As the first winds of winter blew around him, cold and clawing, he turned to look at the Tower of the Stars, the shining beauty of masonry and magic, made in the days of Silvanos and raised up as a seat of power from which the line of that storied king had ruled in majesty for centuries. His glance made the marble run as the wax of a candle melts. The turrets rumbled, and the tower bent and twisted as though it were an old man writhing in grief.
The Nightmare King laughed, and he turned his back on the place of power. Howling as banshees howl, as the mad howl, he strode through the Garden of Astarin, and everywhere he went harm followed. Birds fell dead, small bundles of bone and feathers. He trod upon them and they woke, savage creatures dragon-shaped, with needle teeth and a lust for blood, their feathers changed to scales, their hearts to malignance. He touched the plants as he walked, moonvine and winter jasmine, the thorny rose and the winding wisteria. In this first hour of winter, they bloomed, their flowers the color of bruises and blood, their fragrance vileness and pestilence. The Nightmare King's shadow fell upon the boxwood, and the hedges collapsed, taken by disease; blighted, they fell into piles of brown bubbling slime.
Singing a madman's song, he went into each of the temples and made the marble walls melt. The altars collapsed under his merest glance. Wands of incense turned putrid. Scrolls burst into flame, and the smoke of those burnings rose up to a sky the color of bile. The houses of the lords and ladies collapsed. The homes of the humble ran like molten lava. All this because the Nightmare King cast his glance upon them.
He went walking through his kingdom, the golden warrior debased. No more the straight-backed king, the wisdom-bearer. No more the lover of the land. His thoughts were poison. The sky above his kingdom turned to roiling green, and when the rains came, they fell as acid, hissing and burning. Each stream he passed turned to blood, running into the mighty Thon-Thalas until that river itself became a red-running artery. He went in despair, in hatred, his mind ruled by the will of a venomous green dragon. The flesh rotted from his limbs, the hair fell from his head so that shining patches of skull gleamed in the green light.
As fell the king, so fell the land. In every part of the Silvanesti Forest, the trees that had been so lovingly tended by the elves of House Woodshaper bent and bled, sap running from them, leaves falling, bark peeling as though they languished in disease. In the forest the deer fell dead. In the river the fish became monsters, fanged things, growing legs and arms and crawling up onto the land.
The Nightmare King strode wide across his kingdom, turning everything to dying. A long, slow dying it was, for this nightmare that rode Lorac Caladon came from a dragon who knew the devices of the Dark Queen well. Cyan Bloodbane was his name, and he had spent time in the Abyss, learning his trade.
Each, dragon and Nightmare King, heard the howling of the land, the screaming of the trees, the shrieking of the birds and animals as Lorac's nightmare caught them and broke them, making from the ruin creatures more horrible than any outside of dementia. They reveled in it, drunken with their own rage. And they heard the wailing of the mortal folk, caught in the terror. Some of them were elves, others were not.
It must not be said, though, that in his madness the elf-king failed of his promise to rid the kingdom of the dragonarmy of Takhisis. Lorac Caladon, who had ruled the Silvanesti for six times as long as the span of the longest-lived human, kept his promise.
Phair Caron rampaged through his land, burning and killing, seeking the fair city of Silvanost. She had endured losses in her battle against Lord Garan's army, not the least the mage who was her finest captain. He was gone, his avatar killed and changed to dust, his mind returned to the prison of his ruined body somewhere far away. She cursed the loss and cursed the mage, but she eased her rage in killing. And so, it was in a small town on the Thon-Thalas that the hand of Lorac Caladon found her. She paused in the slaughter of children and felt herself fall, fast and hard, into a dark and terrible place.
Falling, she had not the wit to wonder whether her mind was whole. When the fall ended, she had no wit at all. She stood, not in a ruined elven village, but in Tarsis, the city of her childhood. She stood outside the doors of the brothel in which she had, at need, earned the money it would take to keep her little sister alive, fed and clothed- and out of this very place. Not far from here, some streets over, across the boulevard that marked the territory of whore from that of the finer folk, she had scrambled in a gutter for an elven coin.
