Table Of ContentDragonlance
Tales II
Volume III
The WAR of the LANCE
MARGARET WEIS AND TRACY
HICKMAN
Introduction
The queen of Darkness SEEKS TO REENTER the
world. Her minions of evil once more grow strong and
powerful. Dragons return to Krynn as war sweeps
across the land. Every person is called upon to face the
evil. Some rise to the challenge. Some fall. But each is, in
his or her own way, a hero.
Michael Williams delves into the soul of the tortured
king of Silvanesti in the epic poem, "Lorac."
"Raistlin and the Knight of Solamnia" by Margaret
Weis and Tracy Hickman tells how the young mage
helped a stern knight learn a hard lesson. (Originally
published in DRAGON(R) Magazine, Issue 154, February
1990.)
Roger Moore writes about the vengeful quest of a
revenant in "Dead on Target."
Mara, Queen of Thieves, sneaks into Mountain
Nevermind in search of "War Machines" by Nick
O'Donohoe.
Dan Parkinson continues the misadventures of the
Bulp clan, as those intrepid gully dwarves search for
"The Promised Place."
Jeff Grubb relates (be warned!) a gnome story in
"Clockwork Hero."
"The Night Wolf" by Nancy Varian Berberick is a tale
of three friends who share a dark and deadly secret.
Mark Anthony's "The Potion Sellers" have a bitter pill
of their own to swallow when the wrong people come to
believe in their fake cure-alls.
Richard Knaak writes the story of an evil priest of
Chemosh, trying to recover dread magical artifacts from
beneath the Blood Sea, in "The Hand That Feeds."
Foryth Teal, valiant scribe of Astinus, returns to pro-
vide us with an exciting account of "The Vingaard Campaign"
by Douglas Niles.
And finally, Tasslehoff Burrfoot tells "The Story That
Tasslehoff Promised He Would Never, Ever, Ever Tell" to
the kender's good friends, Margaret Weis and Tracy
Hickman.
We hope you are enjoying our return to Krynn as
much as we are. Thanks to all of you for your support.
You are the ones who have made this return journey pos-
sible. We look forward to traveling with you again in the
future.
Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
Lorac
Michael Williams
The country of thought
is a pathless forest,
is an intricate night
of redoubling green,
where the best and the worst
entangle and scatter
like distant light
on the face of an emerald
like a spark on the breast
of the fallen seas.
And yes, it is always like this,
for that country is haunted
with old supposition,
and no matter your stories,
no matter the rumors
of legend and magic
that illumine you through
the curtain of years,
you come to believe
in the web of yourself
that history twines
in the veins of your fingers,
that it knits all purpose,
all pardon and injury,
recovers the lapsed
and plausible blood,
until finally, in the midst of believing,
you contrive the story
out of the rumors,
the old convolution
of breath and forgetting,
and then you will say,
beyond truth and belief,
THIS IS WHAT IT MEANS,
FOR ONCE AND AT LAST
WHAT IT ALWAYS MEANT,
NO MORE THAN I KNEW
FROM THE WORLD'S BEGINNING
IS ALL THAT IT MEANS FOREVER.
Perhaps it was love
in the towers of thought,
in the haunts of High Sorcery,
in the towering doctrine
of moon and spell and convergence:
where the dragons dispersed
and the Kingpriest hovered
in the blind riots
of dogma and piety.
Perhaps it was love
in the breathing radius,
in the forest of crystal
where thought tunneled into
five vanishing countries,
forging the five stones
at Istar, at Wayreth,
in lofted Palanthas.
Perhaps it was love
but more likely thought
in the two vanished towers,
as the rioting stones
dwindled to four, then three,
three like the moons
in a fracturing orbit,
and the towers at Istar
and gabled Palanthas
echoed and shuddered
in the forgotten language,
hollow and cold
with ancient departures,
as high on their turrets
the spiders walked,
and the moth and the rust
corrupted the dream of days.
II
But before the towers
fell to abandonment,
before the fire,
the incense of destruction,
when the Tower at Istar
blossomed in magic
and durable light,
the parapets shone
in the lonely notions
of Lorac Caladon,
Speaker of Stars.
Restless in Silvanost,
drawn by cold light,
by the intricate forest of magic,
to the North he came,
to glittering Istar
where the tests of High Sorcery
awaited his judgment,
his ordained mathematics,
and the first test past,
and the second surmounted,
he stood as if satisfied
high on the parapets
in doubtful, striated light,
the vaunt of his intellect
over the globe of the city,
where the green luminescence
of the dangered orb
called to him out of the Tower's heart.
