Retaking the Vigil (A Poem)

Hi guys! I wanted to share a poem I wrote about retaking the Stone Vigil (Stone Vigil Hard Mode), just for fun. I want to acknowledge up front that I have heavily borrowed or plundered outright--in terms of general structure, themes, meter, rhyme, and even with whole lines taken wholesale--from G. K. Chesterton's poem "Lepanto". I did this deliberately, as an homage; and I would love if more people came to appreciate this great poem as a result. But I want to be explicit about what I'm doing, so as to avoid any deceptive pretensions to literary greatness on my part. ;)



Retaking the Vigil
by Ghalleon Helseth of Balmung


White snows blowing out against the granite walls,
And the Drake of Giruvegan grins and cackles as it falls;
There is laughter like the blizzards in that face of all foes feared,
It shakes the fallen stronghold, filled with corpses rent and seared;
It echoes through the mountaintops and cascades down the coast;
For the final frontier bastion now is fallen to his host.
They have dared the steely virtue of the stalwart Holy See,
They have dashed her northern armies in the icy Bloodbrine Sea,
And the Bishop casts his arms abroad for desperate foreign aid,
And calls the brave of Eorzea to ride for the Crusade.
The Shrouded Elementals, to their Hearers, sayeth "Nay";
The misty-bearded pirates out in Vylbrand turn away;
The Sultan in her palace sups and counts the daily gold,
And the Lord upon the Vigil Stone is laughing in the cold.

Bell gongs softly, in the hills half heard,
Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred,
Where, risen from a dead-end post and half-forgotten stall,
A true knight of Ishgard takes weapons from the wall,
A true and faithful chevalier whose weapons striketh sure,
Who liveth neath the Fury's gaze, because his heart is pure.
In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
Comes up along a winding path the horn of the Crusade.
Deep bells tolling as the guns boom far,
Lord Drillemont of Durendaire is going to the war.
Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold,
In the gloom black-purple, in the sable, in the gold,
Torchlight creeping on the hardened leather drums,
Then the fanfare, then the banners, then the cannons, and he comes.
Lord Drillemont laughing in his gold beard curled,
Spurning every comfort and the thrones of all the world,
Holding his head high with the hope of all the meek.
Dauntless knight without compare!
Evil man and beast, beware!
Lord Drillemont of Durendaire
Is riding to the Keep.

Nidhogg stirreth neath the ice-sheets hoar,
(Lord Drillemont of Durendaire is going to the war.)
His frozen eye begins to search, and blood begins to warm,
He speaketh with his voice that stirs the tempest and the storm,
It courseth through the heavens from the sunset to the morn,
His voice of blood and thunder sent to gather forth the swarm:
His voice through all the Highlands a dread summons sent to bring
Black Gorynich, and Isgebind, and Koshchei on the wing.
Puk and drake and biast fly,
Multiplex of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Bahamut was king.

They rush in brown and crimson from the scorching desert lands,
Where temples to the Boiling God spill blood across the sands;
They rise in cyan roaring from the green hells of the sea
Where drownèd souls and fortunes lost and eyeless creatures be,
On them the scales stick slimy and the orange corals curl,
Departing the dominions of the Serpent of the Whorl;
They rise from depthless yawning cracks in Kobold-stinking smog;
They gather, and they wonder, and give worship to Nidhogg.
And he saith, "Break up the towers where the telescopes abide,
And smash the locks and garrisons where village folk can hide,
And chase the Wroth One’s faithful flock, and butcher every priest,
For lo, Our ancient trouble comes again out of the east.
We have set the seal of fire down on all in Our domain,
A desolate purgation in Our image and Our name.
But a horn is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
The voice that shook Our empire, one thousand years ago:
It is he who scoffs at destiny; who bares his steel at fate:
It is Thordan, it is Haldrath, it is Beltrant at the gate!
It is he whose life is forfeit when the Fury deems it worth:
Sink down your teeth upon him, that our kin may rule the earth."
For he heard bells tolling and he heard guns shake,
(Lord Drillemont of Durendaire whets blade upon the slate.)
In silence and in stillness, prayer;
In warfare, steely glint and glare;
Lord Drillemont of Durendaire
Is gone by Judgment Gate.

The Twelve look down from Heaven on the passes of the north
(Lord Drillemont of Durendaire is girt and going forth.)
Where the grey skies rumble and the torch-lights blaze
And the low folk labor and the sheep go graze.
And the Fury casts Her bolt aloft, and claps Her wings like stone;
The noise goes through Eorzea; the noise is gone alone;
The realm is full of weary beings and loss and aching eyes,
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise.
And fellow killeth fellow on the flats of Carteneau,
And fellow hateth God above, from whom all blessings flow,
And fellow scorneth priest and saint who live forever blest,--
But Lord Drillemont of Durendaire is riding to the west.
Lord Drillemont calls, "ho, hurrah!" along the cloudy coast,
Through the blasting of the trumpet, through the swelling of his host,
The trump resounds with trill and flair!
The hunting hounds hath scent the hare!
Lord Drillemont of Durendaire
Has manned his battle post.

The nobles of the Houses High retire to their estates
(Lord Drillemont of Durendaire is armed and at the gates.)
The walls are hung with portraiture and scented with perfumes,
The fragrance drifts up lazily through furnace-heated rooms.
They sit and dine and laugh and sing and feast on candied sweets,
And rise and take their wives to bed, and sleep on heated sheets.
The mansion walls are proof against the blast of wind and frost,
Proof against the lesser cares of profit and of loss,
For with the stately Houses, only birth and blood afford;
But Lord Drillemont of Durendaire has fired upon the Horde.
Lord Drillemont's hunting, and his hounds have bayed--
Booms away past Coerthas the rumor of his raid.
Gun upon gun, they blare!
Gun upon gun, despair!
Lord Drillemont of Durendaire
Has loosed the cannonade.

The Bishop's in his chapel through the night as battle broke,
(Lord Drillemont of Durendaire is hidden in the smoke.)
The hidden room in man's house where the Twelve sit all the year,
The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.
He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous Cloudy Sea
The shadow of the wingspan of the dreadful enemy;
They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Bell and Castle dark,
They rend manflesh and armor like the gullet of a shark;
And above the Keep are palaces where heretics abide,
And below the Keep are prisons where Ishardians are tied,
Men and women, sick and sunless, all a sobbing race repines
Like a race in sunken cities, like the Kobolds in the mines.
They are flayed alive and burned alive and stripped in stagnant mud,
And, as ending to the torture, they are offered dragon’s blood.
They are countless, voiceless, hopeless, as those fallen headlong sprawled
Beneath the Imperator's boot cast forth from Garlemald.
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell
Where a reptile face looks inward through the lattice of his cell,
And he finds his Gods forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign--
(But Lord Drillemont of Durendaire has burst the battle-line!)
Lord Drillemont slashing from the bloody barricade,
Smearing all the ramparts with the slaughter of his blade,
Scarlet running over like a noble's toppled grail,
Breaking of the fastened doors, and breaching of the gaol,
Thronging of the thousands up from wreckage and debris
Mute for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.

All glory to the Azure's heir!
All glory to Halone the Fair!
Lord Drillemont of Durendaire
Has set his people free!

Faillicie says a quiet prayer and takes her scabbard-band
(Lord Drillemont of Durendaire rides homeward with the van.)
And she sees across a weary land a straggling mountain trail,
Up which a lone adventurer rides onward with a tale.
And she smiles, but not a mocking smile, and settles back her blade....
(But Lord Drillemont of Durendaire rides home from the Crusade.)