The Awakening of History : 05
Then Klane was troubled for he was afraid of what History could do and he was afraid too of the part that he might have played in the awakening of History, though he still did not comprehend the full pattern of his fate. The giant continued.
“The seers of Kalonia knew that I was destined to walk the Earth again and they played their part when they raised you to be my champion. They were themselves the weakness in the schemes the Guardians had set in place.
"All the other Enclaves had simple tasks but the seers were charged with a labour which was at once futile and self defeating. The station of seers sought to predict the future in a world where there could be no future. The Guardians had set them there to look for evidence that I might be returning so that the other Enclaves could more thoroughly ensure I did not. Yet, predicting trends within the Great Forgetting is like trying to build a house with water. It is an attempt to deny the very thing which the Great Forgetting imposed. The Guardians thought they were being very clever incorporating seers into the Enclaves. They thought they had provided insurance which would guarantee I could never awake. But as so often with security, what looks like an additional cast iron precaution can be the very weakness that undermines the whole system.
"The seers grew bored. They had been set to watch where vision was impossible. And because it was in their nature to understand the future they had, themselves, a more thorough understanding of the past than the other Enclaves and a more complete understanding of me. Some of them even had sympathy for me despite the task the Guardians had assigned them. Over the long age of the Great Forgetting it was those seers who saw that for the future to mean anything and thus for their existence to have a significant purpose there must be records of the past. There must, in short, be me - History. They laid their plans to reawaken me and through a combination of the chance arrival of Orietta at the station and the improvisations of Hirilow you became the fulcrum in those plans.
"When Gyrun reported his station to the Conclave and Kalonia was destroyed it might have seemed that the silence of the Great Forgetting would continue unchanged; that I might have stirred in my sleep but returned to it again. Yet Hirrilow had foreseen that the nudge that had been given to me by the sacrifice of Kalonia would rouse me fully in time. By using the Riders as their necessary agents in Kalonia’s destruction the other Enclaves had taught them knowledge they could not take back. Then too there was you. Klane Kalonia, the gadfly stinging the Enclaves, the instrument of the vengeance of Kalonia – a tiny thing yet a fate heavy thing. It was you, Klane, who were destined to end the Great Forgetting!”
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