The cataclysm

I

On Solamnia's castles ravens alight, dark and unnumbered like a year of deaths, and dreamt on the battlements, fixed and holy, are the signs of the Order

Kingfisher and Rose -

Kingfisher and Rose and a sword that is bleeding forever over the covering mountains, the shires perpetually damaged, and the blade itself is an unhealed wound, convergence of blood and memory, its dark rain masking the arrangement of stars, and below it the ravens gather.

Below it forever the woman is telling the story, telling it softly as the past collapses into a breathing light, and I am repeating her story then and now in a willful dusk at the turn of the year in the flickering halls of the keep.

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 her telling you this.

But bent by the fire like a doubling memory, the woman recounts and dwells in a dead man's story, harsh in the ears of his fledgling son, who nods, and listens again, and descends to a dodging country of tears and remembrance, where the memories of others fashion his bent recollections, assemble his father from mirrors and smoke and history's hearsay twines and repeats, and the wavering country,

Solamnia, muses and listens.

Out on the plains, orestes,

the woman is saying, out among fires

Which the bard's voice ignited

In rumor and calumny,

There they are burning your father,

His name and our blood

Forever from Caergoth

To harboring Kalaman

And out in the dying

Bays of the north:

All for a word, my son,

A word masked as history

Shielding a nest of adders.

With words are we poisoned,

Orestes, my son, she repeats in the fragmenting darkness, the firelight fixed on her hair, on the ivory glove of her hand and the tilted goblet.

And always Orestes listened and practiced his harp for the journey approaching, and the world contracted, fierce and impermeable, caged in the wheeling words of his mother, caged in a custom of deaths.