Dragons of Autumn Twilight

by Margaret Weis

  In the wreckage of Solace, Riverwind had found a vallenwood branch spared by the dragon’s fire and had carried it in his pack. Now that branch made Riverwind’s gift to Goldmoon—a ring, perfectly smooth and plain. When polished, the wood of the tree was a rich gold color, marked by streaks and whorls of softest brown. Goldmoon, holding it, remembered the first night she had seen the great vallenwoods, the night they had stumbled—weary and frightened—into Solace, bearing the blue crystal staff. She began to cry softly and wiped her eyes with Tas’s handkerchief.

  “Bless the gifts, Paladine,” Elistan said, “these symbols of love and sacrifice. Grant that during times of deepest darkness, these two may look upon these gifts and see their path lighted by love. Great and shining god, god of human and elf, god of kender and dwarf, give your blessing to these, your children. May the love they plant in their hearts today be nourished by their souls and grow into a tree of life, providing shelter and protection to all who seek refuge beneath its spreading boughs. With the joining of hands, the exchanging of vows, the giving of gifts, you two, Riverwind, grandson of Wanderer, and Goldmoon, Chieftain’s Daughter—become one—in your hearts, in the sight of men, in the eyes of the gods.”

  Riverwind took his ring from Goldmoon and placed it upon her slender finger. Goldmoon took her ring from Riverwind. He knelt before her—as would have been the custom of the Que-shu. But Goldmoon shook her head.

  “Rise, warrior,” she said, smiling through her tears.

  “Is that a command?” he asked softly.

  “It is the last command of Chieftain’s Daughter,” she whispered.

  Riverwind stood up. Goldmoon placed the golden ring on his finger. Then Riverwind took her in his arms. She put her arms around him. Their lips met, their bodies melded together, their spirits joined. The people gave a great shout and torches flared. The sun sank behind the mountains, leaving the sky bathed in a pearl-like hue of purples and soft reds, which soon deepened into the sapphire of night.

  The bride and groom were carried down the hill by the cheering throng and feasting and merriment began. Huge tables, carved from the pine trees of the forest, were set up on the grass. The children, freed at last from the awe of the ceremony, ran and shouted, playing at dragon slaying. Tonight care and worry were far from their minds. Men broached the huge casks of ale and wine they had salvaged in Pax Tharkas and began drinking salutes to the bride and groom. Women brought in huge plates of food—game and fruits and vegetables gathered in the forest and taken from the stores in Pax Tharkas.

  “Get out of my way, don’t crowd me,” Caramon grumbled as he sat down at the table. The companions, laughing, moved over to give the big man room. Maritta and two other women came forward and placed a huge platter of deer meat before the big warrior.

  “Real food,” sighed the warrior.

  “Hey,” roared Flint, stabbing at a piece of sizzling meat on Caramon’s plate with his fork, “you gonna eat that?”

  Caramon promptly and silently—without missing a bite—emptied a flagon of ale over the dwarf’s head.

  Tanis and Sturm sat side by side, talking quietly. Tanis’s eyes strayed to Laurana occasionally. She sat at a different table talking animatedly with Elistan. Tanis, thinking how lovely she looked tonight, realized how changed she was from the willful, lovesick girl who had followed him from Qualinesti. He told himself he liked the change in her. But he caught himself wondering just what she and Elistan found so interesting.

  Sturm touched his arm. Tanis started. He had lost track of the conversation. Flushing, he began to apologize when he saw the look on Sturm’s face.

  “What is it?” Tanis said in alarm, half-rising.

  “Hush, don’t move!” Sturm ordered. “Just look—over there—sitting off to himself.”

  Tanis looked where Sturm gestured, puzzled, then he saw the man—sitting alone, hunched over his food, eating it absently as if he didn’t really taste it. Whenever anyone approached, the man shrank back, eyeing him nervously until he passed. Suddenly, perhaps sensing Tanis’s eyes on him, he raised his head and stared directly at them. The half-elf gasped and dropped his fork.