In the pathless forest
at the end of all centuries,
he would hear the song
as it tumbled from thought
into faceted memory,
singing, perpetually singing,
AFTER THE SECOND
THERE IS NO OTHER.
O THE TESTS ARE BEHIND YOU
SPEAKER OF SUNS
AND THE SONG OF THE ORB
IS THE SONG OF YOUR MIND
IN THIS ANCIENT TOWER
HOLLOW AND LOVELESS
WITH LONG DEPARTURES.
O THE TESTS ARE BEHIND YOU
SPEAKER OF SUNS
BUT I SHALL LIE HERE
the orb said, shimmering
AS HISTORY FOLDS
IN THESE FLOURISHING WALLS
AS THE TOWER CRUMBLES
AND WITH IT THE MIND
THE FIRST HIGH BATTLEMENTS
THE HOUSE OF THE GODS
BUT I SHALL LIE HERE
AS THE FOREST WITHERS
AS THE PLAINS DESCEND
INTO WINTER AND NOTHING
UNLESS THE SONG OF YOUR THOUGHTS
WHICH IS EVERYTHING, IS THE WORLD,
CONTROLS AND SUBDUES
AND INFORMS THE MYSTERY.
TAKE ME TO SILVANOST
SPEAKER OF SUNS,
TAKE ME TO FREEDOM
TO THE COUNTRY OF GREEN ON GREEN.
Perhaps it was love
in the crystal heart,
in the refraction of light
and beguiling light,
love meeting love in his long belief,
in dire mathematics,
in the mapped parabola
of the trining moons,
but there in the Tower
six reasons converged
the hand of the prophet
the nesting heart of his will
the hurdling thought
the summoning crystal
and always the ruinous moment,
all of them settling
in grim alignment,
the orb the sixth
like a heart in his hand,
like a fluttering light
a firebrand he carried
to ignited Silvanost
in the numbered days.
I AM BRINGING THEM FIRE,
he said to himself,
I AM BRINGING THEM LIGHT
IN THE OLD GODS' STORY.
I AM THE FIRST
I WILL SAVE THEM
IN THE RISING EARTH
I WILL SAVE THEM
AND THE OLD WORLD PIVOTS
AWAY FROM MY GUIDING HAND.
So he said to himself,
and the shapeless horizon
shaded to green
and redoubling green
as out of his last dreams
arose Silvanesti,
tangible, fractured in light.
III
And outside the forest
the world collapsed,
a mountain of fire
crashed like a comet
through jewelled Istar,
through the endless city,
and the Tower, unmanned and unhouseled,
split like a dry stalk
in the midst of the ruinous flames,
and out of the valleys
the mountains erupted,
the seas poured forever
into the graves of mountains,
the long deserts sighed
on abandoned floors of the seas,
and the highways of Krynn descended
into the paths of the dead.
As hail and fire
in a downpour of blood
tumbled to earth,
igniting the trees and the grass,
as the mountains were burning,
as the sea became blood
as above and below us
the heavens were scattered,
as locusts and scorpions
wandered the face of the planet,
Silvanost floated on islands of thought,
immaculate memory
gabled in cloud and dreaming,
untouched by the fire,
by the shocks of the Rending,
and from tower to tower
from the Tower of Sorcery
down to the Tower of Stars,
drowsy in thinking, Lorac imagined
an impossible dream of salvation,
a country bartered in magic,
renewed in his mind
to a paradise won
in a ranging study.
And so it appeared in the orb,
in the waking hours,
in the suddenly secret
lodging of light
as the globe lay buried,
masked and unfabled
in the Tower of Stars,
the ancestral tower
of Speakers, of Silvanost,
buried for centuries.
While the continent burned
and the people of Qualinost
wandered through ash
and the outer darkness,
Silvanost floated
at the edge of their sight,
absent and glorious,
down to the edge of their dreams.
Lorac watched from the Tower of Stars,
from the heart of the crystal,
his eye on the face
of the damaged world
like a rumor of history
he was forgetting
lost in the fathomless
maze of the orb.
