Dalamar The Dark

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.

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 took 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."

"And freed the king?"

"And freed the king. But, sorry to say, he found his freedom in death, and things aren't so good in the Nightmare Kingdom these days."

"But how was the king freed? How was the spell undone? How did people manage to enter the land and come out alive?" All this Dalamar wanted to know.

The fisherman shrugged, said some mage or another did it, one of the questers, and he didn't remember much more about it except that the fellow wore red robes and part of his name was the name of a god. "Majere…" he said. "Something, somebody Majere."

When Dalamar asked to know more of this mage, the fisherman shook his head. He'd told all he knew, and there wasn't more to say. No more news of the mysterious mage came to Silvamori that year, or any year after, though often Dalamar listened to see if more would. Magic and power, these things were as gold and silver to him. Tales of them were nearly as good.

Still, if one servitor among them was unsatisfied with the amount of news he gathered, most of Silvamori had more news than they knew what to do with. A red mage undoing evil magic in a land where no magic was honored but white, the Speaker of the Stars dead, the children of the Speaker of the Suns running around wild… By the end of the second year of the war, the people of Silvamori and Qualimori decided that all the world beyond their own homes in exile was doomed to damnation.

"Ah, but things are finally changing," said the Kagonesti fisherman, one day in the spring of the third year of the war. The Blue Army, filled up with humans, ogres, and the foul traitors from Lemish who'd thrown in their lot with the minions of Takhisis, prepared to fling itself against the High Clerist's Tower, that bastion of the Knights of Solamnia that stands at the head of a high mountain pass to ward the way to Palanthas. A rich prize, that city of Palanthas, with access to Coastlund in the west and the Bay of Branchala in the north. That whole sector of Solamnia would be squeezed and starved and find itself pleading for mercy if this ploy worked. "But it won't," said the fisherman, laughing. "Those knights have finally got themselves sorted out and are ready to fight."

Indeed, they had, and they'd found themselves a general as well. Laurana of Qualinesti went for a soldier, and she aimed for high rank. Well she was, after all, the daughter of a king. They called her the Golden General, and under her leadership the Knights of Solamnia became a force worth counting on. For the first time in all the war, a dragonarmy fled the field of battle, bloody and beaten. "Because they had something called dragonlances," the fisherman said. "Old weapons from old times. Made the difference, it did."

Soon-gods be praised-dragons of brass and silver and gold and copper were seen in the skies, come at last to defend the people of Krynn against the evil of Takhisis and her servants. At Whitestone Glade, dwarves and humans and elves were making treaties of alliance left and right, swearing to defend each other one and all.

"And so," said Dalamar Argent, who secretly liked the name Dalamar Nightson, "for whatever reason, the gods of Good have roused at last."

The fisherman, eyes wide at this near-blasphemy, made a sign against ill luck. "They have their reasons, Dalamar Argent. It's being said near and far that they have been working in the world all along, through the hearts and hands of people of good faith. Look you, aren't the races coming together now, putting aside their differences to work for a common good? Why, I heard it said that last winter the dwarves took human refugees into Thorbardin!" He laughed, as at a good joke. "Who'd ever have imagined that, eh? Enough to rouse any god and make him take notice. And the knights are united again, E'li's dragons come to save us at last… It's been a time of wonders. Which goes to show it was, after all, not just a war on the ground, but a war in the heavens as well."

So it was, Dalamar thought. He didn't speak his bitterness aloud. He took it with him, though, the question no one dared ask: How many have died praying for this moment so long delayed while gods played their games with each other, moving the people of Krynn around as though they were gaming pieces on a board? He thought of Lord Tellin Windglimmer, the cleric who died with E'li's name on his lips, his prayer unanswered.

Dalamar thanked the fisherman for his news and, as though in ritual long planned, he went to his house-his own small home, not that of his lover-and took off his white mage's robe, that mark of one who has been dedicated to Solinari. Instead, he dressed in the dun garb of a servant. Earthen brown boots, trews the color of mahogany, a shirt dyed walnut, these were the darkest clothes he could find. So changed, he walked down to the sea to the place where exiles had landed years before, from where exiles would soon again sail. He took with him the embroidered scroll case, that artifact of another time.

For a long moment he stood in the sun, a tall dark figure on the shining strand, an elf whose black hair blew around his pale face in the wind off the sea. Waves foamed around his feet and gulls cried in the sky. He turned the case over in his hands again and then again, looking at the silken hummingbirds hovering over ruby roses, those roses faded to brown as though the petals had withered.

With a cry like a curse, Dalamar hurled that artifact of another time into the sea, the scroll case and the Dawn Hymn to E'li consigned to the streams and the tides and the fishes.

Two days later, the watch in the crow's nest of the elven ship Bright Sun saw that scroll case bobbing in the waters. He wondered, briefly, what it could be, but then he didn't think more about it, for he was far up among the gulls in the bright blue sky, and it was just then sinking into the sea. Bright Sun was a Qualinesti ship, not one out of Qualimori but one coming into Qualimori from the Nightmare Kingdom. Aboard was an elven prince, Porthios himself, whose sister commanded the Knights of Solamnia, whose father had nearly died of the grief of that. He had with him messages for the two elf kindreds, greetings for his father, and a message to Lord Belthanos and his council-in-exile from their princess.

"Come home," she had written, Alhana Starbreeze in her far tower in ruined Silvanost. "Prepare ships and come home. Bring clerics to cleanse the temples, mages to unwork the vestiges of evil magic, and Wildrunners to ward all."

She gave the missive to Porthios, and gave to him the care of those who would return. They had been, over the last months of the war, often in correspondence, a prince and a princess of sundered kindred. No light of love shone in the eyes of one, nothing like that gleamed in the heart of the other. They were, always, the children of their fathers, and when their hearts burned, they burned for their people. And so, at the end of the war when all of Krynn looked around to see what must be put back together, these children of kings wondered whether something long ago broken might again be made whole. Could it be, they said each to the other secretly and in whispers, could it be that we two can make the sundered elven nations whole?