  “But that’s impossible!” he said in a strangled voice. “We saw him die! With Eben! No one could have survived—”

  “Then I was right,” Sturm said grimly. “You recognize him, too. I thought I was going mad. Let’s go talk to him.”

  But when they looked again, he was gone. Swiftly, they searched the crowd, but it was impossible to find him now.

  As the silver moon and the red rose in the sky, the married couples formed a ring around the bride and groom and began singing wedding songs. Unmarried couples danced in pairs outside the circle while the children leaped and shouted and reveled in staying up past their bedtime. Bonfires burned brightly, voices and music filled the night air, the silver moon and the red rose to light the sky. Goldmoon and Riverwind stood, their arms around each other, their eyes shining brighter than the moons or the blazing fire.

  Tanis lingered on the outskirts, watching his friends. Laurana and Gilthanas performed an ancient elvish dance of grace and beauty, singing together a hymn of joy. Sturm and Elistan fell into conversation about their plans to travel south in search of the legendary seaport city of Tarsis the Beautiful, where they hoped to find ships to carry the people from this war-torn land. Tika, tired of watching Caramon eat, teased Flint until the dwarf finally agreed to dance with her, blushing bright red beneath his beard.

  Where was Raistlin? Tanis wondered. The half-elf recalled seeing him at the banquet. The mage ate little and drank his herbal mixture. He had seemed unusually pale and quiet. Tanis decided to go in search of him. The company of the dark-souled, cynical mage seemed more suited to him tonight than music and laughter.

  Tanis wandered into the moonlit darkness, knowing somehow he was headed in the right direction. He found Raistlin sitting on the stump of an old tree whose lightning-shattered, blackened remains lay scattered over the ground. The half-elf sat down next to the silent mage.

  A small shadow settled among the trees behind the half-elf. Finally, Tas would hear what these two discussed!

  Raistlin’s strange eyes stared into the southlands, barely visible between a gap in the tall mountains. The wind still blew from the south, but it was beginning to veer again. The temperature was falling. Tanis felt Raistlin’s frail body shiver. Looking at him in the moonlight, Tanis was startled to see the mage’s resemblance to his half-sister, Kitiara. It was a fleeting impression and gone almost as soon as it came, but it brought the woman to Tanis’s mind, adding to his feelings of unrest and disquiet. He restlessly tossed a piece of bark back and forth, from hand to hand.

  “What do you see to the south?” Tanis asked abruptly.

  Raistlin glanced at him. “What do I ever see with these eyes of mine, Half-Elf?” the mage whispered bitterly. “I see death, death and destruction. I see war.” He gestured up above. “The constellations have not returned. The Queen of Darkness is not defeated.”

  “We may not have won the war,” Tanis began, “but surely we have won a major battle—”

  Raistlin coughed and shook his head sadly.

  “Do you see no hope?”

  “Hope is the denial of reality. It is the carrot dangled before the draft horse to keep him plodding along in a vain attempt to reach it.”

  “Are you saying we should just give up?” Tanis asked, irritably tossing the bark away.

  “I’m saying we should remove the carrot and walk forward with our eyes open,” Raistlin answered. Coughing, he drew his robes more closely around him. “How will you fight the dragons, Tanis? For there will be more! More than you can imagine! And where now is Huma? Where now is the Dragonlance? No, Half-Elf. Do not talk to me of hope.”

  Tanis did not answer, nor did the mage speak again. Both sat silently, one continuing to stare south, the other glancing up into the great voids in the glittering, starlit sky.

  Tasslehoff sank back into the soft
grass beneath the pine trees. “No hope!” the kender repeated bleakly, sorry he had followed the half-elf. “I don’t believe it,” he said, but his eyes went to Tanis, staring at the stars. Tanis believes it, the kender realized, and the thought filled him with dread.

  Ever since the death of the old magician, an unnoticed change had come over the kender. Tasslehoff began to consider that this adventure was in earnest, that it had a purpose for which people gave their lives. He wondered why he was involved and thought perhaps he had given the answer to Fizban—the small things he was meant to do were important, somehow, in the big scheme of things.