But often at night
when the senses faltered
and the polished country
altered and coiled,
the shape of the dream
was the Speaker's reflection:
The estranging trees
were nests of daggers,
the streams black and clotted
under a silent moon
that mourned for the day
and the fierce definition
of sunlight and knowledge
where the trees and towns
were named and numbered
and always, implacably
intended and purposed,
far from the tangle
of nightmare, the shadow
and weave of the forest
that wrangled to light
in the dreams of Lorac,
invading the day
with the glitter of flint,
subverting the pale
and anonymous sun.
IV
Then to the North
an evil arose
in the cloud-wracked skies,
for the Dragon Highlords
sent sword and messenger,
firebrand and word
to the Tower of Stars,
to rapt Silvanesti,
to the dwindling porches
of the elf king's ear,
promising peace
and the forest's asylum
in the discord of armies,
promising Silvanost free
in exchange for the promise
of silence, inaction,
for a nodding head
on the Green Throne.
And Lorac agreed,
his eye on the hooded orb,
where miraculous silence
promised a blessing of spears,
an end to all promise,
the dragons by summer.
And so Silvanesti
was emptied of silver,
emptied of lives
and the long dreaming blood
of its last inhabitants
as they took to the boats,
to the skiffs, to the coracles,
aimless on water
as cloudy as oracles
and the Wildrunners fought
in the wake of the water,
where their last breath billowed
in the spreading sails.
Alhana Starbreeze, the Speaker's daughter,
stood at the helm
in the silver passage
as they sailed to the South
on the Paths of Astralas,
on the bard's memory,
on history's spindrift,
and Lorac behind them
ordered his soldiers
to leave the unraveling land
in the last of the ships,
for there in the dark
called the forest, called Silvanost,
the elm and aeterna
choiring like nightingales,
singing this song
to his turning ear,
AFTER THE LAST TEST
THERE IS NO OTHER.
O THE TESTS ARE BEHIND YOU
SPEAKER OF SUNS
AND THE SONG OF THE ORB
IS THE SONG OF YOUR MIND
IN THIS ANCIENT TOWER
HOLLOW AND LOVELESS
WITH LONG DEPARTURES.
O THE TESTS ARE BEHIND YOU
SPEAKER OF SUNS
BUT I SHALL LIE HERE
AS HISTORY FOLDS
IN THESE FLOURISHING WALLS
AS THE TOWER CRUMBLES
AND WITH IT THE MIND
THE FIRST HIGH BATTLEMENTS
THE HOUSE OF THE GODS
BUT I SHALL LIE HERE
AS THE FOREST WITHERS
AS THE PLAINS DESCEND
INTO WINTER AND NOTHING
UNLESS THE SONG OF YOUR THOUGHTS
WHICH IS EVERYTHING, IS THE WORLD,
CONTROLS AND SUBDUES
AND INFORMS THE MYSTERY.
KEEP ME IN SILVANOST
SPEAKER OF SUNS,
KEEP ME IN FREEDOM
IN THE COUNTRY OF GREEN ON GREEN.
It lay in the chambers
secret in stars,
above it the Tower
and a labyrinth of legends,
and the freedom it promised
at its crystalline heart
was green ice beckoning,
flame of the distant voice.
And drawn by its music,
by the unearthly chiming
of crystal and shifting thought
the Speaker of Suns descended alone
to the heart of the Tower
where time and the forest
and a shaft of moonlight
collapsed on the orb,
and he reached for the crystal
as a thousand voices
rose from its brimming fire,
all of them singing
the lure of the possible,
all of them singing
the song he imagined,
and his thoughts were a fortress,
phantasmal ramparts
of maple and ash and belief,
in his daylit dreams
the armies were breaking,
the edge of the forest
bristled with leaf and invention,
and summoned, he reached
for the crystal
as the globe and the world
dissolved in his terrible grasp.
He knew when the bones
of his fingers ignited,
when green fire danced
on the back of his hands,
in the damage of arteries,
and he knew at once
that the fire was the heart of his error,
that neither the strength
nor the words nor the mind
could govern the magic.
But the shadows of Silvanost
faded from green into red,
into brown and untenable gold,
the orb was a prison
and above Thon-Thalas
the long wingbeat
of the dragon approached,
and the trees bent and bowed
in a sinister wind
as Lorac beheld this
all through the light of the orb,
and the dragon, the Bloodbane,
came with its whispers,
and under its words
the old stones tilted,
and the Tower of Stars,
as white as a sepulchre,
twisted and torted
