you,' he growled, slapping his misshapen hands on the stone.
Inza turned and ran. Soth started after her, but Isolde laid a restraining hand on his arm. 'No, Loren,' she said softly. 'Other powers control her fate.'
The Vistana emerged into the chaos of the courtyard. The dead and wounded covered the ground. Soth's thirteen skeletal warriors marched among the bodies, methodically hacking anything that moved or wept or bled too much. Overhead, the thirteen banshees wove frenzied patterns around the keep in their wyvern-drawn chariots of bone. The light of the blaze and of the new red moon, shining full and bright over Nedragaard, made the usually pallid spirits appear drenched in gore.
Inza passed through the carnage untouched, as if surrounded by an invisible shield. She reached the courtyard's edge. There, the gaping rift in the outer curtain opened onto the isthmus and freedom. Only, the isthmus was gone. The section of the earthen bridge closest to the keep had collapsed into the Great Chasm. On the opposite side of the gap stood the hapless giant Inza had crippled, with the three remaining Wanderers crowded at his strangely booted feet.
Nabon started to back up, as if he intended to leap the gap. Inza could see Alexi, ever-practical Alexi, trying to make the giant reconsider. Piotr and Nikolas, on the other hand, cheered him on. It was obvious that the giant would make it. His anger and his hatred would vault him over the entire chasm itself if necessary. Inza knew Nabon would tear her limb from limb for what she'd done to him.
Nabon started forward. His footfalls shook the fragile banks of the remaining isthmus, sending chunks of rock into the eternal murk of the Great Chasm. Inza met the giant's charge with a smile of defiance on her face and her storied ancestor's dagger in her hand. But before Nabon could leap, Inza Magdova Kulchevich threw herself from the cliff.
They watched her fall, the giant she had tortured and the adoptive kin she had betrayed. That insolent smile remained on her lips-until she felt the darkness cradling her, slowing her descent. As vile hands lowered her into the chasm's lightless depths and the gloom closed over her like a shroud, Inza finally screamed.
Within Nedragaard's main hall, the White Rose nodded again to Soth. 'There,' she said. 'The sound of justice.'
The Beast lowered his necklace of ears, which he had raised in a mocking posture, as if they might amplify the Vistana's shriek of horror. 'Come now, what does he know of justice?' he rumbled. With one grimy hand he indicated Soth. 'I swear he could not define the word.'
'You must know something to pervert it,' the Cobbler offered. He walked slowly around the death knight, regarding him carefully. 'Just as you must recognize the path of the righteous to choose not to tread upon it.'
'Respect,' Isolde chided. 'Regardless of what he is, you must show your father respect.'
Though his face was hidden by his helm, Soth's voice made his horror clear. 'These monsters are not mine, woman.'
'We are,' the Cobbler said, 'and we are not alone. This entire land was built around you, Father. Why should you wonder that you are the sire of its nightmares, too?'
'We are monsters only to the likes of you,' the Beast snarled, 'to men who swear oaths and break them.'
'To those who recognize, but squander the gifts the gods have given them,' the Cobbler added. 'They afforded you the capacity for valor, for honor, and the strength of arm to protect the innocent. But you wasted their munificence.'
'Honor is an illusion,' Soth replied. 'You can be no progeny of mine if you do not know that.'
Isolde stepped forward, gently lowering her cowl as she came. Her flesh was charred from the fire that had claimed her life, a blaze much like the one burning above them in Nedragaard's upper floors. 'This place has made you forget. That is its nature.'
'I forget nothing,' Soth said as he, too, unmasked.
Like Isolde's, the death knight's flesh was blasted, withered. But around this never-changing, ever-corrupt core a phantom hovered, a ghostly reflection of the honorable man he'd once been. Had Soth cared to look, he would have recognized his own deep-set eyes in the Cobbler's handsome face. Even the Beast, beneath the outward filth and seeming armor of corruption, resembled his sire.
Smoke had begun to fill the hall, and Isolde swayed, more from remembered pain than any actual discomfort. The Beast and the Cobbler were at her side in an instant. They stood to either hand, steadied her, as she faced Soth. 'The curse I laid upon you at my death is strong, Husband, strong enough to send me here to ensure you do not escape its sting. Before I can be released, I must be certain you are ready to feel its barb once more…'
Isolde drew her hands together. As she did, the Beast and the Cobbler melted into mist. The pale fog flowed into the White Rose's outstretched arms, reformed as a whimpering, skeletal infant swaddled in a fire-blackened bunting.
The blaze had burned down to the main floor at last. The ceiling groaned under the weight of the toppled stone and timber pressed down upon it. Isolde held out the mewling child, poor slain Peradur, and said, 'Please, my lord, he is your flesh.'
Soth placed his helmet back onto his head. He stared for a moment at the monstrous thing in Isolde's grasp. Even as he recognized the spectral child as his own, his spirit rebelled at the thought of accepting it. To do so would overturn the final action that had brought Isolde's curse upon him and made him what he was. To do so would be admitting he'd been wrong.
The ceiling collapsed. Burning wood and blackened stone rained down upon the hall. Indifferent to the havoc, Lord Soth turned away from Isolde and Peradur, just as he had a world away and several lifetimes ago in Dargaard Keep.
With that decision, the death knight's scarred and patched memory finally healed. He looked inward and found that the last missing fragments of his past had been replaced. His history unfurled before him, a grim pageant that he had scripted, he had directed.
As he looked out upon all his deeds, both glorious and infamous, the Knight of the Black Rose felt that same history enfold him in its cold embrace.
Epilogue
Through the perpetual twilight of Nightlund they came, the undead and the undying, the things of darkness that made that cursed realm the sorrow of all the peaceful lands surrounding it. The air shivered with the tread of monstrosities. The blasted fields stirred to the unsettling susurrus of lost souls wending over the earth. They put aside their quarrels, those beasts that lived for bloodshed alone. If only for one night, they recognized a unity of purpose.
They came to pay homage.
They came to prove for themselves that the tales were true.
When those foul creatures saw the light burning within the ruins of Dargaard Keep and glimpsed the armored figure standing atop the fire-blasted battlements, they quailed and cursed, even as their corrupt hearts rejoiced. The Knight of the Black Rose had returned.
Unquiet dreams plagued the peoples of Krynn that night. From the deepest tunnels of Thorbardin to the most isolated, moonlit glade in the Silvanesti Forest, the sleeping minds of men and elves and dwarves alike were overwhelmed by a similar vision. A black rose had taken root in the garden of Ansalon. Its petals slowly opened until, immense and festering with corruption, the bloom engulfed the entire world.
The denizens of Sithicus, too, dreamed of the tainted rose, but in the nightmares of those luckless, terror- ridden people, the flower that had so long loomed over their land shriveled and fell away. Lord Soth was gone, and with him the plague and the White Rose, the Whispering Beast and the Bloody Cobbler. Nedragaard Keep had toppled. Its ruins sat upon a spike of stone in the Great Chasm, cut off from the cliffs, surrounded on all sides by a sea of hungry shadow.
A single moon shone down upon that rubble and all the other destruction wrought by the shadow mountain's impact. Some claimed the pattern on the orb formed a rosette with petals of white and black and crimson. Others saw things more ominous than a rose in the pattern, though they were reluctant to describe just what it was they recognized there. The only thing upon which all could agree was the strangeness of the moon's triple-hued light.
