The cataclysm

VIII

A year and a day the seasons encircled, according to fable and ancient decrees of enchantment, as the gnats' choir of autumn surrendered to ice and the turn of the year approached like a death and the listening castles mislaid under snow.

Orestes's apprenticeship led to a circle of fire, where the harp he had mastered and the seven songs and the fourteen modes of incalculable magic circled him back to the night and the keep and the wintry eyes of the bard singing memory into flesh, into stone, into dreaming and wind, and

Arion, he said, and Arion, tell me of time

Of the rending of Krynn and betrayals.

The bard took the harp in the foreseen night: for his memory darkened the edge of the past when knowing devises the shape of creation, 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 and Arion told us 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 Arion told us, and Orestes leaned closer and ARION, he said, and

Arion, teach me of time

Of the famine and plague and Pyrrhus Alecto.

Arion stroked the harp and began, his white hair cascading across the gold arm of the harp as though he were falling through song into sleep and the winter stilled at the touch of the string, and he sang the last verses as hidden Orestes reclined and remembered and listened:

Down in the arm of Caergoth he rode:

Pyrrhus Alecto, The knight of the night of betrayals

Firebrand of burning that clouded the straits of Hylo,

The oil and ash on the water, ignited country.

Forever and ever the villages burn in his passage,

And the grain of the peasantry, life of the ragged armies

That harried him back to the keep of the castle

Where Pyrrhus the Firebringer canceled the world

Beneath the denial of battlements,

Where he died amid stone with his covering armies.

For seventeen years the country of Caergoth

Has burned and burned with his effacing hand,

A barren of shires and hamlets,

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.