I shall not do so); the kender are as indifferent to who wrote the poetry as they are to anything of honesty and high seriousness; the dwarves as indifferent as they are to anything nonarchitectural or nonmetallic;
and the humans seem to be represented on the issue by Caramon Majere (who at last report believed an ode to be a form of salted cracker) and his wife Tika (of whom, alas, I thought better than this betrayal, this INSULT!). Surely, the poet deserves an account less treacherous, less indifferent, less ignorant. But I grow bitter again, galled by the fading light in my chambers and the endless dripping of the faucets on the south wall, placed there generations ago for Reorx knows what purpose but to gall me with their dripping. I shall fix them this instant; mine is a long and unbearable story, made even less bearable by the perpetual accompaniment of water torture.
As I sit again, I mistrust the passage above, the self-pity that you, my philosophical fellows, may well read into my complaints of neglect, of poor lighting, poor plumbing. I am not a self-pitying gnome, a whiner; my duty is to the name and reputation of Armavir, regardless of my discomfort, of the water knee-deep in these chambers, of the scant light in the chamber from the holes through which, in a far better time than ours, wires and helmets dangled with hope and promise. His biography and the notes toward an annotated text of his poetry will be my testament, the testament of our people that the tides of history shall not overwhelm us before we recover these songs as our own.
II. Of Armavir The Poet
A poet is not born but made, as another Gnomish philosopher once said,9 and our Armavir was no exception. Born in the midst of the great Gnomish Industrial Revelation (267 A.C.), he was a pampered and protected child who could have expected a Life Quest in keeping with those of his family — a career as an optical illusion inventor or a winch facilitator. Instead, as he said once in a playful moment, he became a topical allusion vendor and a wench facilitator — translated ungraciously by one human,10 who never understood his sensitive and generous poetic soul, as "a gossip and a skirt-chaser."
As the youngest of three children, Armavir's life was scarred by early tragedy, his father entangled and dragged to death through a malfunctioning pulley system while facilitating a winch (rumors abounding that he was tied to the fatal rope by a jealous husband), an older brother mistaking the reflection of an onyx ornamental pool for actual water and, clad only in swimsuit and water wings, plunging to his death from atop a fifty-foot stalagmite, an older sister (who, alas, promised in her meager thirteen years to be the genuine beauty of the family) catapulted to her untimely end by an experimental steam-powered seesaw. Needless to say, it was the lad's mother (the charming and still activeQuacumqueviamvirtutepetivitsuccessum
9. And in saying so, assured another gem that would fall from the mouth of a human!
10. Otik Sandahl the Innkeeper. I quote not to give merit to what the innkeeper has said, but to show how petty and unforgiving prejudice can shape history. We historians strive to be generous; after all, I have forgiven Otik's watering the beer in the Inn of the Last Home.
feminadiranegat)11 who removed him early from the rough life of mirrors and exploratory physics, leaving him forever with a mistrust of mirages (his poems, as well the reader knows, circle obsessively, skeptically around the image of foxfire) and an even greater mistrust of simple machines.
Isolated by circumstance, by maternal decision, the lad found his chief source of delight in the conversations around him: the retelling of the legends of Krynn we all remember from childhood, those stories beginning with the famous phrase, "The elves tell it otherwise, but this is how it happened"; the recitals of name-histories and genealogies (it is rumored that young Armavir went sleepless for a month to hear three genealogies in their entirety, and that he was "never quite right afterwards");12 but most of all he enjoyed the gossip, of which his mother was chief author, editor, and judge.
Lest this sound like the standard autho-biography,13 the repetition of the same tired story in which a child