The Messenger

somewhere in the depths of his memory Waykand’s taunting laugh echoed.

Then came despair. Would life be worth living if he had to live it away from Silvanesti? He gazed longingly at the verdant bluffs on the distant shore. A gleam of color, washed pale by the haze, arced over a deep, tributary canyon. This was the Rainbow Gorge, he knew, the shadowy vale where wizards maintained a permanent and brilliant pattern of rainbows, bright even in darkest night. When he sailed northward from the sea, he had always used the Rainbow Gorge as a sign that he was drawing near to home.

Now it seemed only a mocking reminder that he would never feast his eyes upon their pure beauty again. Slumping in the hull, he at last gave way to a hopelessness so deep and wounding that he could not even weep. He only sat numbly, watching as the gorge and its precious rainbows slowly receded in the distance.

A froth of water caught his eye, and he glimpsed a great trading galley churning northward through the river channel. Banners of silk, in red and blue and green, the colors muted by the magic haze, trailed from every mast and post. Double banks of great oars propelled the big ship upstream against the current. Kerrick drifted close enough that he could make out the faces of the elven captain and his mates, saw them leaning casually at the rail. It had been a successful voyage, to judge from the many pennants, and Kerrick wondered fleetingly how many times his father had made just such a return to this great land, had brought back cargoes of dwarven stone or Tarsian horses or-after the Istarian War-precious gold to make rich the coffers of the elven king.

As the great ship cruised on past and he studied the officers and their laboring crew, he came to a realization that only deepened his unhappiness. For these elves were looking in his direction, admiring the shoreline, but they made no acknowledgement of his presence, even steering dangerously close to him.

“They can’t even see me!” The wizards’ magic not only locked him onto a course of exile but shrouded his very existence from those he encountered on the way down the river and out of the elven nation.

As he crumpled against the transom, he was reminded of the scroll tube he had placed in his pocket. Kerrick took it out, pulled the cork from the end of the container, and slid the sheet of silken paper into his hands.

Even now, in the depths of his misery, the words brought back a measure of the pride he had felt when his liege bestowed it upon him:

These are the words of the King, for the eyes of all elvenkind:

Know that a young sailor of Silvanost has made the arduous journey from the Than-Thalas estuary to Tarsis, and then returned, crewing his sailing boat, Cutter, entirely by himself.

This solitary voyage ranks high in the annals of elven seamanship, and Kerrick Fallabrine is to be known to all of Silvanesti as a Friend of the King.

Speaker of Stars

Nethas Caladon of

House Silvanos,

Fifth King of Silvanesti

A gust of wind carried drops of water across the gunwale, splashing onto the page and causing the ink to smear. Strangely, though this scroll had been one of his treasured possessions, Kerrick wasn’t concerned. His mind wandered, drifting away from the boat, across the water with the wind, free of this bobbing vessel and its magical geas. He remembered his first voyage, not in Cutter, but in his father’s fabulous galley, Silvanos Oak, a vessel that would have dwarfed the splendid ship that had just passed him.

Of course, Dimorian Fallabrine was the king’s admiral and a victor of many noteworthy sea battles. He had made himself a name and a fortune during the Istarian War, when navies of that human empire had attempted to block the elves from trading with the many human nations flourishing to either side of Silvanesti. The Kingpriest had sent his ships by the score, great, deep-drafted galleons that sailed with impunity back and forth across the mouth of the Than-Thalas, blockading the ships of elves and humans alike, keeping all from entering or departing from the elven kingdom.

The roots of the conflict were ancient but could be boiled down to one word: gold. That precious metal, ever in short supply among the civilized nations of the world, was the historical symbol of Istarian might. The Kingpriest claimed that every ingot, every flake of the precious stuff belonged, by gods-given right, to him. However, elves coveted gold, too-not only for its beauty, but because it was necessary for the working of great magic spells, such as the sustained beauty represented by the Rainbow Gorge.