All around her she heard laughter and rough music. She heard men growling and roaring like animals. The voices of women rose up in shrieking laughter and fell low in sobbing, and still the men came in and out of those rough wooden doors, entering eager, returning sated. She knew the place. She went a step forward and then another, like a child tiptoeing to the door she'd been forbidden to enter. She knew who ruled beyond that door. She knew-
The door opened wide. A woman stood upon the threshold, dressed in black silks thin as gossamer and artfully torn to look like the rags of a gutter-girl. Her golden hair spilled down her shoulders, her face the canvas of some demented hand that had painted upon it with rouges and kohl to make her white cheeks red and her pale eyes dark.
"Phair!" cried the woman in drunken laughter. She opened her arms to welcome in yet another man to the brothel and grabbed him before he got past her, giggling and then howling laughter as he kissed and fondled her. Over his shoulder, she cried, "Sister, come in! I have kept your pallet ready for you!"
'Twas then the Highlord of Takhisis fell to screaming, 'twas then she saw all she'd tried lifelong to prevent, her sister grasping greedily the coin offered for use of her body.
Phair Caron ran among her army, hair streaming, mouth gaped wide in shrieking as she tore at her eyes, finally plucking them from the sockets so that she might cease to see the living nightmare into which she'd been plunged. It mattered not at all that she went running now with bleeding holes where her blue eyes once were. Still she saw the horror. Still she saw the nightmare that ruled her mind, and that nightmare did not end until at last, thinking her a foeman charging, screaming in their own nightmares, three of her warriors fell upon her and hacked her, shrieking, to death.
The dragonarmy did not again ravage the Kingdom of Silvanesti. Some got out, but most did not. All, those who fled and those who stayed, died raving, screaming and shrieking, in nightmare defeated.
And in the audience chamber of the Tower of the Stars, the body of the Speaker sat in perfect stillness, eyes starting wide, mouth open in a wrenching, soundless scream.
Chapter 10
Though the moons over Krynn were the usual ones, red Lunitari and his brother white Solinari, though the stars took their regular shapes and traveled their accustomed routes across the sky, though the sun was the same, the light in an exile's eye glares bitterly bright. By that light the exile fleet watched as the ship Aspengold, that lovely ship upon which traveled Alhana Starbreeze, separated from the others and sailed away from those who fled, taking a southerly route. It was her decision to leave the exiles in the hands of Lord Belthanos, her cousin, and go out among the cities of Krynn to seek help for her beleaguered land. Seeing her go was like seeing the shadow of one's own soul passing over the ocean.
"Ah, gods!" cried the elves. "She is going among outlanders! Our dear princess! What has become of us? What will she face out there where the people are but savage barbarians?" In the bitterly bright light of exile, they watched her leave. They prayed her away, wishing her well in her journey through the gutter they considered the rest of the world.
Yet soon it was seen by some among the Silvanesti that the Sylvan Land was not, after all, the center of the world. Fleeing from a dragonarmy and the disaster of a king's magic, some among the elves began to recognize that a wider world lay outside their wooded borders. The winds of winter drove the refugee fleet north around the Blood Sea of Istar, past Kothas and Mithas and the ravening minotaur pirates who had thrown in their lot with the forces of Takhisis.
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Cold winds buffeted them, the winds off foreign lands around the Cape of Nordmaar. These winds took them past the shores of Solamnia, the home of the ancient knighthood, which, by all accounts, found itself reviled on all sides and torn from within. Old feuds died hard, as knights will testify. The people of Krynn had not forgiven them their part in the ancient tragedy of Istar, as though the sons must still account for the folly of their distant fathers who did not ride at once to defend that city from the arrogance of a kingpriest determined to flout the gods. And, as though the enmity of the world around were not enough, the knights fought each other; within their own ranks, they bickered for position and power.
"You can hear them fighting," said one elf to another, one night as King's Swan plied the seas off the shores of that land, "like quarrelsome children." One could not, of course, hear them, but it wasn't hard to imagine.
In their exodus, the elves tasted the salt spray of seas unimagined in the straits between the land of Solamnia and the isle of Northern Ergoth. Wherever they went, they gathered news. Some few of them, the venturesome, went into the port cities among the taverns and the shops to learn what they could. In this way, they discovered the fate of their king, Lorac, trapped in magic. Bitterly, they learned that Silvanesti was now being called the Nightmare Kingdom. They heard, too, news of their princess-none of it was the stuff of hope, for Alhana Starbreeze wandered the ports of the world, their lily princess going in and out of the cities, looking for help and finding none. She did not falter. Even as green dragons came to nest in the tormented forests, to claim the haunted land, she went to the houses of the high in every city she could, searching for a way to rescue her homeland from the grip of an evil magic.
