Dan Parkinson - Dragonlance Tales 2 - The Reign of Istar

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DRAGONLANCE TALES II

Volume One

THE REIGN OF ISTAR

1992

TSR, Inc.

OCR'ed by Alligator

croc@aha.ru

Paladine, you see the evil that SURROUNDS ME!

You have been witness to the calamities that have been the

scourge of Krynn.... You must see now that this doctrine of

balance will not work!

"... I can sweep evil from this world! Destroy the ogre

races! Bring the wayward humans into line! Find new

homelands far away for the dwarves and the kender and the

gnomes, those races not of your creation....

"... I demand that you give me, too, the power to drive

away the shadows of evil that darken the land!"

So the Kingpriest prayed on the day of the Cataclysm.

He was a good man, but intolerant, proud. He believed

his way to be the right way, the only way, and insisted that

everyone else - including the gods - follow his thinking.

Those who disagreed with him were, by definition, evil

and, according to the law, must be "converted" or

destroyed. The stories in this volume deal with the effects

of such edicts and beliefs on the people of Ansalon at the

time prior to the Cataclysm.

Michael Williams begins this series, appropriately,

with a prophecy for the last days in "Six Songs for the

Temple of Istar."

"Colors of Belief," by Richard A. Knaak, tells the story

of a young knight who travels to Istar in search of the truth.

He finds it, though not quite in the way he expected.

A crusty old trainer of young knights must cope with a

most unorthodox recruit in "Kender Stew," by Nick

O'Donohoe.

"The Goblin's Wish," by Roger E. Moore, is a tale of a

disparate band of refugees, driven together by need, who

almost find the power to overcome evil. Almost.

"The Three Lives of Horgan Oxthrall," by Douglas

Niles, continues the theme of unlikely allies, forced to band

together in the face of a common enemy, as told by a clerk

to Astinus.

Nancy Varian Berberick writes about alliances of a

more intriguing nature in "Filling the Empty Places."

Dan Parkinson tells how the small and seemingly

insignificant can end up playing an important role in

history in "Off Day."

Our novella, "The Silken Threads," reveals the fate of

the true clerics and tells how Nuitari, the guardian of evil

magic, attempts to thwart the ambitions of the black-robed

wizard known as Fistandantilus.

We are delighted to be visiting Krynn once again,

along with many of the original members of the

DRAGONLANCER game design team and some new

friends we met along the way. We hope you enjoy THE

REIGN OF ISTAR and that you will join us for further

journeys through Krynn in subsequent volumes in this

series.

Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

Six Songs For the Temple of Istar

Michael Williams

According to legend, the author of these songs is the

obscure Silvanesti bard Astralas, born about the time of the

Proclamation of Manifest Virtue. Well over a century old

when his voyage commenced, the elven prophet supposedly

set sail for Istar shortly before the Edict of Thought

Control, returning with a series of confused and confusing

visions of an impending disaster. He vanished under

mysterious circumstances around the time of the

Cataclysm; some say that he was destroyed by the elven

priestesses of Istar, acting in accordance with the edict.

Some also say that in the nightmare days of chaos that

followed the Cataclysm, Astralas traveled the forests of

Ansalon, forever reciting these songs. The fifth of the songs

- the account of the visions themselves - occurs in more

than a hundred oral versions throughout the continent. This,

however, is the only known manuscript version.

Quivalen Sath

Archivist of The Qualinesti

Poetic Records

Astralas, called into song

by the fluted god

Branchala of the leaves,

called when I haunted

the woods of Silvanost,

two thousand and sixty years

since the signing of scrolls,

since the sheathing of armies.

O when the god called me,

the twin moons crossed

on the prow of my ship,

and the ocean was red on silver,

encircling light

upon inarticulate light

from the settled darkness

rushing, awaiting my song.

And O when the god called me,

this was my singing,

my prophecy compelled

in a visitation of wind.

The language of wind

is one tongue only,

pronounced in the movement

of cloud and water,

voiced in the rattle of leaves

in the breath between waiting

and memory, it stalks

elusive as light and promise.

The language of wind

is the vanishing year

preserved in recollection,

and always it yearns

for a season the heart

might have been in its wild anointing.