  But until now it had never occurred to the kender that all this might be for nothing, that it might not make any difference, that they might suffer and lose people they loved like Fizban, and the dragons would still win in the end.

  “Still,” the kender said softly, “we have to keep trying and hoping. That’s what’s important, the trying and the hoping. Maybe that’s most important of all.”

  Something floated gently down from the sky, brushing past the kender’s nose. Tas reached out and caught it in his hand.

  It was a small, white chicken feather.

  The “Song of Huma” was the last, and many consider the greatest, work of the elven bard, Quivalen Soth. Only fragments of the work remained following the Cataclysm. It is said that those who study it diligently will find hints to the future of the turning world.

  SONG OF HUMA

  Out of the village, out of the thatched and clutching shires,

  Out of the grave and furrow, furrow and grave,

  Where his sword first tried

  The last cruel dances of childhood, and awoke to the shires

  Forever retreating, his greatness a marshfire,

  The banked flight of the Kingfisher always above him,

  Now Huma walked upon Roses,

  In the level Light of the Rose.

  And troubled by Dragons, he turned to the end of the land,

  To the fringe of all sense and senses,

  To the Wilderness, where Paladine bade him to turn,

  And there in the loud tunnel of knives

  He grew in unblemished violence, in yearning,

  Stunned into himself by a deafening gauntlet of voices.

  It was there and then that the White Stag found him,

  At the end of a journey planned from the shores of Creation,

  And all time staggered at the forest edge

  Where Huma, haunted and starving,

  Drew his bow, thanking the gods for their bounty

  and keeping,

  Then saw, in the ranged wood,

  In the first silence, the dazed heart’s symbol,

  The rack of antlers resplendent.

  He lowered the bow and the world resumed.

  Then Huma followed the Stag, its tangle of antlers receding

  As a memory of young light, as the talons of birds ascending.

  The Mountains crouched before them. Nothing would

  change now,

  The three moons stopped in the sky,

  And the long night tumbled in shadows.

  It was morning when they reached the grove,

  The lap of the mountain, where the Stag departed,

  Nor did Huma follow, knowing the end of this journey

  Was nothing but green and the promise of green

  that endured

  In the eyes of the woman before him.

  And holy the days he drew near her, holy the air

  That carried his words of endearment, his forgotten songs,

  And the rapt moons knelt on the Great Mountain.

  Still, she eluded him, bright and retreating as marshfire,

  Nameless and lovely, more lovely because she was nameless,

  As they learned that the world, the dazzling shelves

  of the air,

  The Wilderness itself

  Were plain and diminished things to the heart’s thicket.

  At the end of the days, she told him her secret.

  For she was not of woman, nor was she mortal,

  But the daughter and heiress from a line of Dragons.

  For Huma the sky turned indifferent, cluttered by moons,

  The brief life of the grass mocked him, mocked his fathers,

  And the thorned light bristled on the gliding Mountain.

  But nameless she tendered a hope not in her keeping,

  That Paladine only might answer, that through his

  enduring wisdom

  She might step from forever, and there in her silver arms

  The promise of the grove might rise and flourish.

  For that wisdom Huma prayed, and the Stag returned,

  And east, through the desolate fields, through ash,

  Through cinders and blood, the harvest of dragons,

  Traveled Huma, cradled by dreams of the Silver Dragon,

  The Stag perpetual, a signal before him.

  At last the eventual harbor, a temple so far to the east

  That it lay where the east was ending.

  There Paladine appeared

  In a pool of stars and glory, announcing

  That of all choices, one most terrible had fallen to Huma.

  For Paladine knew that the heart is a nest of yearnings,

  That we can travel forever toward light, becoming

  What we can never be.

  For the bride of Huma could step into the devouring sun,

  Together they would return to the thatched shires

  And leave behind the secret of the Lance, the world

  Unpeopled in darkness, wed to the dragons.

