The cataclysm

IV

Look around you, my son for the fire in Arion's singing:

For where in this country, in forgotten Caergoth, where does a single village burn?

Where does a peasant suffer and starve by the fire of your father?

Somewhere to the east before a white arras, gilded with laurel and gold adulation, the bard sings a lie in a listening house, and Caergoth burns in the world's imagining, while the bard holds something back from his singing, something resembling the truth.

But let not the breath of the fire touch your father,

Orestes, my son, my arm in the dwindling world, my own truth my prophecy, soothed the effacing mother, and darkly and silently

Orestes listened, the deadly harp poised in his hand circuitous.

And the word turned to deed and the song to a journey by night, and the listening years to a cloak and a borrowed name, as the boy matured in his mother's word, and the harp strings droned in the facing wind as he rode out alone, seeking Arion.