The Dragonstone

CHAPTER 29

Embraced on the north and west and south by an enfolding arm of the Grimwall Mountains, and on the east by the trail leading upward into Kaagor Pass, there lies a woodland of silver birch and trembling aspen and splendid high pine. It is modest as Mithgarian forests go, measuring but some forty miles north to south and thirty east to west, yet it sits like a jewel in a cup, a small treasure to be cared for, cherished, loved. It is the Silverwood.

It has existed for unknown millennia, here in this sheltered mountain bowl. And in the year that Arin camped in these woods-1E9253-the Drimm had just begun delving the Drimmenholt called Kachar at the end of a vale of the Silverwood along its northwestern flank.

This fact would not be mentioned at all but for what was to come. For in the year 3E1602, some four thousand one hundred twenty-four years after Arin passed along its eastern flank, in a war between Drimm and humans, this Silverwood, this precious jewel, would be all but destroyed by raging Dragon fire.