Margaret Weis,Tracy Hickman,Michael Williams, Teri Williams, Mark Anthony, Todd Fahnestock, Nick O'Donohoe, Richard A. Knaak, Dan Parkinson, Roger E. Moore
The cataclysm
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?