The War Of The Lance

Dragonlance - Tales 2 3 - The War of The Lance Various

DRAGONLANCE Tales 2 Volume Three

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 provide 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 possible. We look forward
to traveling with you again in the future.

Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

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.

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.

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.

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 as the trees rained
blood and the animals shrieked their cries like torn metal in a charmed and perpetual
midnight.