The Cataclysm

Dragonlance - Tales 2 2 - The Cataclysm Various

The world was forged upon three pillars: good, evil, neutrality. In order to progress, a
balance between the three must be maintained. But there came a time in Krynn when the
balance tilted. Believing himself to be the equal to the gods in knowledge and in wisdom,
the Kingpriest of Istar sought the gods in arrogance and pride and demanded that they do
his bidding.

Having viewed with sorrow the tilting of the scales of balance, resulting in hatred,
prejudice, race divided against race, the gods determined to restore the balance of the
world. They cast a fiery mountain upon Ansalon, then withdrew their power, hoping those
intelligent races who dwelt upon Krynn would once again find their faith - in thegods, in
themselves, and in each other.

This catastrophe became known as the Cataclysm.

Michael Williams tells a tale of vengeance in his epic poem, “The Word and the Silence.”
He and his wife, Teri, continue the tale and turn it into a mystery, as the accused
murderer's son seeks to end the curse on his family in “Mark of the Flame, Mark of the
Word.”

Matya, a very cunning trader, stumbles onto the bargain of her life - literally - in Mark
Anthony's “The Bargain Driver.”

In Todd Fahnestock's story, “Seekers,” a young orphan boy embarks on a perilous journey to
ask the gods a question.

For most people, the Cataclysm meant sorrow, death, ruination. For the entrepreneurs in
Nick O'Donohoe's story, “No Gods, No Heroes,” the Cataclysm means opportunity.

Richard A. Knaak tells the tale of Rennard, known to readers of THE LEGEND OF HUMA. Now a
ghost, doomed to torment in the Abyss, Rennard finds himself transported back to Ansalon
during the Cataclysm. Is it an accident, or has he been brought back for a reason?

Dan Parkinson continues the adventures of the Bulp clan of gully dwarves. Led by their
valiant leader, Gorge III, the Bulps leave Istar in search of the Promised Place. What
they find instead is certainly not what they expected, in “Ogre Unaware.”

Roger E. Moore reveals why Astinus never hires kender to be scribes, in his story, “The
Cobbler's Son.”

A ship bound for Istar may be making its final voyage, in Paul B. Thompson and Tonya R.
Carter's story, “The Voyage of the SUNCHASER.”

Doug Niles continues the adventures of his scribe, Foryth Teal, as that intrepid historian
sets out to investigate a priest's claim that he can perform miracles, in “The High Priest
of Halcyon.”

In “True Knight,” we continue the story of the cleric of Mishakal, Brother Michael, and
Nikol, daughter of a Solamnic Knight. The two survive the Cataclysm, but now they want
answers. Their search leads them to an encounter with the knight who, so rumor has it,
could have prevented the Cataclysm.

MARGARET WEIS AND TRACY HICKMAN

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. II Three things are lost in the long night of words:

history's edge the heart's long appeasement the eye of the prophet. But the story born of impossible fragments is this: that Lord Pyrrhus Alecto light of the coast arm of Caergoth father to dreaming and to vengeful Orestes fell to the peasants in the time of the Rending fell in the vanguard of his glittering armies and over his lapsing eye wheeled constellations the scale of Hiddukel riding west to the garrisoned city.

It is there that the edge of history ends:

the rest is a song that followed on song the story involved in its own devising tied in devolving circles until truth was a word in the bardic night and the husk of event was a dim mathematics lost in the matrix of stars.

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 BETRA Y ALS 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.

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.

High on the battlements of Vingaard Keep as the wind plunged over the snow-covered walls,
Orestes perched in a dark cloak huddled, 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.

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.

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, his back to the dream and incredulous fire, discovered
the years and the fading arm of the sword.

Seven songs of instruction arose from the fire and the dreaming:

the spiral of Quen love's first geometry the wing of Habbakuk brooding above the world the circle of Solin rash and recurrent heart the arc of Jolith dividing intention from deed the white fire of Paladine perfected song of the dragon the prayer of Matheri merciful grammar of thought and the last one the high one light of Branchala that measures all song in the shape of words Alone in the margin of darkness, Orestes surrendered and listened singing reluctantly,
joyfully, as the gods and the planets and the cycle of years devolved in a long dream of
murder and the cleansing of harp strings.