The Chronicles Of Fone Bone, Oathbreaker

Chapter 4: Birth

Prologue: Faerie Dream

Thorn Harvestar, Veni-yan-cari, Awakened One, watchful even while sleeping, moved through dark, shadowed, and fearful dreams. As horrific shapes flitted through her mind, faded, and appeared again, these words arose before her, and they etched into her heart the artful lines of beginning terror:

Tho turning all his pride to humblesse meeke,

Him selfe before her feete he lowly threw,

And gan for grace and loue of her to seeke:

Which she accepting, he so neare her drew,

That of his game she soone enwombed grew,

And forth did bring a Lion of great might;

That shortly did all other beasts subdew.

With that she waked, full of fearefull fright,

And doubtfully dismayd through that so vncouth sight.

She would never know that the words floated out of Fone Bone's mind to hers as with her Dreaming power she wandered through his sleep. He read them at midnight many years ago when, wearied with study, he bent over one of his esoteric tomes and traced the letters with his finger as he mouthed their strange sounds. They struck his fancy then, though he did not know their import. But Thorn in her wisdom read them with fear, though she would not remember them on waking, for these words had an edge of certainty that comes with prophecy, and it was too late already to thwart their fulfillment...

The night they threw Rictus in the river, the bones prolonged their revelry by making a bonfire of Fone Bone's books.

The heap of texts was not very large, so in the middle of the street, they piled logs and kindling and twigs, lit them, and stoked the blaze. As the fire licked the dry air, they tossed in the moldy paperbacks and heavy, leather-bound tomes. As each work struck the pyre, the sparks gushed upward and lit the bones' gleeful faces; each flash reflected orange in their dark, wet eyes.

Dante roasted in the inferno. Descartes cooked in his own juices. Lord Byron, lying on Goethe, jumped too high and expired in flame. Suetonius, Eusebius, and Herodotus together became an ash heap of history. The bell tolled for John Donne. The scriptures and several Church Fathers smoldered together. Homer burned like Troy. Into the fire went the likes of Emerson, Longfellow, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Whitman, and Browning.

Like Mephistopheles ascending from Hell, an enormous specter reared over the flames. The fire illuminated its underside with a sickly purple, above which great red orbs flashed in the darkness. Raised high above its intimidating bulk was a stark shadow that bore a fearful, flashing beacon. The bones gasped, but then clapped in glee as the phantom took on certain shape.

It was Phoney Bone. He had looped a bridle into Bartleby's mouth and rode in triumph on his back. Bartleby bore the humiliation with shame and patience.

Phoney shouted out to all the bones, "Th' rat is tamed! I have broken his will!" The bones answered with more claps and more cheers.

The flash in Phoney's upraised hand was fire reflected from a large, sharp knife. The Bone cousins owned two relics of their famous ancestor-one was Smiley's beloved banjo, and the other was the knife in Phoney's hand, the sole weapon Big Johnson carried whenever he ventured into the wild, the blade known as Piecemaker.

Phoney planted the knife in the sheath on his hip, reached behind himself, and brought forth another prize, the one he had barely rescued from the bones as they looted his library.