Dragonlance Tales II, Vol. 2 – The Cataclysm

the window below him

gabled in light,

and he muttered and listened,

his honored impatience

grown loud at the song

of the bard by the fire.

Melodiously, Arion sang

of the world’s beginning,

the shape of us all

retrieved by the hands

of the gods from chaos,

the oceans inscribing

the dream of the plains,

the sun and the moons

appointing the country

with light and the passage

of summer to winter,

the bright land’s corners

lovely with trees,

the leaves quick with life

with nations of kestrel

with immaculate navies of doves,

with the first plainsong

of the summer sparrow

and the song from the bard

sustaining it all,

breathing the phase

of the moon’s awakening,

singing the births

and the deaths of the heroes,

all of it rising

to the ears of Orestes.

And rising beyond him

it peopled the winter stars

with a light that hovered

and stilled above him,

as nightly in song

the old constellations

resumed their imagined shapes,

breathing the fire

of the first creation

over the years to the time

that the song descends

in a rain of light

today on your shoulder

with a frail incandescence

of music and memory

and the last fading green

of a garden that never

and always invented itself.

For the bard’s song

is a distant belief,

a belief in the shape of distance.

All the while as the singing

arose from the hearth and the hall,

alone in the suffering wind, Orestes

crouched and listened

slowly, reluctantly

beginning to sing,

his dreams of murder quiet

in the rapture of harp strings.

VI

HIERONYMO he called himself,

HIERONYMO when down from the battlements

he came, supplanted and nameless

entering the hall

in the wake of the wind and darkness.

Arion dreamt by the fire,

and his words were a low, shaping melody:

the tongue of the flame

inclined in the hall of his breath

and the heart of the burning

was a map in the eye of Orestes,

who crouched by the hearth

and offered his harp

to his father’s slanderer,

smiling and smiling

his villainous rubric,

TEACH ME YOUR SINGING, ARION, he said,

adopting the voice and the eye

of imagined Hieronymo

deep in disguises,

and none in the court

knew Alecto’s son –

TEACH ME YOUR SINGING, MEMORABLE BARD,

THE LIGHT IN THE HEART OF WINTER,

SINGER OF ORIGINS, FRAMER OF HISTORY,

DRIVE MY DEAD THOUGHTS OVER THE WINTER PLAINS

LIKE WITHERED LEAVES TO QUICKEN A NEW BIRTH!

Old Arion smiled

at the boy’s supplication

at the fracture of coals,

at the bright hearth’s flutter

at the nothing that swirled

at the heart of the fire:

for something had passed

in his distant imagining,

dark as a wing

on the snow-settled battlements,

a step on a grave

he could only imagine

there in the warmth of the keep

where the thoughts were of song

and of music and memory,

where something still darker

was enjoining the bard

to take on the lad

who knelt in the firelight.

SOME THINGS, he said,

THE POET BRINGS FORTH.

OTHERS THE POET HOLDS BACK:

FOR WORDS AND THE SILENCE

BETWEEN THEM COMMINGLE,

DEFINING EACH OTHER

IN SPACES OF HOLINESS.

Softly the old hand

rose and descended,

the harp-handling fingers

at rest on the brow

of the bold and mysterious boy.

The apprenticeship was sealed

in Orestes’s bravado,

the name of HIERONYMO

fixed to the terms of indenture,

all in the luck of an hour,

and depth of a season,

but somewhere within it

a darker invention

that sprawled in the depths

of the heart and the dwindling earth.

VII

So masked in intention,

in a sacred name

for a year and a day

Orestes surrendered

his anger to music and wind,

apprenticeship honed

on the laddered wires

of a harp that the gods whispered over,

of a wandering in lore

and the cloudy geographies

tied to the fractured past,

and he dwelt by the poet

and traveled to Dargaard

to the heart of Solanthus,

to imperiled Thelgaard,

to nameless castles of memory

where the knights abided

in yearning for something

that moved in the channels of history,

redeeming the damaged blood of the rose,

while the story that Arion sang,

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