The Cataclysm Read Online Free Page A

don't understand,” I said. “It's over. He's killed himself and brought down a
     curse on me.”
    L'Indasha waved her hand for silence. “It wasn't the killing that cursed you. It was the
     words - what he said before he died. Now you must go from here - anywhere, the farther,
     the better. But not to Finn's Ear, the bandit king's stronghold on the Caergoth shore.”
    “Why should I leave?” I asked. “They are after my father, not me. I STILL don't understand.“ ”Your scars,” she replied, emphatically,
     impatiently.
    “The whole world will mistake you for your father, because of the scars.”
    “I'll tell them who I really am!” I protested, but the druidess only smiled.
    “They won't believe you,” she said. “They will see only what they expect. Hurry now. FIND
     the truth about Orestes. The finding will save your life and make the past . . .
     unchangeable.”
    I thanked her for her healing and her oracle, and she gave me one last gift - her
     knowledge.
    “Although now you may regret your blood,” she said, “remember that you are the son of a
     bard. There is power in all words, and in yours especially.”
    It was just more puzzlement.
    We climbed, Mother and I, into the sled, moving quickly over thick ice on our way back to
     the cottage. Mother slept, and I guided the dogs and looked into the cloudless skies,
     where Solinari and Lunitari tilted across the heavens. Between them somewhere rode the
     black abscess of Nuitari, though I could not see it.
    The black moon was like the past: an absence waiting to be filled. And looking on the
     skies, the four big dogs grumbling and snorting as they drew us within sight of the
     cottage, I began to understand my scars and my inheritance.
    *****
    Frantically, as I gathered my clothing in the cottage, Mother told me more: that my
     grandfather, Pyrrhus Alecto was no villain. He had kept the Solamnic Oath, had fallen in
     the Seventh Rebellion of Caergoth, in the two hundred and fiftieth year since the
     Cataclysm. She showed me the oldest poem, the one that Arion had taken and transformed.
     The old parchment was eloquent. I read it aloud:
    "Lord Pyrrhus Alecto light of the coast arm of Caergoth father to dreaming 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.
    “And that was all?” I asked. “All of this trouble over a poem?” I hated poetry.
    I gave voice to her answer as she held forth rapidly, as the words slipped from her
     fingers into my breath and voice. “No, Trugon, not over that, over the other one.”
    She did not know the words of the other poem. She had not even seen or heard it. It was
     the poem of trouble, she insisted, crouching nervously by the door of our cottage. It was
     the poem that Father . . .
    “Changed?” She nodded, moving toward Father's old strongbox. “Then Father lied as well as
     betrayed?” Mother shook her head, brushed her hair back. She opened the strongbox. I knew what was inside. Three books, a penny whistle a damaged harp. I had never asked to see them. I hated poetry.
    Mother held up one of the books.
    It was the story of the times since the Rending, since the world had opened under Istar.
     The work of the bard Arion, it was, but more. It was his words and the words of others
     before him: remote names like Gwion and Henricus and Naso, out of the time when Solamnia
     was in confusion.
    The book was battered, its leather spine scratched and cracked. As Mother held it out to
     me, it opened by nature to a page near its end, as though use and care had trained it to
     fall at the same spot, to the same lines.
    She gestured that the lines were in Father's hand. Indeed, the whole book was in Father's
     hand, for neither Arion nor any of the bards before him had written down their songs and
     tales, preferring to pass them on to a