And the wind is always your heartbeat,

is breathing remote

as the impassive stars,

and it moves from arrival to leaving,

leaving you one song only:

OH, THAT WAS THE LANGUAGE OF WIND,

you say, and WHAT DOES IT MEAN

TO THE LEAVES AND THE WATER,

always, WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

So it found me the first time

at the banks of Thon-Thalas,

at the last edge of river,

after the ministries

of inkwell and tutor,

after the damaged heirloom of days,

when the long thoughts burrow

and the childhood dances

on dark effacements of memory,

losing the self in the dance.

I remembered too much, unabled

for the sword and buckler,

for spellbook and moon,

for altar and incense,

for the birds' veiled grammar

and the seasons' alembic,

and always the river

was telling me telling me

COME, ASTRALAS, COME TO THE WATERS:

I AM THE LAST HOME, it was saying,

THE REFUGE OF DREAMS

AND THE SLEEP OF REASON.

COME TO MIDCURRENT, ASTRALAS.

I SHALL CARRY YOU PAST YOUR FAILURES.

COME TO MIDCURRENT AND OPEN YOUR ARMS

AS YOU FALL INTO SPINDRIFT,

TO MOVEMENT, TO LIGHT ON THE WATER,

TO WATER ITSELF, ENRAPTURED AND LOST

AS THE WHOLE WORLD VANISHES.

And always the river

spoke like this, always the dark current

lulling the heart and the mind

into that undertow

where the homelands shift

behind you and fade,

and you think they have vanished

in the necessity of rivers,

in the battlements of forest,

so that if you return

to recover your path

you are lost in the maze

of leaf and inevitable current,

of fore and aft,

of the homelands always receding.

So spoke the river,

and darkly I hearkened,

suspended in darkness,

in the heart's surrender.

A boat for the passage

I began to fashion,

hides stripped in the lime pits

sealed with tallow

and stitched by the tendon of flax

as the awl and the needle

passed through and over

the supple and skeletal wood:

The sails bellied forth

in carnivorous winds,

and in dark, in surrender,

the ship moved rudderless,

launched on insensible currents,

borne to the South

where the Courrain covers

the edge of the world.

And borne to the South

I lay on the deck,

and the boat was a cradle, a bride's bed,

a gray catafalque carried into the night,

it was strong wine and medicine,

sleep past remembrance

and past restoration,

and as I lay down

in the veinwork of halyards

I decided to rise up no longer.

And the date of my death

was my embarkation.

III

Something there is

in the rudderless sailing,

abandoning hope

as the husk of desire,

architectures of boat and body

coalesce with the water

and the disburdening wind.

In the south, the sails filled with words

and the boat took wing

above the denial of waters.

Softly the wind spoke

under the pulse of the sails:

COME, ASTRALAS, RIDE INTO PROPHECY:

I AM THE BREATH OF A GOD,

the wind was saying,

THE SOURCE OF DREAMS

AND THE WEBWORK OF REASON.

ASTRALAS, OPEN YOUR ARMS:

I SHALL PASS THROUGH YOUR FINGERS

AS BRINDLED LIGHT,

AS A VISION FROM THE BROWS OF A WEARY KING.

HASTEN TO ISTAR, DOMED AND TEMPLED,

WHERE SUNLIGHT REFRACTS

ON BRONZE AND SILVER,

ON CRYSTAL AND BURNISHED IRON.

TEN VISIONS THERE

YOU SHALL READ AND INTERPRET,

IN THAT COMFORTABLE CITY

WHERE TRUTH WITHOUT PAIN

GOVERNS THE SPAN OF THE HAND,

GLITTERS LIKE MOONLIGHT

OVER IMMOVABLE WATERS.

BUT YOU, ASTRALAS,

IMPRESSED FOR YOUR TERRIBLE VOYAGE,

CANNOT MAKE TRUCE WITH THE WIND AND THE WATER

IN THE BREATH OF YOUR VEINS,

BECAUSE THEY ARE WITH YOU FOREVER.

The trees wept blood

at my departure,

staining the whiteness

of birches and butternut,

glittering dark on the maple and oak,

blood that was falling

like leaves in a thousand countries,

greater than augury,

sprung from prophetic wounds,

as I sailed through the mouth

of ancient Thon-Thalas

like a prayer into endless ocean.

In the mazed and elaborate swirl

of omens, of long prophecies,

comes a time when you stand

in the presence of oracles,

but what they foretell

is mirrors and smoke.

When I reached the Courrain

I was standing on deck,

despair having moved

to the country of faith,

and slowly the coast took a shape

and a name, as the forest

dwindled to Silvanost,

green on water on green.

