The Dawning of a New Age

by Jean Rabe

  “What do you want?” he said to the air. He felt a soft breeze wash over his skin, and looked upon the translucent visage of a young man’s face.

  “To warn you,” the image replied. “To share a dream.”

  The black-cloaked sorcerer closed his eyes, and his mind relived Palin’s vision, blue scales and golden eyes filling his senses. After several long moments the haze vanished, the wispy cloud disappeared, and the sorcerer rushed away from the window. He hurried down the twisting stairs, stopping on each level to retrieve a few priceless baubles and magical trinkets.

  The sorcerer worked diligently for many hours, collecting scrolls, magical weapons and armor, crystal balls and the like. All the while he mulled over the dragon from Palin’s dream and wondered why it wanted access to the Abyss.

  All of the Tower of High Sorcery’s magic wouldn’t necessarily allow him to open the portal. Such an act would devastate the city, flatten all the buildings within at least a mile of the tower. Hundreds could be killed. Worse could happen if the dragon first turned the power of the magical items loose on Palanthas before using them to open the portal.

  The battle with Chaos was over. Only death hovered in the Abyss now. What could the dragon want there, hope to accomplish there? Palin had told the sorcerer it didn’t matter. But it did, the sorcerer knew. He vowed to consider the matter later – after the magic was saved.

  Not used to strenuous physical labor, the sorcerer was nearly exhausted by the time he had an impressive pile of objects gathered in one place deep below ground. His chest heaved as he regarded the hoard that twinkled in the torchlight.

  “It is not everything,” he whispered, brushing a strand of sweat-soaked hair away from his eyes. “But it is the best and the most powerful, and it will have to do.” His slight frame shuddered and he leaned against the damp stone wall. “Old friend,” he said to the stone. “I shall miss you. We’ve... what’s that?” He cocked his head, ran his fingers along a seam between the bricks. “The dragon. He’s coming.”

  He reached into the deep folds of his robe and produced a staff of polished mahogany. It was topped by a bronze dragon claw clutching a faceted crystal and fairly pulsed with energy. He traced his fingertips over the staff’s smooth surface, then raised it high before twice driving its end down against the stone floor.

  A blinding blue flash filled the underground chamber. As the glow receded, the guttering torch illuminated the crumpled form of the sorcerer. The horde of arcane treasure was gone. “Safe,” the man whispered. His breathing was labored, and he used the staff for support as he slowly rose.

  He struggled up the steps, his robes tangling his feet and causing him to falter. His trembling fingers brushed against the cool stones in a gesture of farewell.

  “We have been together so long, you and I,” he whispered to the walls.

  Outside, the first rays of the setting sun were touching the rooftops of the city and the trees in the Shoikan Grove. The guardians in the grove let him pass unchallenged. “Flee,” he whispered to them as he made his way to the gate and out onto the bustling city streets. “Flee or die.”

  “Flee!” he called to the people, his voice rising.

  At first the passersby ignored him, prattling amongst themselves about their purchases or discussing what they would cook for dinner. A few hovered outside the door to an inn, ogling a menu board in the window. But those nearest the sorcerer saw him lift the staff high into the air. They heard him speak words they couldn’t understand, and they felt a tremor beneath their feet.

  “Run!” someone called.

  The people moved back like a wave receding from the sand, leaving the dark-clad man standing alone before the tower. But few ran so far away that they couldn’t watch what was transpiring, their curiosity overcoming their common sense. Most took cover inside buildings, their faces pressed against the windows. Some huddled in doorways or under awnings.

  His fist clenched the staff in a death grip and the words flowed furiously from his lips. His eyes glowed with an intense light, and the tower shuddered like a pained old man.

  The sorcerer sobbed. His breath came in uneven rasps and tears welled up in his eyes. “Fall,” he urged. “Please, fall.”

  Somewhere behind him he heard the loud chatter of a Palanthas group that had refused to take shelter.

  “What’s he doing?” a woman cried.

