The War of the Lance

V

So it was as the centuries gathered and telescoped into the passage of a dozen years, as the bristling heart of Silvanesti festered and doubled and hardened like crystal. And always the promise of Cyan Bloodbane, of the dragon coiled on the crystal globe, always the promise was nothing and nothing and the forest the map of a strangled country, land of stillbirth, of fever, of warped and gangrenous age and of long unendurable dying, until from the North came another invasion of hard light and lances as the Heroes, the Fellowship, the fashioned alliance of elf and dwarf, of human and gnome and kender came to the forest through the nest of nightmare, through the growing entanglement, through bone, through crystal, through all the forgotten banes and allures of the damaged heart, to Silvanost and the disfigured Tower, to Lorac, to the imprisoning Orb, and they freed the Speaker the Tower and town, the forest, the people, the bright orb they freed and like a survivor tumbled the globe through the years through the centuries lodged in the pale hands of others and its old polished carapace bright and reflecting the hourglassed eyes of its ultimate wielder.

But the sands were draining over the Speaker of Suns, and the knowledge of Lorac, vaulted and various, numbered and faceted, descended and simplified into a knowledge of evil, as the forest unfolded, stripped of the long light, bare of bedazzlement and at last Silvanesti was free of his mind, torn from the labyrinth bearing forever the scars of belief to the last syllable of eventual time, and Lorac died in his daughter's arms, his thoughts in the Tower entombed and surrendered, his last wish a burial underneath Silvanost, driving the green from the body's decay, resolving to forest, resolving to Silvanost forever and ever, his enabling ghost to ascribe and deliver the land that he dreamt of, as thought was translated to dream.

And yes, it is always like this, for the country is haunted with old supposition, and no matter the stories, no matter the rumors of legend and magic that illumine you through the curtain of years, you come to believe in the web of yourself that history twines in the veins of your fingers, that it knits all purpose, all pardon and injury, recovers the lapsed and plausible blood, until finally, in the midst of believing, you contrive among rumors the story, the old convolution of breath and forgetting, in which you will say, beyond truth and belief,

This is what it means, for once and at last what

It always meant, no more than I knew

From the world's beginning is all

That it means forever.