Dan Parkinson - Dragonlance Tales - Cataclysm

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DRAGONLANCER TALES II
Volume 2
THE CATACLYSM
1992 TSR, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Introduction
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 the
gods, 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
THE WORD AND THE SILENCE
I
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.
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.
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.
V
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.
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,
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.
VIII
A year and a day the seasons encircled,
according to fable and ancient decrees of enchantment,
as the gnats' choir of autumn surrendered to ice
and the turn of the year approached like a death
and the listening castles mislaid under snow.
Orestes's apprenticeship led to a circle of fire,
where the harp he had mastered and the seven songs
and the fourteen modes of incalculable magic
circled him back to the night and the keep
and the wintry eyes of the bard singing memory
into flesh, into stone, into dreaming and wind,
and ARION, he said, and ARION, TELL ME OF TIME
OF THE RENDING OF KRYNN AND BETRAYALS.
The bard took the harp in the foreseen night:
for his memory darkened the edge of the past
when knowing devises the shape of creation,
and the Rending changed as he spoke of its birth
in the spiral of prophecy, the brush of its wing
on the glittering domes and spires of Istar
the swelling of moons and the stars' convergence
and voices and thunderings and lightnings and
earthquakes
and Arion told us that night by the hearth
that hail and fire in a downpour of blood
tumbled to earth, igniting the trees and the grass,
and the mountains were burning, and the sea became
blood
and above and below us the heavens were scattered,
and locusts and scorpions wandered the face of the
planet,
as Arion told us, and Orestes leaned closer
and ARION, he said, and ARION, TEACH ME OF
TIME
OF THE FAMINE AND PLAGUE AND PYRRHUS ALECTO.
Arion stroked the harp and began, his white hair
cascading across the gold arm of the harp
as though he were falling through song into sleep
and the winter stilled at the touch of the string,
and he sang the last verses as hidden Orestes
reclined and remembered and listened:
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.
Orestes listened, as honor and song,
as blood and adoption warred in the cell of his thoughts,
his father redeemed by poison, by blade
by the song of the harp string rendered a garrotte,
closing the eloquent throat of Arion
silencing song, reclaiming his father,
and transforming Caergoth from desert to garden:
yet the hand of Orestes stilled in the arc of reprisal,
and into the night he warred and remembered,
and as I tell you this, memory wars with him still.
IX
The mourning began when the doves circled Vingaard:
the poison had passed through the veins like imagined fires:
and alone in his quarters, the poet's apprentice
abided the funerals, settled accounts, awaited
the search of the Order through ravaged Solamnia
for rivals and villains, for the trails of assassins,
and late on the fifth night after the burning,
when the ashes had settled on Arion's pyre,
only then did Hieronymo bring forth the harp
(though some there were curious, who late in the night
had heard, or had thought they heard, the apprentice
weeping and playing the sonorous mode of the Rending),
and late on the fifth night after the burning
Hieronymo sang for the host at the Vingaard Keep
and the Rending changed as he spoke of its birth
in the spiral of prophecy, the brush of its wing
on the glittering domes and spires of Istar
the swelling of moons and the stars' convergence
and voices and thunderings and lightnings and
earthquakes
as Hieronymo told them that night by the hearth
that hail and fire in a downpour of blood
tumbled to earth, igniting the trees and the grass,
and the mountains were burning, and the sea became
blood
and above and below us the heavens were scattered,
and locusts and scorpions wandered the face of the
planet,
as Hieronymo told us, and then he leaned closer
and NOW, he said, NOW, I SHALL TEACH YOU
OF TIME
OF THE FAMINE AND PLAGUE AND PYRRHUS ALECTO.
DOWN IN THE ARM OF CAERGOTH HE RODE:
PYRRHUS ALECTO, THE KNIGHT ON THE NIGHT OF BETRAYALS.
WHEN A FIREBRAND OF BURNING HAD CLOUDED THE STRAITS OF
HYLO.
LIKE OIL ON WATER, HE SOOTHED THE IGNITED COUNTRY.
FOREVER AND EVER THE VILLAGES LEARN HIS PASSAGE
IN THE GRAIN OF THE PEASANTRY, LIFE OF THE RAGGED ARMIES.
THEY CARRIED HIM BACK TO THE KEEP OF THE CASTLE
WHERE PYRRHUS THE LIGHTBRINGER CANCELED THE WORLD
BENEATH THE DENIAL OF BATTLEMENTS,
WHERE HE DIED AMID STONE WITH HIS HOVERING ARMIES.
FOR SEVENTEEN YEARS THE COUNTRY OF CAERGOTH
HAS TURNED AND TURNED IN HIS EMBRACING HAND,
A GARDEN OF SHIRES AND HAMLETS,
AND Lightbringer HISTORY HANGS ON THE PATH OF HIS NAME.
X
His duty dispatched
and the old bard murdered,
Orestes returned
toward rescued Caergoth,
skirting the foothills,
and long were his thoughts
as he passed over Southlund,
摘要：

DRAGONLANCERTALESIIVolume2THECATACLYSM1992TSR,Inc.AllRightsReserved.IntroductionTheworldwasforgeduponthreepillars:good,evil,neutrality.Inordertoprogress,abalancebetweenthethreemustbemaintained.ButtherecameatimeinKrynnwhenthebalancetilted.Believinghimselftobetheequaltothegodsinknowledgeandinwisdom,th...

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