| DIRGE OF THE EXILES |

[mmat 7461]

The following piece was discovered, faded and worn, amid the personal effects and stores of Khaine Csarathiare after the latter’s death, and was then passed onto his son Avius. It details an origin tale for the Csarathaire seed and is one of only a few works to survive into the Second Age. If the events alluded to within actually occurred, the piece was almost certainly written in the later fifteenth or sixteenth centuries of the First Age, before Khaine came to Axios.

 

Spoiler

Excuse the 1st grade poetry its my first try

 

 

Amid a river of blood, and an ocean of tears.

Amid an empire’s folly, its cruelty and its cheers.

Malin’s children unnumbered suffered, wept and died.

The end of all things, and the young who cried.

But not all the Mali knelt, content with their fate

The fire-hearted took up steel, and fought back in their hate.

 

As the vindictiveness of war is so wont to do

All this valour did was make the suffering more true.

And so in their despair, the warriors made a choice

To neither fight where they stood, nor give sound to their voice

In anguish they went as one, passing from the land.

Where the warriors would go was left to fate’s hand. 

 

Through forest, across plain and by mountain pass they fled

Until the path before them afflicted the heart with dread.

The depth of the snows and the malice of the ice,

Failed to daunt the exiles through even its cruel device.

But by hunger, by rock, by frost or by fall,

These wretched Mali met their end, as it seemed, one and all.

 

As if lured to their sorrow like a moth to the flame

Did the fell phoenix come and complete this dark game.

Desperate and afraid, the doomed exiles made a plea

For the winged fire to save them, and in return to take the knee.

Willing slaves were thus marked with a firebird on the chest

In its dark service the warriors slew, enslaved and oppressed.

 

So it was that they became as the valah they abhorred

But the fires of revolt stirred and we took up the sword

Our own kin we killed to free them from the beast

In malice and evil, the being saw only its feast.

It burned and seared, scorched and consumed

Until the aspects came and sealed its black tomb.