Margaret Weis: The War of the Lance

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

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.

So it was as the centuries gathered and telescoped into the passage of a dozen years, as the bristling heart of Silvanesti festered and doubled and hardened like crystal. And always the promise of Cyan Bloodbane, of the dragon coiled on the crystal globe, always the promise was nothing and nothing and the forest the map of a strangled country, land of stillbirth, of fever, of warped and gangrenous age and of long unendurable dying, until from the North came another invasion of hard light and lances as the Heroes, the Fellowship, the fashioned alliance of elf and dwarf, of human and gnome and kender came to the forest through the nest of nightmare, through the growing entanglement, through bone, through crystal, through all the forgotten banes and allures of the damaged heart, to Silvanost and the disfigured Tower, to Lorac, to the imprisoning Orb, and they freed the Speaker the Tower and town, the forest, the people, the bright orb they freed and like a survivor tumbled the globe through the years through the centuries lodged in the pale hands of others and its old polished carapace bright and reflecting the hourglassed eyes of its ultimate wielder.

But the sands were draining over the Speaker of Suns, and the knowledge of Lorac, vaulted and various, numbered and faceted, descended and simplified into a knowledge of evil, as the forest unfolded, stripped of the long light, bare of bedazzlement and at last Silvanesti was free of his mind, torn from the labyrinth bearing forever the scars of belief to the last syllable of eventual time, and Lorac died in his daughter's arms, his thoughts in the Tower entombed and surrendered, his last wish a burial underneath Silvanost, driving the green from the body's decay, resolving to forest, resolving to Silvanost forever and ever, his enabling ghost to ascribe and deliver the land that he dreamt of, as thought was translated to dream.

And yes, it is always like this, for the country is haunted with old supposition, and no matter the 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 among rumors the story, the old convolution of breath and forgetting, in which 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.

It was a chill night for spring, undoubtedly the reason there were so many people in the inn. The inn wasn't accustomed to such crowds. In fact, it wasn't accustomed to any crowds, for the inn was new, so new that it still smelled of fresh-hewn wood and paint instead of stale ale and yesterday's stew. Called "Three Sheets," after a popular drinking song of the time, the inn was located in — . But where it was located doesn't matter. The inn was destroyed five years later in the Dragon Wars and never rebuilt. Small wonder, for it was on a road little traveled then and less traveled after the dragons leveled the town.