Burning Times (Bardic)

By: Tallaen Posted on: February 08, 2005

We wait, huddled in this cellar, backs pressed to cold packed earth
and our breaths reserved for the moment of relief
when the rattle of chain-mail fades, and the heft of booted feet
takes the omen of death a little further down the street,
to another modest house, where more of our kin –
faces we trusted, minds we praised –
shiver, chilled and terrified, in such a hiding-place.

We wait in this dank hole, counted with the vermin
that scurry in the dark and shuffle grimy claws
over our manuscripts – what little we could take
of the work that brought us glory, the work that brought us here,
the little we could save. The damp, the rot, the rats
now eat parchment away. We wait, and longing burns us,
for understanding lost with every crumbling page.

We wait, and waiting burns us, flickering its tongues
over our anxious limbs, impatience its own suffering,
goading us to stand and fight, as though others had not tried.
They went first, our dangerous ones, our strength,
not armed with steel or venom, but with a cannier substance,
opposing the crude fire with a subtler flame.
The armies of the light beat them in numbers, not in right.

Perhaps some of them escaped. The pale and nervous faces
crowded here in the dark are the scholars and librarians,
devout to Chaos in the Word, the last of our Cabal,
those of us who still remain, ringed around an empty hearth.
We who sought enlightenment, in our hiding, are denied,
any torch or fire or candle, whose weak flicker might betray us
to the Church's brutes, the Templars, patrolling in the night.

In this darkness, without fire, we keep deeper fires alive.
We wait, and inside us burn anger, grief, resentment, vengeance,
and these are crueller flames than the pyres of Shallam.
In the fire, we are distilled; in the fire, we are reformed.
Fire incites Entropic currents we've long fostered in ourselves.
We burn, and inside us stirs our intellectual thirst,
and the perilous growing calm of minds with clear intent.