  “It’s magic!” a man barked.

  “But magic is dead!” another called.

  “It must be the staff!” retorted the man.

  “Flee!” the sorcerer called to them. He drove the staff down into the ground repeatedly. “Down!” he shouted, “down!” And, as if in response, the cobblestones shook beneath his knees, and the tower quaked and groaned.

  Screams erupted from behind the sorcerer. He barely heard the sound of retreating footsteps. The gawkers were no longer brave enough to watch. Then he heard nothing but the moaning of the tower as it started to fall. He looked up to see cracks appear in the sky above the tower; its invisible barrier was shattering like an egg. Shards of glass from the tower’s windows burst into the air and pelted the street below.

  A spiderweb-fine crack appeared in the cobblestones between the sorcerer’s knees. It spread, racing toward Shoikan Grove and through the open gate. The crack began to widen. The ground vibrated, and the sorcerer watched through a haze of tears as stones from the grove’s wall were pitched into the still-widening fissure. The trees of the grove heaved and toppled into the crevice. The grass flowed into the crack like water, taking with it the wildflowers and berry bushes the sorcerer had once so carefully tended.

  Pops and hisses cut through the cacophony, evidence that the tower’s magical wards and guards were being simultaneously released and obliterated by the quake.

  The sorcerer grabbed his side, screaming. The sound was echoed by the tower as it collapsed upon itself. The blood-red minarets fell inward first, swallowed whole as the black marble ruins began to melt down to the ground.

  Glass shattered from somewhere behind him, and he heard a child wail. An awning flapped and tore free from a building facade, flying past him to disappear into the black, molten mass.

  He tried to stand, but the vibrating ground threw him onto his back. Looking up at the dust-heavy sky, he saw a shape that he could barely make out.

  A large bird? No. The dragon.

  The sorcerer rolled onto his stomach. Digging his thin fingers into the cracks between the cobblestones, he pulled himself along, away from the inward pull of the tower.

  A great boom rocked Palanthas then, signaling the end of the Tower of High Sorcery. The reverberations continued to damage the building facades, shaking free balconies, chimneys, and roof tiles.

  The sorcerer reached the side of a building and turned to see the large crevice in the ground seal itself, burying the remnants of the grove. His eyes followed the line of the fissure as it closed, racing toward the tower. But the line led his eyes only to a round spot of mirrorlike obsidian material. That was all that remained of the Tower of High Sorcery.

  Coughs racked his body as he tried to steady himself. For an instant he wondered if the damage he had unleashed was worse than what the dragon would have done. But he knew otherwise. No one had died, that he was sure of. Not only was the tower’s magic beyond the dragon’s grasp now, but the contents of the Great Library had also disappeared. At the moment of the tower’s demise, the books simultaneously departed.

  He looked at the flat, shiny black spot and thought of all it contained, the remnants of the tower and the paintings of the old wizards who had once studied there and walked by the sorcerer’s side.

  “Goodbye,” the sorcerer whispered to the ruins as he huddled against the building’s cold stone wall.

  *

  In the sky above Palanthas, Khellendros raged. The tower was destroyed and its remains buried. His path to the Abyss was lost.

  “Kitiara!” he cried.

  Lightning streaked the sky
and darted down to Palanthas’s cobblestones, shattering the sidewalk in front of an inn where a crowd huddled. Dark clouds gathered to blot out the setting sun, and a fierce storm began. Frightened citizens barred their doors as the rain started. It was soft at first, but its force quickly grew until the rain was pummeling the city. It washed away the dust and dirt from the magical earthquake and mingled with the sorcerer’s tears.

  Chapter 6

  THE COMING OF MALYSTRYX

  The warrior stood on a peak overlooking Palanthas and watched Khellendros bank away from the city. He was drenched by the blue dragon’s storm.

  “I thought he was the one. Pity.”

