Margaret Weis: The cataclysm

And Firebringer history hangs on the path of his name.

Orestes listened, as honor and song, as blood and adoption warred in the cell of his thoughts, his father redeemed by poison, by blade by the song of the harp string rendered a garrotte, closing the eloquent throat of Arion silencing song, reclaiming his father, and transforming Caergoth from desert to garden: yet the hand of Orestes stilled in the arc of reprisal, and into the night he warred and remembered, and as I tell you this, memory wars with him still.

The mourning began when the doves circled Vingaard: the poison had passed through the veins like imagined fires: and alone in his quarters, the poet's apprentice abided the funerals, settled accounts, awaited the search of the Order through ravaged Solamnia for rivals and villains, for the trails of assassins, and late on the fifth night after the burning, when the ashes had settled on Arion's pyre, only then did Hieronymo bring forth the harp

(though some there were curious, who late in the night had heard, or had thought they heard, the apprentice weeping and playing the sonorous mode of the Rending), and late on the fifth night after the burning

Hieronymo sang for the host at the Vingaard Keep and the Rending changed as he spoke of its birth in the spiral of prophecy, the brush of its wing on the glittering domes and spires of Istar the swelling of moons and the stars' convergence and voices and thunderings and lightnings and earthquakes as Hieronymo told them that night by the hearth that hail and fire in a downpour of blood tumbled to earth, igniting the trees and the grass, and the mountains were burning, and the sea became blood and above and below us the heavens were scattered, and locusts and scorpions wandered the face of

the planet, as Hieronymo told us, and then he leaned closer and now, he said,

Now, I shall teach you of time

Of the famine and plague and Pyrrhus Alecto.

Down in the arm of Caergoth he rode:

Pyrrhus Alecto, the knight on the night of betrayals.

When a firebrand of burning had clouded the Straits of Hylo.

Like oil on water, he soothed the ignited country.

Forever and ever the villages learn his passage

In the grain of the peasantry, life of the ragged armies.

They carried him back to the keep of the castle

Where Pyrrhus the Lightbringer canceled the world

Beneath the denial of battlements,

Where he died amid stone with his hovering armies.

For seventeen years the country of Caergoth

Has turned and turned in his embracing hand,

A garden of shires and hamlets,

And Lightbringer history hangs on the path of his name.

His duty dispatched and the old bard murdered,

Orestes returned toward rescued Caergoth, skirting the foothills, and long were his thoughts as he passed over Southlund, the Garnet Mountains red like a memory of blood in the distance:

There is no law,

Orestes murmured, his hand on the harp strings,

No rule unwritten

That your father's slanderer

Cannot instruct you,

That the man you murder

Your heart cannot honor,

Even as your hand

Concocts the poison.

The landscape ahead was diminished and natural, no thing unforeseen sprang from the heavens, the waters were channeled and empty of miracles.

So this is history,

Orestes considered,

So this is history

Now I can understand

as the road lay before him uninherited,

heirless cut off from its making and silenced by blood.

At the borders of Southlund the smoke was rising,

the Arm of Caergoth harbored incessant fire:

Orestes rode swiftly through billows of prophecy,

the stride of his horse confirming the dead words of Arion.

The cavalry plundering the burgeoning fields,

leveling villages, approaching invulnerable Caergoth,

heeded little the ride of a boy in their column cloaked in the night and in helpless mourning.

A bard, some said, or a bard's apprentice returned to his homeland burning and desolate.

The captain of cavalry turned to the weeping boy and addressed him as soldier as fellow and brother:

Sooner or later, sing you this,

Bard or bard's apprentice.

For the voice of the harper

The musician, the piper

Shall no longer be heard

In the arm of Caergoth,

Long kept from the fire

By the song of a poet

Who said she was burning already:

For a fresh fabled country

Is the nest of invasions,

The quarry of cavalry,

Ripe for the sword and the fire.

Orestes rode forth and the captain continued, turning his pale horse as a star tumbled down from the fixed dream of heaven:

For the bard's song, they tell me,

Is a distant belief

In the shape of distance.

For Caergoth was burning

When she said in her heart,

'I am Queen, not a widow

And sorrow is far from me,

Elusive as thought

Or the changes of memory.'

Sooner or later, sing you this.

And he vanished in histories of rumor and smoke, and sooner or later, a bard will sing this, in beleaguered castles abandoned to night and the cough of the raven.

Sooner or later, someone will sing of Orestes the bard, for some things the poet brings forth and fashions, and others the poet holds back: for words and the silence between them commingle, defining each other in spaces of holiness. and through them the story ascends and spirals, descends on itself and circles through time through effacing event and continuing vengeance down to the time

I am telling and telling you this.

It began when I was fourteen, the burning, in the winter that the fires resurged on the peninsula.

I awoke with a whirling outcry, my face awash in fire, the blankets scattering from the bed. The dogs raced from the cottage, stumbling, howling in outrage. Mother was beside me in an instant, wrapped in her own blanket, her pale hair disheveled, her eyes terror stricken.

The burning spread down my neck and back, the pain brilliant and scoring, and I clutched at her hand, her shoulders, and shrieked again. Mother winced and fumbled silently, her thick fingers pressing hard, too hard, against my scarred lips.

And then we were racing through the forest night.

The freezing rain lanced like needles against the hissing scars on my neck and face. QUIET, MY DARLING, MY DOVE, LEST THEY HEAR YOU IN THE VILLAGE , her hands flashed.

We moved over slick and glittering snow, through juniper and Aeterna, and my breath misted and crystalized on the heaped furs, and the dogs in the traces grumbled and yapped.

Then it was light, and I lay in a dry, vaulted cavern on a hard pallet.

Above me the druidess L'Indasha Yman rustled, draped in dried leaves and holly bobs like a pageant of late autumn. She was young for medicine, young even for divining, and I was struck by her dark eyes and auburn hair because I was fourteen years old and just becoming struck by such things.

She gave me the Beatha to help with the pain, and it tasted of smoke and barley. The burning rushed from my scars to my throat, and then to the emptiness of my stomach.

"They've matured, the lad's scars," she said to my mother. "Ripened." Expectantly, she turned to me, her dark eyes riveting, awaiting our questions.

Mother's hands flickered and flashed.

"Mother wants to know… how long…" I interpreted, my voice dry and rasping.

"Always," said the druidess, brushing away the question. "And you?" she asked. "Trugon. What would you ask of me this time?"

She should have known it. Several seasons ago, the scars had appeared overnight without cause, without warning. For a year they had thickened slowly, hard as the stone walls of our cottage, spreading until my entire body was covered with a network of calluses. I could no longer even tell my age. I was becoming more and more a monstrosity, and no one could say why.