Lord Soth

Epilogue

When at last, after days of burning, the flames died down, Dargaard

Keep-once the pride of all Solamnia and one of the wonders of

Krynn-was little more than a black and charred husk retaining its rose-like shape, but none of its former glory.

There had been some who escaped the flames. They had managed to leap from the burning keep and across the yawning chasm surrounding it. But those survivors were few, as most of the inhabitants had succumbed to the flames, dying horrifically only to be reborn as wraithlike beings who haunted the keep in the service of its lord.

Lord Loren Soth.

The Death Knight.

Weeks later, some signs of life returned to the grounds around Dargaard

Keep. While the land surrounding the keep, once green and lush, had been blackened by ash and become almost devoid of life, some flowers had begun to bloom.

In the charred garden within the keep and on the grounds around it, black roses bloomed, their thorns long and sharp and quite painful to the touch.

Travelers sometimes picked the odd, gloomy flowers, but never more than one or two at a time. And most important of all, never did they linger afterward for fear of attracting the attention of the lord of the keep and incurring his wrath.

Lord Loren Soth.

Knight of the Black Rose.

As the sun set on the gray plains of Solamnia, the flame blackened drawbridge leading into the keep rumbled and was slowly lowered across the chasm.

In silence, Soth's thirteen retainers, former Sword, Crown and Rose knights, appeared through the archway under the raised portcullis. They were skeletal warriors now, still loyal to their lord, even in death.

They exited the keep mounted upon their horses, which had also been transformed by the flames, for yet another nocturnal patrol of Knightlund.

Soth sat on his throne. The walls of the keep that surrounded him were black and charred by the fire. Soth's armor had also been blackened by the flames.

His flesh had burned too, but he had not died.

With each agonizing movement, his burnt and charred flesh cracked and broke off in pieces. The pain had been less these past few days as most of his skin had slowly fallen off of his body. In another week it would be gone completely, leaving only a cold, hard skeleton.

If anything remained alive in his new undead form, it was his eyes. They burned the color of the same bright orange flames which had consumed him. But they burned also with anguish, regret, and the pain of never ending torment, as he knew he would remain in this form for an eternity so that he might be properly punished for his sins.

The pain of it all was sometimes too much for him to bear. Orange tears fell from his eyes and sizzled like water on a hot iron as they hit the ground below.

To compound his torment, around him circled the banshee spirits, spirits he had brought to life when he so brutally killed the elf-maidens who had confronted him on the way to Istar.

In life they had tormented him with their words. In death they did the same, their words transforming into song.

They would never let him forget.

And now, as he sat on his throne pondering his former life and current unlife, the banshees' keening wails continued to rip into his mind and tear relentlessly at his soul.

And though his heart did not beat, it was nevertheless shattered and racked by the agonizing pain of regret.

He tried to close his eyes.

But as death would not come to relieve him of this world… Neither would sleep.

Song of the Banshees

And in the climate of dreams when you recall her, when the world of the dream expands, wavers in light, when you stand at the edge of blessedness and sun, Then we shall make you remember, shall make you live again through the long denial of body.

For you were first dark in the light's hollow, expanding like a stain, a cancer For you were the shark in the slowed water beginning to move For you were the notched head of a snake, sensing forever warmth and form

For you were inexplicable death in the crib, the long house in betrayal.

And you were more terrible than this in a loud alley of visions, for you passed through unharmed, unchanging, As the women screamed, unraveling silence, halving the door of the world, bringing forth monsters As a child opened in parabolas of fire There at the borders of two lands burning

As the world split, wanting to swallow you back willing to give up everything to lose you in darkness.

You passed through these unharmed, unchanging, but now you see them strung on our words of your own conceiving as you pass from night to awareness of night to know that hatred is the calm of philosophers, that its price is forever, that it draws you through meteors, through winter's transfixion through the blasted rose through the shark's water through the black compression of oceans through rock-through magma to yourself-to an abscess of nothing that you will recognize as nothing, that you will know is coming again and again under the same rules.