The War of the Lance

I

The country of thought is a pathless forest, is an intricate night of redoubling green, where the best and the worst entangle and scatter like distant light on the face of an emerald like a spark on the breast of the fallen seas.

And yes, it is always like this, for that country is haunted with old supposition, and no matter your 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 the story out of the rumors, the old convolution of breath and forgetting, and then 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. Perhaps it was love in the towers of thought, in the haunts of High Sorcery, in the towering doctrine of moon and spell and convergence: where the dragons dispersed and the Kingpriest hovered in the blind riots of dogma and piety.

Perhaps it was love in the breathing radius, in the forest of crystal where thought tunneled into five vanishing countries, forging the five stones at Istar, at Wayreth, in lofted Palanthas.

Perhaps it was love but more likely thought in the two vanished towers, as the rioting stones dwindled to four, then three, three like the moons in a fracturing orbit, and the towers at Istar and gabled Palanthas echoed and shuddered in the forgotten language, hollow and cold with ancient departures, as high on their turrets the spiders walked, and the moth and the rust corrupted the dream of days.