The Magic of Krynn

I

Here on the plains where the wind embraces light and the absence of light, where the wind is the voice of the Gods come down, the rumor of song before singing begins, here the people under the winds are wandering ever towards home, forever in movement an old man is singing the song of an absent country, beautiful, heartless as sunlight, cold as imagined winds behind the eye of the rain, and wide before us, my sons and fathers, the song of the country centers and swoops like a hawk in a sleeping land, borne upon hunger and thermals, singing forever, singing: It was not always after the wars, it was a time once when fire did not rise on its own out of the dead grass, a time of waters and of vanishing light, when we did not imagine new country arising out of the long mirage of countries remembered from mother to daughter in a ruinous dream that would not have let this happen, nor did the dance of the moons, the opened hearts of hawks, nor did the wind itself foresee the fires hot as shrew's blood in the veins of the land consuming our dream while we slept in our journeys, while these things came to pass.

The outrunners found the child among waves of grass and darkness, on the night when the moon and the moon wed one another and canceled their light and the sky was black except for a wedge of silver turned like a blade in the heart of the heavens. And the night they found him was his naming night, and the years unnamed were the years behind him, the time among leopards who must have raised him in the waves of grass and darkness, though he did not remember this, did not recount the graves upon graves to which he gave infancy, where he buried the first words of childhood, And the night they found him was his naming night.

Riverwind the name he borrowed, borrowed for him out of the grass and the darkness moving, out of their fear of the sky and the blade of the swallowed moon. And honored he was among families, as the source of the blood was lost in the people, as the path of the eland, the high call of the hawk buried themselves in words and the long wind died at the back of his head as he moved and he moved, as the Que-Shu contained him, becoming his country, as the dream of the Que-Shu wed to his dreaming like dark to the moon, until he remembered the plains and the wind and the wandering only.