The Cataclysm Read Online Free

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 invasion and struck mute by goblin
     atrocity as they passed through with their flames and long knives. Orestes spirited her
     away to the woods of Lemish, where in seclusion they lived a dozen years in narrow hope.
    A dozen years, the druidess said, in which the child they awaited never came.
    That part I knew. Mother had told me when I was very little, the soft arc of her hand
     assuring me how much they had waited and planned and imagined.
    That part I knew. And Mother had shared his death with none but me. But I had never heard
     just how he had died.
    “In despair,” the Lady Yman told me, the cavern lapsing into shadow as her brown, leafy
     robes blocked out the firelight, the reflection on the ice. "Despair that his country was
     burning still, and that no children of his would extinguish the fires. He did not know
     about you. Your mother had come to me, and she knew, was returning to your cottage to tell
     him, joyous through the wide woods.
    “She found what you've seen. Orestes could wait no longer. Your mother brought me his note
     to read to her: I HAVE KILLED ARION, AND THE BURNING WILL NEVER STOP, it said. THE LAND IS
     CURSED. I AM CURSED. MY LINE IS CURSED. I DIE.”
    L'Indasha reached for me as I reeled, as the room blurred through my hot tears.
    “Trugon? Trugon!”
    REDEEM NOR CONTINUE. I understood now, about his anger and guilt and the terrible, wicked
     thing he had done. The BEATHA raced through me, and the torchlight surged and quickened.
    “Why did you finally tell me?” I asked.
    “To save your life,” the lady replied. She passed her hand above the broken water, and I
     saw a future where fires arose without cause and burned unnaturally hot, and my scars were
     afire, too, devouring my skin, my face, erasing all reason and memory until the pain
     vanished and my life as well.
    “This ... this is what will be, Lady?”
    “Perhaps.” She crouched beside me, her touch cool on my neck, its relief coursing into my
     face, my limbs. “Perhaps. But the future is changeable, as is the past.”
    “The past?” The pain was gone now, gone entirely.
    “Oh, yes, the past is changeable, Trugon,” L'Indasha claimed, passing from firelight to
     shadow, “for the past is lies, and lies can always change.” She was nearing the end of the
     answer and the beginning of another riddle.
    “But concern yourself now with the present,” she warned, and waved her hand above the
     troubled water. I saw four men wading through an ice-baffled forest on snowshoes, their footing unsteady, armed with sword and crossbow.
    “Bandits,” L'Indasha pronounced, “bound to the service of Finn of the Dark Hand”
    I shivered. The bandit king in Endaf."
    The druidess nodded. “They are looking for Pyrrhus Orestes. Remember that only your mother
     and you know he is dead. They seek him because of the renewed fires on the peninsula. They
     are bent on taking your father to the beast, for the legend now goes, and truly, I
     suppose, that no man can kill a bard without dire consequence, without a curse falling to
     him and to his children.”
    She looked at me with a sad, ironic smile.
    “So the bandits are certain Orestes must die to stop the fires.”
    Mother helped me to my feet.
    “I ... I