The cataclysm

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, the Garnet Mountains red like a memory of blood in the distance:

There is no law,

Orestes murmured, his hand on the harp strings,

No rule unwritten

That your father's slanderer

Cannot instruct you,

That the man you murder

Your heart cannot honor,

Even as your hand

Concocts the poison.

The landscape ahead was diminished and natural, no thing unforeseen sprang from the heavens, the waters were channeled and empty of miracles.

So this is history,

Orestes considered,

So this is history

Now I can understand

as the road lay before him uninherited,

heirless cut off from its making and silenced by blood.

At the borders of Southlund the smoke was rising,

the Arm of Caergoth harbored incessant fire:

Orestes rode swiftly through billows of prophecy,

the stride of his horse confirming the dead words of Arion.

The cavalry plundering the burgeoning fields,

leveling villages, approaching invulnerable Caergoth,

heeded little the ride of a boy in their column cloaked in the night and in helpless mourning.

A bard, some said, or a bard's apprentice returned to his homeland burning and desolate.

The captain of cavalry turned to the weeping boy and addressed him as soldier as fellow and brother:

Sooner or later, sing you this,

Bard or bard's apprentice.

For the voice of the harper

The musician, the piper

Shall no longer be heard

In the arm of Caergoth,

Long kept from the fire

By the song of a poet

Who said she was burning already:

For a fresh fabled country

Is the nest of invasions,

The quarry of cavalry,

Ripe for the sword and the fire.

Orestes rode forth and the captain continued, turning his pale horse as a star tumbled down from the fixed dream of heaven:

For the bard's song, they tell me,

Is a distant belief

In the shape of distance.

For Caergoth was burning

When she said in her heart,

'I am Queen, not a widow

And sorrow is far from me,

Elusive as thought

Or the changes of memory.'

Sooner or later, sing you this.

And he vanished in histories of rumor and smoke, and sooner or later, a bard will sing this, in beleaguered castles abandoned to night and the cough of the raven.

Sooner or later, someone will sing of Orestes the bard, for some things the poet brings forth and fashions, and others the poet holds back: for words and the silence between them commingle, defining each other in spaces of holiness. and through them 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 and telling you this.