  Or Huma could take on the Dragonlance, cleansing

  all Krynn

  Of death and invasion, of the green paths of his love.

  The hardest of choices, and Huma remembered

  How the Wilderness cloistered and baptized his first

  thoughts

  Beneath the sheltering sun, and now

  As the black moon wheeled and pivoted, drawing the air

  And the substance from Krynn, from the things of Krynn,

  From the grove, from the Mountain, from the abandoned

  shires,

  He would sleep, he would send it all away,

  For the choosing was all of the pain, and the choices

  Were heat on the hand when the arm has been severed.

  But she came to him, weeping and luminous,

  In a landscape of dreams, where he saw

  The world collapse and renew on the glint of the Lance.

  In her farewell lay collapse and renewal.

  Through his doomed veins the horizon burst.

  He took up the Dragonlance, he took up the story,

  The pale heat rushed through his rising arm

  And the sun and the three moons, waiting for wonders,

  Hung in the sky together.

  To the West Huma rode, to the High Clerist’s Tower

  On the back of the Silver Dragon,

  And the path of their flight crossed over a desolate country

  Where the dead walked only, mouthing the names

  of dragons.

  And the men in the Tower, surrounded and riddled

  by dragons,

  By the cries of the dying, the roar in the ravenous air,

  Awaited the unspeakable silence,

  Awaited far worse, in fear that the crash of the senses

  Would end in a moment of nothing

  Where the mind lies down with its losses and darkness.

  But the winding of Huma’s horn in the distance

  Danced on the battlements. All of Solamnia lifted

  Its face to the eastern sky, and the dragons

  Wheeled to the highest air, believing

  Some terrible change had come.

  From out of their tumult of wings, out of the chaos

  of dragons,

  Out of the heart of nothing, the Mother of Night,

 
Aswirl in a blankness of colors,

  Swooped to the East, into the stare of the sun

  And the sky collapsed into silver and blankness.

  On the ground Huma lay, at his side a woman,

  Her silver skin broken, the promise of green

  Released from the gifts of her eyes. She whispered her name

  As the Queen of Darkness banked in the sky above Huma.

  She descended, the Mother of Night,

  And from the loft of the battlements, men saw shadows

  Boil on the colorless dive of her wings:

  A hovel of thatch and rushes, the heart of a Wilderness,

  A lost silver light spattered in terrible crimson,

  And then from the center of shadows

  Came a depth in which darkness itself was aglimmer,

  Denying all air, all light, all shadows.

  And thrusting his lance into emptiness,

  Huma fell to the sweetness of death, into abiding sunlight.

  Through the Lance, through the dear might and

  brotherhood

  Of those who must walk to the end of the breath

  and the senses,

  He banished the dragons back to the core of nothing,

  And the long lands blossomed in balance and music.

  Stunned in new freedom, stunned by the brightness

  and colors,

  By the harped blessing of the holy winds,

  The Knights carried Huma, they carried the Dragonlance

  To the grove in the lap of the Mountain.

  When they returned to the grove in pilgrimage, in homage,

  The Lance, the armor, the Dragonbane himself

  Had vanished to the day’s eye.

  But the night of the full moons red and silver

  Shines down on the hills, on the forms of a man

  and a woman

  Shimmering steel and silver, silver and steel,

  Above the village, over the thatched and nurturing shires.

  About the Authors

  Margaret Weis

  A decade and a half after her first collaboration with Tracy Hickman. Margaret Weis is the author of ten DRAGONLANCE® novels, the four-volume galactic fantasy Star of the Guardian, co-author with her husband Don Perrin of The Doom Brigade, Knights of the Black Earth, Robot Blues and Hung Out. She and Perrin are also the authors of Brothers in Arms, the sequel to Weis’s The Soulforge. Currently she is hard at work, with Tracy Hickman, on a new DRAGONLANCE trilogy called The War of Souls. She lives happily in a converted barn in southern Wisconsin with an assortment of dogs and cats and far, far too many books.