At long last, to portside

lay the watch fires of Balifor,

the manhandling country of kender,

of hoopak and flute

and rifled treasuries.

The smoke from the coastline

mingled with clouds from the mountains

in the high air resolving

to nebulous hammer and harp,

to veiled constellations,

as the shores of Balifor

sighed with departures of gods.

North and west along the coast,

cradled by pine-scented wind,

by infusion of hemlock,

the long plains climbed

into mountainous green,

and everywhere forest and ocean,

ocean and forest twined

with the westernmost haze

of the damaged horizons,

until the traveler's fancy

supposes Silvanost rising again

in dreams of retrieval,

but instead it is priest-ridden Istar,

sacrifice-haunted, where freedom is incense,

the long smoke rising

destroyed in its own celebrations.

There in the branching seas,

in warm waters harmful and northern,

the wind took me westward

skirting a desolate land.

Now the sea is a level

and heartless country,

boiling with unsteady fires:

The salt air smothers

the coastal lights,

but the mast, the shipped oars,

ignite with the corposant,

and all through the water

a green incandescence,

and often at night

the coastline is dark, obscured

by the luminous reef

by the Phoenix of Habbakuk,

low in the canceling west,

and the wind and the water

are borrowed and inward as light.

And on those same nights,

on the face of the waters,

unexplainable darkness

embarks from the starboard to port

like a dream beneath memory

as though from the ocean

a new land is rising, proclaimed

by the distant and alien

calls of the whales.

The compass needle

flutters and falls

into vertiginous waters,

and waking to sunlight

fractured on spindrift,

the impervious jade

of the ocean below you,

you dismiss the night, you turn it away,

which is why this song

returns to you quietly

at full noon, when the assembled sea

is changing past thought and remembrance

above the eternal currents.

And now the northerlies

rising fierce, equatorial,

the madman's wind,

the mistrals of prophecy,

guiding me into the bay.

Karthay tumbled by to the portside,

the city of harbors

where the sorcerer's tower

waits out the erosion of mountains,

as the northerlies lifted

my boat from the waters' embrace.

Into the Bay of Istar we rushed

like an unforeseen comet,

like a dire thing approaching

the webbed and festering streets,

the harbor's edge

where the wind sailed over me,

calming the vessel

at the feet of the mountainous piers:

where the wind sailed over me,

catching the web of the kingdom

as it blew where it wished,

and none could tell

where it came or went,

and it dove through the alleys,

vaulted the towers,

and lay waste the house

of the last Kingpriest.

The augurers took it

as one immutable sign,

to add to the bloodtears

of alder and vallenwood,

to the pillared eruptions

of campfire and forge,

to the flight of the gods

and the gods returning.

And the sound of my coming

was a warning sign.

Ten visions, O Istar, lie sleeping

in the great crystal dome

of your Kingpriest's Temple,

where the walls recede from the plumb line,

where foundations devolve

through corundum through quartz,

through limestone through clay,

to the half-fallen dreams of foundation.

Ten visions lie sleeping

and my song has awakened them all.

For my words are the leveling wind,

are the blood of the trees

and the fire on the shores,

the gods walk in my song,

where ten visions waken

in the hands of my singing:

I offer them, glittering, shattered,

and the gods break in my hands.

Istar, your army in Balifor

is a gauntlet, clenched

on a quicksilver heirloom.

Your priests in Qualinost

are dazzlements of glass

fractured on red velvet.

Your light hand in Hylo

steals breath from the cradle:

Ice on the glove.

In Silvanost, the white thighs of the women

wade through the muddied waters

of Thon-Thalas.

Your sword arm in Solamnia

entangles in filaments,

in the spider's alley.

Your children in Thoradin

dream away ancestries

of green earth and sun.

The shards of remembered Ergoth

collect to a broken vessel

from dispersion they call the planet's twelve corners.

One name on the lips of Thorbardin

the rows of teeth

unmarked gravestones.

Your fingers in Sancrist

fumble the intricate hilt

of a borrowed sword.

But, Istar, the last song

is yours, the song at the center of songs:

A bleached bone on the altar.

And last generation of Istar,

pure generation,

born of bright stones

drawn from the crown

of a mountebank's hat,

whose goodness is ordinance,

precise, mathematical,

stripped of the elements

in the hearts fire

and the earth of the body,

in the water of blood

and the air's circumference:

You have passed through your temple

unharmed until now,

but now all of Istar

is strung on our words

on your own conceiving

as you pass from night

to awareness of night

to know that hatred is the calm of philosophers

that its price is forever

that it draws you through meteors

through winter's transfixion

through the blasted rose

through the shark's water

through the black compression of oceans

through rock

through magma

to yourself to an abscess of nothing

that you will recognize as nothing

that you will know is coming again and again

under the same rules.