Many elven noblemen, dashing sailors who fancied themselves epic heroes, dared to try and slip past that blockade, but their ships were always caught, the crews put to the sword, nobles held hostage against exorbitant ransom. It was Dimorian Fallabrine, in a small trading galley, the Southcoast Elm, who successfully challenged the Istarian fleet. The tale of his exploits would later be made into a court poem and national song, and the recounting of his accomplishment never failed to fill Kerrick with pride.

With his ship crewed by an unusual mix of races, Dimorian faced two Istarian galleons in a long battle. Fire arrows filled the sky with smoke, and the ships rammed and counterrammed all day, breaking timbers, masts, and oars. The Kingpriest’s cleric shouted spells of protection and blessing until an elven wizard killed that priest with a crackling bolt of magical lightning. Eventually, one of the Istarian ships was sunk in a tangle of rigging, wreckage, and drowning men. Another ship was trapped against the shoals and captured with her entire crew. When Southcoast Elm towed the prize upriver to Silvanost, Dimorian Fallabrine was accorded a welcome reserved for the greatest heroes.

Kerrick’s father was awarded an admiral’s commission by King Nethas, together with a purse of gold allowing him to build the mightiest vessel afloat. The result was Silvanos Oak, a ship propelled by nearly two hundred oars, with a hull enchanted against damage and a ram of deadly steel. Dimorian next sailed down river with a force of a dozen galleys, and Silvanos Oak as his flagship. He led the final campaign against the blockade, a campaign so constant, so costly in terms of ships and lives lost, that finally the prideful Kingpriest was forced to acknowledge the failure of his plan.

The resulting treaty allowed Silvanesti free access to such gold as the elves could obtain by trade and mining, and involved settlement of a significant amount of gold paid directly from Istarian coffers into those of King Nethas. For a time there were rumors that Dimorian would be accorded rank as a minor noble, but in the end the monarch instead rewarded the bold sailor with a payment of riches and a vow that all of his offspring would be entitled to training in the royal court of Silvanost.

Kerrick was born shortly after the war ended, and by that time his father had established a great manor on Silvanost’s exclusive Harbor Hill. His wealth granted the family privileged status in the city, though he was never fully accepted by the nobles of the Elder Houses. Still, Dimorian was able to provide for his son a comfortable childhood, with nurses and nannies and plenty to eat.

The young elf’s earliest memories were of the water. He used to gaze southward from his father’s manor tower, eyeing the broad river, dreaming of the endless ocean beyond the elven realm. How many hours had he wasted up there in the tower? Happily he awaited the Silvanos Oak, each time the sleek galley returned from some profitable adventure. Upon each homecoming Dimorian produced fabulous gifts-dyes of unique hues, wines, fruits, and grains of exotic origins, teas from as far away as Istar, and, once, an ornately modeled sword of tin that had been hammered out by a Tarsian craftsman.

Most mysterious of all was the tiny box that Dimorian showed to his son, when Kerrick was still a lad of twenty-five. It came with a whispered promise of magical powers. It was a rare treasure obtained in trade with a mysterious wizard.

“You will have it, my son, a golden prize when you have reached your adulthood, and it may give you the strength to face the trials that will inevitably come your way. But always treat it with caution and respect, for it also has the power to weaken and destroy.”

Before Kerrick could attain that mystical rank-“adulthood,” to an elf, came some time in the seventh or eighth decade of life-he entered the palace of House Royal to begin his studies in earnest. Setting aside the toy sword of his childhood, he said farewell to his mother. He could still remember her carefully restrained tears as he passed through the gates of the great capital to begin service as a page in the court of the great King Nethas. How eager he had been to go-he was too quick to break off those final embraces, too much in a rush to race across the drawbridge and enter a new world.

For three years he had lived the courtly life, learning of Silvanesti’s heralded past, her station as the greatest nation in the history of Krynn. He thrilled to the tales of the great dragon wars in which ogres, even more than the