always the ruinous moment, all of them settling in grim alignment, the orb the sixth like a heart in his hand, like a fluttering light a firebrand he carried to ignited Silvanost in the numbered days.
I am bringing them fire, he said to himself, I am bringing them
Light in the old gods' story. I am the first
I will save them in the rising earth
I will save them and the old world pivots away from my guiding hand.
So he said to himself, and the shapeless horizon shaded to green and redoubling green as out of his last dreams arose Silvanesti, tangible, fractured in light.
III
And outside the forest the world collapsed, a mountain of fire crashed like a comet through jewelled Istar, through the endless city, and the Tower, unmanned and unhouseled, split like a dry stalk in the midst of the ruinous flames, and out of the valleys the mountains erupted, the seas poured forever into the graves of mountains, the long deserts sighed on abandoned floors of the seas, and the highways of Krynn descended into the paths of the dead.
As hail and fire in a downpour of blood tumbled to earth, igniting the trees and the grass, as the mountains were burning, as the sea became blood as above and below us the heavens were scattered, as locusts and scorpions wandered the face of the planet, Silvanost floated on islands of thought, immaculate memory gabled in cloud and dreaming, untouched by the fire, by the shocks of the Rending, and from tower to tower from the Tower of Sorcery down to the Tower of Stars, drowsy in thinking, Lorac imagined an impossible dream of salvation, a country bartered in magic, renewed in his mind to a paradise won in a ranging study.
And so it appeared in the orb, in the waking hours, in the suddenly secret lodging of light as the globe lay buried, masked and unfabled in the Tower of Stars, the ancestral tower of Speakers, of Silvanost, buried for centuries.
While the continent burned and the people of Qualinost wandered through ash and the outer darkness, Silvanost floated at the edge of their sight, absent and glorious, down to the edge of their dreams. Lorac watched from the Tower of Stars, from the heart of the crystal, his eye on the face of the damaged world like a rumor of history he was forgetting lost in the fathomless maze of the orb.
But often at night when the senses faltered and the polished country altered and coiled, the shape of the dream was the Speaker's reflection: The estranging trees were nests of daggers, the streams black and clotted under a silent moon that mourned for the day and the fierce definition of sunlight and knowledge where the trees and towns were named and numbered and always, implacably intended and purposed, far from the tangle of nightmare, the shadow and weave of the forest that wrangled to light in the dreams of Lorac, invading the day with the glitter of flint, subverting the pale and anonymous sun.
IV
Then to the North an evil arose in the cloud-wracked skies, for the Dragon Highlords sent sword and messenger, firebrand and word to the Tower of Stars, to rapt Silvanesti, to the dwindling porches of the elf king's ear, promising peace and the forest's asylum in the discord of armies, promising Silvanost free in exchange for the promise of silence, inaction, for a nodding head on the Green Throne.
And Lorac agreed, his eye on the hooded orb, where miraculous silence promised a blessing of spears, an end to all promise, the dragons by summer.
And so Silvanesti was emptied of silver, emptied of lives and the long dreaming blood of its last inhabitants as they took to the boats, to the skiffs, to the coracles, aimless on water as cloudy as oracles and the Wildrunners fought in the wake of the water, where their last breath billowed in the spreading sails.
Alhana Starbreeze, the Speaker's daughter, stood at the helm in the silver passage as they sailed to the South on the Paths of Astralas, on the bard's memory, on history's spindrift, and Lorac behind them ordered his soldiers to leave the unraveling land in the last of the ships, for there in the dark called the forest, called Silvanost, the elm and aeterna choiring like nightingales, singing this song to his turning ear,
After the last test
There is no other. o the tests are behind you
Speaker of suns and the song of the orb
Is the song of your mind in this ancient tower
Hollow and loveless with long departures.
O the tests are behind you speaker of suns
But I shall lie here as history folds
In these flourishing walls as the tower crumbles
And with it the mind the first high battlements
The house of the Gods but I shall lie here
As the forest withers as the plains descend
Into winter and nothing unless the song of your thoughts
Which is everything, is the world, controls and subdues
And informs the mystery.
Keep me in Silvanost speaker of suns, keep me in freedom
It lay in the chambers secret in stars, above it the Tower and a labyrinth of legends, and the freedom it promised at its crystalline heart was green ice beckoning, flame of the distant voice.
And drawn by its music, by the unearthly chiming of crystal and shifting thought the Speaker of Suns descended alone to the heart of the Tower where time and the forest and a shaft of moonlight collapsed on the orb, and he reached for the crystal as a thousand voices rose from its brimming fire, all of them singing the lure of the possible, all of them singing the song he imagined, and his thoughts were a fortress, phantasmal ramparts of maple and ash and belief, in his daylit dreams the armies were breaking, the edge of the forest bristled with leaf and invention, and summoned, he reached for the crystal as the globe and the world dissolved in his terrible grasp.
He knew when the bones of his fingers ignited, when green fire danced on the back of his hands, in the damage of arteries, and he knew at once that the fire was the heart of his error, that neither the strength nor the words nor the mind could govern the magic.
But the shadows of Silvanost faded from green into red, into brown and untenable gold, the orb was a prison and above Thon-Thalas the long wingbeat of the dragon approached, and the trees bent and bowed in a sinister wind as Lorac beheld this all through the light of the orb, and the dragon, the Bloodbane, came with its whispers, and under its words the old stones tilted, and the Tower of Stars, as white as a sepulchre, twisted and torted as the trees rained blood and the animals shrieked their cries like torn metal in a charmed and perpetual midnight.
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
