The cataclysm

III

But this is the story as Arion told it,

Arion Corvus, Branchala's bard the singer of mysteries light on the wing string of the harp.

Unhoused by the Rending, traveling west, his map a memory of hearth and castle, unhoused, he sounded forever the hymns of comet and fire perpetual sounded the Time of the Rending, betrayals and uprisings spanning the breadth of the harper's hand, and history rode on the harp incanting the implausible music of breath.

His was the song I remember, his song and my mother's retelling.

O sing the ravens perpetually wronged to the ears of my children,

O sing to them, Arion Stormcrow:

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.