  The warrior looked vaguely like a man, but he was solid black and featureless, as if cut from a piece of wet slate or obsidian. His glowing, ruby eyes followed the retreating form of the dragon until it was a speck on the horizon. Then he peered down through the sheets of rain at the black puddle that was once the Tower of High Sorcery.

  “The blue was too soft,” he growled. “When he did not get what he wanted, he should have destroyed the city. He had the power and the right to seek revenge.”

  The warrior balled his black fists, which for an instant glowed orange like hot coals. “There was no one in Palanthas who could have challenged him. Only the sorcerer, and he spent all his energy destroying the tower. They are all such silly, pathetic fools.”

  A large crowd milled about on the street, humans primarily, though the warrior could pick out a handful of elves and several kender in the bunch. They were commoners for the most part, clad in simple tunics and leggings of brown and gray. Their clothes and their expressions were haggard and worn.

  Curiosity helped a few of them brave the potential danger and slowly approach the area where the Tower of High Sorcery had stood several minutes ago. Finally, a pair of eager kender rushed forward and when the two got close enough to look down into the reflection of the hard obsidian surface, they saw a reflection of the tower locked inside. All remained still, but their fellows held back for a brief moment, waiting to see what might happen.

  When it was clear that nothing more would occur, the warrior began to watch another pair of overly-curious kender as they searched the area that was once the Shoikan Grove. The warrior suspected the others in the crowd had heard the tales of the creatures lurking in the tower’s surroundings and decided to stay away. The kender weren’t so easily cowed.

  After glancing behind himself, the warrior returned his attention to the kender in the decimated grove. He couldn’t see them, though he noticed twin wisps of orange smoke twisting upward from the spot where they had stood before.

  “Fools,” he whispered again. “They don’t know what they trifle with.”

  As more townsfolk gathered excitedly, the level of noise grew. The warrior could hear only some of what they said.

  “It was magic that destroyed the tower,” a tired-looking man proclaimed suddenly. “Earthquakes aren’t so selective that they only swallow one building.”

  “There were probably sorcerers in the tower,” another interjected. “They experimented with something they shouldn’t have. I saw one running from the place. Dressed all in black, like a piece of coal, he was. He told me to flee.”

  “I think it was the gods.” The new speaker was a butcher. He wiped his hands on his bloodied apron and shook his head. “The gods were angry at the sorcerers.”

  “The gods are gone, and so’s magic,” an old woman sighed. “And I think neither will ever be back. But I bet what little magic might have been hanging on in that tower caused the quake.”

  “Did you see the dragon?” asked a kender who tugged on her skirt.

  The old woman said nothing.

  A haggard-looking young man answered. “I saw the dragon. It was a great blue one. Never saw anything so big.”

  “He could have killed us,” the kender uttered with a hint of awe.

  “He should have killed you,” the warrior whispered. “All of you. Chaos wanted you dead.”

  The warrior was birthed during the recent war in the Abyss. In the heat of the struggle, Chaos, father of the gods, called a star down from the heavens and demolished it with but an impulse. From the flaming fragments of rock that resulted, the deity shaped the watcher and his evil brethren, worked them into magical, manlike images in much the same way a sculptor would create a series of statues. Chaos breathed life into his creations by tugging memories from the knights who swarmed about him, drawing out their worst nightmares and using them to inspire his daemon warriors, to start their dark hearts beating. The evil constructs fought in Chaos’s defense and by his command.

  Most of them died in the battle. The daemon warrior overlooking Palanthas saw most of his brethren perish and fail. He had been spared when the mortals won. And he and a handful of others like him felt their creator pull away from them, abandon them. Without orders, and without Chaos to guide them, the surviving daemon warriors left the Abyss and found their way to Ansalon. They were forced to find a new reason to keep living.

  This one was obsessed with revenge. He vowed to make the humans pay for chasing away the all-father. The warrior shifted his shape to a conical, swirling mass and grew foggy claws and a snakelike tail that whipped about. Chaos had gifted his warriors with the ability to alter their bodies, to ride the winds, and to move through water or the earth as effortlessly as the mortals walked upon the ground.