"And to save her father," said an elf who had heard this in a port not far from the ruin of the City of Lost Names, there at the topmost part of Solamnia, "for she believes he is not dead." Shuddering, he said, "Our Alhana believes the Speaker of the Stars yet lives."
And so the venturesome ventured, and the news they brought to the fleet made wider the world. One such gatherer of news was Dalamar Argent, for while others sought always after word of Silvanesti, his ears were keen for word of the world around. Each time the fleet put into a port, he went down to the docks and walked among the people in the taverns, seeking to learn all he could. It was no easy thing, this going among outlanders-for he thought of all others than elves that way-but he did it. How wide the word of which Silvanesti was not the center! How strange the languages-lovely some and ugly others. He spoke with humans in the wild ports near Kalaman, in Palanthas, and in the bazaars of Caergoth. All around him, the sights of humans and dwarves and kender enchanted him-the smells of cooking in the stalls, of spices in the marketplaces, the weaves of foreign fabrics. The flashing eyes of strangers were intoxicating, rich and deep and wonderfully strange.
They came, at last, to Southern Ergoth, the elves who fled, and they made a home for themselves. In exile, Lord Belthanos, he of blood kinship to the Speaker of the Stars, shaped a council from the Heads of the Houses. This council-in-exile was made of much the same folk as Speaker Lorac's had been, with two exceptions. Lady Ylle Savath was gone from its ranks, dead in the Silvanesti Forest, and Lord Garan of House Protector had not survived the sea. He had died in the first month of the journey. The old warrior's heart had simply stopped beating in his breast. It broke, said some, because he believed that he could not survive being gone from the kingdom he had so long defended. And so House Mystic gave Lord Feleran to the new council, and House Protector gave Lord Konnal, who had served with Lord Garan in the war.
The council-in-exile convened and began at once the task of establishing the Silvanesti claim to this land of sea-breeze and sweet pine forests, of rich hunting grounds and coastal waters thick with fish. It didn't much matter to them that the wild Kagonesti lived there, those proud hunters whom Silvanos had tried to change into servitors in ancient days. The Silvanesti came with weapons; they came armed with the certainty that they were, among all races, the best beloved of the gods, thus deserving of the best of everything. This, no matter what events suggested, was not a belief the Children of Silvanos were ready to lay down. And so they forced servitude upon the Kagonesti and built upon their land a city they named Silvamori, their home in exile. This was, by honest account, a harder thing for the Kagonesti than for their aristocratic cousins, though most of the moaning and sighing came winding out from the houses of the Silvanesti, the lorn exiles.
Dalamar Argent didn't complain much, and for a time this surprised him. He did ache for his homeland, the aspenwood, the orderliness of the city, the scent of the gardens, and the deep tolling of bells in the harbors. Sometimes he took out the embroidered scroll case that held the Dawn Hymn to E'li, and he looked at it, smudged with dirt from the day of Lord Tellin's death. He had tried to return it to Lady Lynntha, but she would not have it. She'd looked at him long, her eyes filled with sorrow and with an unvoiced plea: Don't make me take it, don't make me think of that which could never have been. And so Dalamar kept it, an artifact of another time, another place, and gods whose names rang through the pine forest of Silvamori but not in his heart.
He found himself free of service, with so many others to take his place, and he found himself a lover among the Wilder Elves, a woman with hair the color of Solinari's moon, eyes green as the sea, and long sun-gilded limbs. K'gathala was a woman wise in the ways of Kagonesti magic, and one who believed strongly in the meaning of names. She said his was a strange name for one of the Light Elves, for if "argent" meant "silver" in the language of the Silvanesti, it meant "night's son" in the speech of the Kagonesti. "And that," she said one night as she lay in his arms, twining her long fingers in his dark hair, "that is a strange name for one of your kind, but perhaps not so strange for you."
