Anthology: Kender, gully Dwarves, and Gnomes

Lest this sound like the standard autho-biography,13 the repetition of the same tired story in which a child

12. Six weeks sleepless and five genealogies, actually. History foreshortens this achievement because history mistrusts the precocious child.

13. "The lad found his chief source of delight in the conversations around him" — opening sentence of BARD FROM PRACTICE: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF QUIVALIN SATH. "The lad found his chief source of delight in the conversations around him" — opening sentence of RIME AMID REASON: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RAGGART, POET OF THE ICE BARBARIANS. "The lad found his chief source of delight in the conversations around him" — opening sentence of SONG OF SOLAMNIA: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIR MICHAEL WILLIAMS, KNIGHT OF THE ROSE. It is ironic how these three minor poets try to conceal their major vanity by writing of themselves in the third person.

falls early in love with the sound and power of words, I shall continue at once with the actual events that sealed Armavir's poetic calling. For love of language and stories makes for a punster or a tattletale in most children, qualities that do not necessarily blossom into verse unless somehow the child receives enlightenment, direction.

Indeed, Armavir might have lived his life unnoticed in the large and intricate underground kingdom near Mount Nevermind — a minor courtier, a fishwife without fishes — were it not for his brush with death by electrocution, a near disaster with a happy outcome, for it galvanized his aimless wanderings in legend and gossip into a genuine (if overlooked) poetic gift, and charged him with a restless desire to see the outer world.

It happened as such things often happen — a youthful invention that backfires, but backfires in a most fortunate manner. One does not discard a Life Quest lightly, and Armavir's quest was what the Guild had pronounced as "Something To Do With Wires": tensile strength, heat conduction, musical properties — a world of circuit and filament lay before our young hero. His heart in none of these sciences but the musical, Armavir explored first the variations of sound one could evoke from wires of different thicknesses, tensions, and metals, designing the forerunner of the cello.14 At first the experiments faltered, for Armavir had not chanced upon the idea of making the instrument portable; chambers of the undercity were strung with thin and taut copper wire, hazardous to children, who took it upon themselves to run chickens into those very chambers, thereby decapitating and slicing

14. An instrument which would later ennoble his lyrics with music, an instrument later claimed to be of elven make! the creatures in one frolicsome yet practical pursuit.15

Nonetheless, the chambers remained dangerous, and Armavir was instructed by the Mechanical Engineers Guild to remove these hazards. While dismantling one of the more complicated structures in an alcove of the main library at Mount Nevermind, Armavir stumbled across a surprising discovery — one that might well have brought about great technological advances had not the discoverer soon been distracted from his studies.

It seemed that one of the wires had been affixed between two ornamental copper helmets: one in the aforementioned alcove, the other in a similar chamber directly above. Sweating, entangled with wires, the young inventor began to detach the crucial strands and to his astonishment heard voices emanating from the helmet in the alcove. At first he imagined the accompanying ghost of the standard "speaking armor" legend,16 but decided otherwise when he heard only giggling and the rustle of clothing that had been, like the helmet in question, long abandoned.

It seemed that wire could conduct sound as well as heat, and the thoughts of young Armavir were immediately patriotic: an elaborate early warning system of wires stretched taut from the undercity to the world aboveground, where they could be affixed to metallic bowls cleverly disguised as fruit or stars, and positioned in the huge vallenwood trees on the slopes of Mount Nevermind. Then below, in a place of safety, those in charge of the city's defense could hear any

15. See "Gnome Chicken" recipe in LEAVES FROM THE INN OF THE LAST HOME, P. 246.

16. For related discussion of the "speaking armor" issue, see PHILOSOPHIKA GNOMIKON MMXVII (323 A.C.), pp. 675, 328 -

threatening movement by those who dwelt beneath the sun and the moons, and could act accordingly, preventing surprise and possible ambush.17

Excited by his developing project (which he lovingly entitled "Star Wires"), Armavir decided to put his findings to the test before submitting them to the Mechanical Engineers Guild. Making his way to the upper world bearing a helmet, 100 feet of wire, an augur, and a detailed map of the undercity, he began by drilling into the earth beneath several of the more prominent vallenwoods on the slopes of the mountain — a task that, of course, took him several years, especially since, as both poet and engineer, his auguries occasionally misfired. But enough of the trial and error: it is not the dark night of labor that we wish to see in a work of genius, but the flawless and seamless fruit (or stars) of that work.

And so, when the elaborate connection was made — the first helmet safely in the upper branches of a large vallenwood, the second at the ear of our hero in a secluded library alcove (not the one mentioned before), the two connected by a copper wire stretched almost to the point of breaking — young Armavir knelt silently and listened to the world outside.

Where it was raining, the birdsong stilled and the clamor of thunder in the distance growing nearer as Armavir listened to the spatter of rain against the leaves, the gentle rustle of the branches in a rising wind. Lulling sounds,tranquil sounds, and soon the budding engineer, the proto cellist, the youthful poet slept the sleep of the just and the absent-minded, until

17. Such an idea is scarcely more fanciful than others proposed by advocates of strong military defense. See, for instance, Theros Ironfeld, "Arms for Hostages," WAR OF THE LANCE VETERAN, IV, pp. 42–57. louder claps of thunder awakened him, and he found that his head had become lodged rather tightly in the experimental helmet, entangled in copper wire that was itself uncomfortably tight beneath his chin, so that he thought of the ill-fated chickens and shuddered.

It was then that the lightning struck the laboratory of the vallenwood, and our lyrical hero discovered that not only did copper wire conduct heat and sound, but also the considerable energies of lightning itself — energies so violent that he could not remember the seven ensuing years except for fleeting images of sunlight and leaves, the brilliant amber bottoms of three half-filled ale glasses, something about a dwarf and a kender, and when the memory settled, himself seated at the Inn of the Last Home, having aimlessly wandered (as he would say in his immortal but flawed "Song of the Ten Heroes")18 "into the heart of the story"

And the rest, my friends, was the story itself. From Solace to Sancrist to Palanthas and further, our hero recording, enshrining the Companions in numbers and song, himself the one who embodied most fully the Gnomish ideal of BALANCE — of balance between action and thought, movement and reflection (in the words of his dear departed sister, "teeter and totter"). Owing to modesty, of course, many of Armavir's more heroic exploits never found their way into his poetry; but some — lines and stanzas and staves (sometimes entire passages) in which Armavir appeared as a Companion in his own right — began to findtheir way OUT of the story.19 For strangely, unac

18. Printed shamelessly as "Song of the Nine Heroes" in both CHRONICLES, II, and in LEAVES FROM THE INN OF THE LAST HOME. See comments in Section III of this essay.