The cataclysm

IX

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.