She was full of these sayings, these takings and givings, and Dalamar enjoyed that, the mystery and the magic. He did not go to her openly. It wasn't a thing encouraged by Lord Belthanos or his council-in-exile. The possibility of dilution of Silvanesti blood through a line of half-Kagonesti, half-Silvanesti children was a thing to make them shudder. Nonetheless, Dalamar went, and he continued his habit of learning magic. In secret nights and stolen days, he learned such things as he had never dreamed-how the Kagonesti did not whisper their spells or even declaim them, but sang them. And the spells of the Wilder Elves were not made up of words. Rather, they were made up of weavings of notes so complex that the mortal voice must struggle for months to learn them. He had the months, he had the will, and within the first year of the exile, he'd advanced so far in his studies that he began to think again that he might find a way to travel to the Tower of High Sorcery at Wayreth and be tested in his skill and knowledge. How? He did not know, and he didn't even know whether that tower would survive the war that raged in the world outside of Silvamori.
For war did rage. He knew this. He had friends among the sailors who went out to the port cities, and they brought back news. As the first year of exile passed and the new years progressed, he learned that the world beyond Silvamori was being taught to hate the coming of spring. It was, ever, the return of spring that brought the renewal of war.
After the disaster in Silvanesti, the armies of Takhisis took stock and found their strength again. They left behind the Nightmare Kingdom and turned west. Phair Caron's had been a force of red dragons. This new one was a force of blues, and so all knew and feared it as the Blue Army. It swept through the Plains of Solamnia like wildfire, merciless and hungry for conquest. It rolled over Kalaman and rampaged down the Vingaard River valleys, burning and looting and killing. Everywhere it went, the dragonarmy conquered. People wailed to the gods of Good, cried out to E'li-Paladine, as outlanders named him-but no god answered. The sky over the land grew dark with dragons. The land itself ran red with blood, and corpses clogged the great Vingaard River. The army surged through Vingaard Keep and left behind the dead and the broken in Solanthus.
Armies of white dragons t
ook Icewall in the south. Highlords on black dragons held Goodlund and Kendermore while the Red Army regrouped, kicking off the dust of Phair Caron's failure, and ripped into Abanasinia, slaughtering Plainsmen and running right up to the borders of Qualinesti. And out came the elves of that land, and the sundered kindred-Silvanesti and Qualinesti-met again in Southern Ergoth. A new city was built under the auspices of the Qualinesti king, he who styled himself Speaker of the Sun. The two factions of the best beloved of the gods glared at each other across Thunder Bay, and for a time the story amused Silvamori that the son of the Qualinesti king, Porthios, decided that he must take part in the fighting and do battle against the forces of Takhisis. Madman! What are the affairs of outlanders to elves? They must have lost their minds, those Qualinesti. No sooner had the folk of Silvamori tired of that story than did a delicious bit of gossip whisper that if the son of the Qualinesti king was mad, his daughter was worse. Laurana, it was said, had fallen so far below herself as to run off with her half-elven lover, disgracing her family to the point where her poor old father took to his bed, and decided she too must become a soldier in the fight against the forces of Takhisis.
It was at this time that word came to Silvamori about the fate of their own wandering princess and the state of their nightmare-ridden homeland. People argued about it for months, some saying, "Well, it must be true," others declaring the news an outright lie. "After all," muttered the nay-sayers, "who in the world would believe that Alhana Starbreeze had found help in Tarsis-of all benighted places! — and that help at the hands of a scruffy band made up of a half-elf, some humans, an elf-maid, a kender, and a dwarf? Insanity!"
"Aye, but it's so," said the fisherman who sat talking with Dalamar late one night while the red moon and the silver shone down on the beach and the sea ran in to the shore and out. "It's so, I know it, because I had word with one who saw the princess's guard escorting her through the city. It was the very night the dragonarmy attacked Tarsis, burning everything they could. Must've been awful. And you know who that elf-maid was? Laurana of Qualinesti, pity her poor father. All those strange folk did meet-a princess, her Wildrunners, and that ragged band of questers. Gone 'round the place looking for a dragon orb." The fisherman laughed, for it was a fine joke to him that the questers should meet with the very woman who sought help in freeing her homeland and her father from the magic of one of those very things. "Wanted one for the same reason your king did, I suppose-wanted to control the dragons, and so some of 'em went with her back to the Sylvan Land."
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