  “Everyone should be dead, moldering in their pathetic graves,” the warrior hissed. “They should be food for the worms.”

  The daemon warrior knew the people of Palanthas were already starting to rebound from the war. The people were mourning the many heroes who died in the battle against Chaos, crying over the pitiful Knights of Solamnia and Knights of Takhisis who fought side by side. The bodies that had been recovered were buried. Those forever lost beneath the carcasses of the dead dragons and the collapsed caverns of the Abyss were honored with markers and kind words.

  No one mourned for Chaos and his lost shapeshifting children. No one mourned except his brethren. The daemon warrior’s piercing red eyes turned toward the expansive Palanthas harbor. A soft breeze sent ripples across the bay. The setting sun coated the water with a fiery orange glow that reminded the creature of smoldering embers, of the bits of the broken star that had birthed it. Some of the docks had been damaged by the backlash of energy from the Abyss, and he could see teams of men laboring to replace them.

  “The blue could have destroyed the harbor,” the daemon warrior ranted. “But the blue is too weak and fosters a spark of respect for these ants. Fortunately, I sense another who is not so weak, who has no attachments. She will bring her raging fire to this world. And I will help to kindle it.”

  *

  Thousands of miles from Palanthas, a young black dragon stalked deer on the rain-soaked plain of Misty Isle.

  He paused in his hunt when the sky grew dark. An enormous red dragon, one larger than any he had seen before, was blotting out the sunset. With scales colored a deep crimson, she hovered in the sky and returned the black’s stare. The dragon’s wings were stretched out to her sides, billowed like the sails of a schooner. The black had to turn his head from side to side just to take in all of her.

  Her glistening ivory horns rose tall and curved gently from atop her massive ridged head. Her amber eyes were unblinking orbs that held him mesmerized. Steam curled upward from her cavernous nostrils. The hunt forgotten, the black dragon rose on his hind legs.

  She is as large as Takhisis was, perhaps even larger, he thought. Only a god could be so huge. His heart leapt with that thought. Perhaps the red is Takhisis – the Dark Queen of the evil dragons – returned to Krynn to lead her children!

  His mind had touched hers once, many months ago, when she was summoning her children for the battle in the Abyss. The black had begged to be chosen to be among those dragons who would fight for their Dark Queen. But Takhisis had passed him over, saying he was too small and would not be able to
contribute. The black had not felt her presence since, nor had he seen many other dragons. The black so badly wanted to know about everything that had transpired in the Abyss. Perhaps Takhisis would tell him now.

  He breathed a stream of acid into the air in tribute, and the great red glided forward. The luminous rays of the dying sun touched her scales and made them glimmer like flickering flames, made her look as if she were a bonfire brought to life.

  He reverently bowed his head as she landed. The ground trembled from her weight, and the black squinted as mud showered all about him, thrown everywhere by the draft from her wings.

  A gout of flame arced through the sky above him, fanning out to touch the forests on both sides of the plain. The searing heat of the red’s dragonbreath was intense and painful, and he heard the snap and crackle of the trees around him that had caught fire despite the dampness of the Misty Isle. The black looked up and opened his mouth to speak and saw a red claw stretching out toward him.

  The claw struck him hard, sending him flying several yards toward the old forest. The impact knocked the air from his lungs. Dazed, he shook his head to clear his senses and stared at her.

  The red dragon’s massive claw raked his side. The talons slashed through his thick dark scales and dug into the softer flesh beneath. Then another claw pinned him to the ground and threatened to pierce his ribs.

  “Takhisis, my queen!”

  The black dragon’s blood flowed from the wound. He cried in surprise and pain, struggling futilely beneath the weight. Through a haze of tears he looked up, his eyes locking onto hers, pleading with her, questioning.

  Her immense head filled his vision as it bore down on him. And the smell of her breath was hot and sulphurous like the fire that was now raging in the forest.