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.

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.