Dragonlance Tales II, Vol. 2 – The Cataclysm

shoulder, and stared into the swirl of broken light.

There was a dead man. He was small. His shadow

swayed back and forth in a room of wood and stone,

dappling the floor below him with dark, then light, then

dark. His fine clothing fluttered and his hood lifted slightly.

I saw his face . . . his arms . . .

“The scars. Lady, they are like mine. Who is he?”

“Orestes,” she replied, stirring the water. “Pyrrhus

Orestes. Your father, hanged with a harp string.”

“And . . . WHO?” I asked, my sudden urge for

vengeance stabbing as hot as the BEATHA, as the burning.

“By his own hand, Dove,” L’Indasha said. “When he

thought he could neither redeem nor . . . continue the line.”

REDEEM NOR CONTINUE. It was quite confusing and

I was muddled from the potion and the hour.

L’Indasha’s face reflected off the fractured ice in the

bucket: it was older, wounded, a map of lost lands. “You

weren’t told. But Orestes got his desire and now the scars

have ripened.”

Mother clutched my shoulder. The pain relented a bit.

“Continue what? Lady, ’tis a riddle.”

A riddle the druidess answered, there in the vaulted

cave, as the weather outside turned colder still and colder,

on a night like those on which the fisherman claim you

could walk on ice from Caergoth across the waters to

Eastport.

She told me that my father, Orestes, had ridden

desperately westward as the peninsula burned at the hands

of the invaders. He rode with freebooters – with Nerakans

and the goblins from Throt, and they were rough customers,

but he passed through Caergoth unharmed. None of them

knew he was the son of Pyrrhus Alecto – “the Firebringer,”

as the songs called my grandfather.

“Why did he … why DIDN’T he …” I began to ask. I

was only fourteen.

The druidess understood and lifted her hand. “He was just

one, and young. And there is a harder reason. Orestes, NOT

YOUR GRANDFATHER, had brought the fires to the

peninsula. You see, he murdered his master. Your

grandmother had fostered his apprenticeship with Anon of

Coastlund. She taught him from childhood that he must

recover his father’s honor at any cost. Your grandfather’s

honor. So he killed Arion, that he should sing no longer of

your grandfather’s shame.”

Mother’s grip tightened on my shoulder. I shrugged her

away yet again. Again the scars on my neck and face bit

and nettled.

“Go on.”

“Then the goblins came, when they heard the new song

Orestes sang. …”

When Orestes saw what his words had wrought, he ran.

It was at the last village seawards – Endaf, where the coast

tumbles into the Cape of Caergoth – that Orestes could

abide no more of the plunder and burning. Caergoth was in

flames behind him, and Ebrill, where the bandits first

camped, then Llun and Mercher, vanished forever in the

goblin’s torchlight.

He was just one man, and he was young, but even so,

surely it shamed him as much as it angered him.

At Endaf he stopped and turned into the fray. He

dismounted, broke through the goblins, and joined in a

frantic attempt to rescue a woman from a burning inn.

Orestes was sent to the rooftop, or he asked to go. The

beams gave way with him, and the goblins watched and

laughed as Orestes fell into the attic, which fell around him

in turn, crashing down and up again in a rapture of fire.

But he lived. He was fire-marked, hated of men, and

they would know him by his scars henceforth. The burns

had bitten deep and his face was forever changed into a

stiffened mask of grief. A fugitive and a vagabond he was

upon Krynn, and wherever he traveled, they turned him

away. To Kaolin he went, and to Garnet, as far north as

Thelgaard Keep and south to the coast of Abanasinia. In all

places, his scars and his story arrived before him – the tale

of a bard who, with a single verse of a song, had set his

country to blaze and ruin.

He took to bride a woman from Mercher, orphaned by the

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