The War of the Lance

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.