So says the wind

in one tongue only,

pronounced in the movement

of cloud and water,

given voice by the rattle of leaves.

In the breath between waiting

and memory it stalks

elusive as light and promise.

So says the wind

in the long year preserved

in the heart'srecollection,

and always it yearns

for another and blessed year

that the heart might have been

in its wild anointing.

And the wind is always your heartbeat,

is breathing remote

as the impassive stars,

and it moves from arrival to leaving,

leaving you one song only.

OH, THAT WAS THE LANGUAGE OF WIND,

you say, AND WHAT DOES IT MEAN

TO THE LEAVES AND THE WATER,

and ALWAYS is what it means.

Colors of Belief

Richard A. Knaak

Arryl Tremaine stepped into the common room of

Timon's Folly, the inn where he was staying, and

immediately noted the eyes that fixed on him. He was clad

in simple traveling clothes. Those in the inn could not

know for certain that he was a Knight of Solamnia, but they

COULD mark him as a foreigner. That in itself brought

attention enough. Had he not prudently decided to leave his

armor back in his room, the rest of the patrons would not

have pretended that they were looking anywhere but at him.

Ignoring the others, he marched toward the innkeeper,

a heavy, bustling man named Brek. The innkeeper was the

only one to give him any sort of greeting, likely because he

felt a kinship with the young knight. Brek's grandfather had

been the Timon whose folly had earned the inn its name -

and likewise drove the family to leave Solamnia. Timon

had been a Knight of the Sword, like Tremaine.

Tremaine was of the opinion that Timon's line had

grown much too soft in only two generations.

"Good evening, Sir Tremaine," the man said in a voice

that carried well. Now all the patrons looked up.

"Master Brek." Arryl Tremaine's own voice was low and

just a hint sharp at the moment. "I have asked you to not

use my title."

Solamnic Knights were a rare sight in the land of Istar,

much less the holy city of the same name. Arryl, coming

from the more secluded southwest of his own country, had

never truly understood why. Both the knighthood and the

Kingpriest - he who was ruler of Istar - served the same

lord, the god of light and goodness, Paladine. Once

compatible, the two servants no longer seemed to be able to

work side by side. There were rumors that the church had

grown jealous of the knights' power, and the knights

jealous of the church's wealth. A Tremaine never bent low

enough to believe such rabble-rousing. The House of

Tremaine might have seen better days, but the pride of the

family was still very much in flower. The young knight had

come to Istar three days earlier to learn the truth.

"My apologies, Master Tremaine. Have you decided to

take your meal here? We've not seen you since you arrived.

My wife and daughters fear you find something amiss with

their cooking."

Arryl had no desire to talk about either food or the

innkeeper's family, especially where Master Brek's

daughters were concerned. Like many a woman, they were

taken with the young knight's handsome, albeit cool, visage

and his tall, well-honed form. Arryl in no way encouraged

them and, in point of fact, found the thought of mixing base

desires with his holy trek to Istar sacrilegious.

"I have come merely to ask some information of you

before I retire for the day."

"So early? It is barely dark, Master." Brek thought the

knight a little odd. It was clear that the innkeeper either had

forgotten or had never been told by his grandfather about

the daily rituals of a Solamnic Knight.

Arryl frowned. He wanted answers, not more questions

about his personal habits. "I saw a man arrested by the city

guard, a man who had simply been standing by his cart and

selling fruit. I have made purchases myself from him in the

past day. The soldiers gave no reason for his arrest,

something unheard of in my country. He was chained and

dragged - "

"I'm certain there was a PROPER reason for it, Master

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DRAGONLANCETALESIIVolumeOneTHEREIGNOFISTAR1992TSR,Inc.AllRightsReserved.OCR'edbyAlligatorcroc@aha.ruPaladine,youseetheevilthatSURROUNDSME!YouhavebeenwitnesstothecalamitiesthathavebeenthescourgeofKrynn....Youmustseenowthatthisdoctrineofbalancewillnotwork!"...Icansweepevilfromthisworld!Destroytheogrer...

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Dan Parkinson - Dragonlance Tales 2 - The Reign of Istar

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