’s impossible to master the Twelve-String Heartstring Ballad” or “I could never remember all thirteen verses of the Ancient Lay of Dragon’s Rest”? Each time this cursed word crosses their lips, it builds walls higher than any giant’s fortress.
As wielders of words, we know their power. “Impossible” is a cage built of letters, a prison fashioned from a single breath. It’s a full stop where there should be an ellipsis, a period where we need a comma, a door slammed shut when it should remain ajar.
Replace it, I say! Give me “challenging” or “demanding” or “not yet conquered.” Give me “awaiting solution” or “requiring innovation.” Even “temporarily beyond my grasp” holds more hope than that final, fatal “impossible.”
Look at young Pip over there by the bar, attempting to juggle five daggers while reciting the Epic of the Undying Light. Three months ago, he claimed such a feat was impossible. Now he only drops them twice per performance, and the scars are healing quite nicely.
Our craft itself defies impossibility. We capture feelings in rhyme, trap memories in melody, and build entire worlds with nothing but twenty-six letters arranged in pleasing patterns. We are bards – impossibility is our beast to tame, our mountain to climb, our dragon to befriend.
So yes, strike “impossible” from every book and ballot, every song and story. Let it fade like the last note of a finished symphony. In its place, let us write new words of potential, of possibility, of paths yet unexplored.
Besides, how can anything be truly impossible in a world where dragons dance, giants play harps, and somehow, despite all odds, my tavern tab keeps growing even when I’m sure I’ve paid it?
Now, who’s ready to attempt that infamous twenty-verse ballad about the philosophically-inclined gelatinous cube? I hear it’s quite impossible to perform…
With a flourish, Melody signed his name with a treble clef, set down his quill, and lifted his lute. Around him, the other bards leaned forward, knowing that somewhere between the strings and stories, impossible things were about to become merely improbable, and then, inevitably, accomplished.
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Chadwick Rye 
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