Dragonlance 15 - Dragons Of A Fallen Sun (24 page)

"I have been with her always," said Galdar, and it truly

seemed to him that he had.

Minotaur and human shook hands. Galdar proudly raised

Mina's standard and fell in beside her as she made her victory

march through the camp. Captain Samuval walked behind Mina,

his hand on his sword, guarding her back. Mina's Knights rode to

her standard. Everyone of those who had followed her from

Neraka had suffered some wound, but none had perished. Al-

ready, they were telling stories of miracles.

" An arrow came straight toward me," said one. "I knew I was

dead. I spoke Mina's name, and the arrow dropped to the ground

at my feet."

"One of the cursed Solamnics held his sword to my throat,"

said another. "I called upon Mina, and the enemy's blade broke in

twain."

Soldiers offered her food. They brought her wine, brought her

water. Several soldiers seized the tent of one of Milles's officers,

turned him out, and prepared it for Mina. Snatching up burning

brands from the campfires, the soldiers held them aloft, lighting

Mina's progress through the darkness. As she passed, they spoke

her name as if it were an incantation that could work magic.

"Mina," cried the men and the wind and the darkness.

"Mina!"

CHAPTER EIGHT

UNDER THE SHIELD

The Silvanesti elves have always revered the night.

The Qualinesti delight in the sunlight. Their ruler is the

Speaker of the Sun. They fill their homes with sunlight, all

business is conducted in the daylight hours, all important cere-

monies such as marriage are held in the day so that they may be

blessed by the light of the sun.

The Silvanesti are in love with the star-lit night.

The Silvanesti's leader is the Speaker of the Stars. Night had

once been a blessed time in Silvanost, the capital of the elven

state. Night brought the stars and sweet sleep and dreams of the

beauty of their beloved land. But then came the War of the Lance.

The wings of evil dragons blotted out the stars. One dragon in

particular, a green dragon known as Cyan Bloodbane, laid claim

to the realm of Silvanesti. He had long hated the elves and he

wanted to see them suffer. He could have slaughtered them by

the thousands, but he was cruel and clever. The dying suffer, that

is true, but the pain is fleeting and is soon forgotten as the dead

move from this reality to the next. Cyan wanted to inflict a pain

that nothing could ease, a pain that would endure for centuries.

The ruler of Silvanesti at the time was an elf highly skilled in

magic. Lorac Caladon foresaw the coming of evil to Ansalon. He

sent his people into exile, telling them he had the power to keep

their realm safe from the dragons. Unbeknownst to anyone,

Lorac had stolen one of the magical dragon orbs from the Tower

of High Sorcery. He had been warned that an attempt to use the

orb by one who was not strong enough to control its magic

could result in doom. In his arrogance, Lorac believed that he

was strong enough to wrest the orb to his will. He looked into

the orb and saw a dragon looking back. Lorac was caught and

held in thrall.

Cyan Bloodbane had his chance. He found Lorac in the Tower

of the Stars, as he sat upon his throne, his hand held fast by the

orb. Cyan whispered into Lorac's ear a dream of Silvanesti, a ter-

rible dream in which lovely trees became hideous, deformed

monstrosities that attacked those who had once loved them. A

dream in which Lorac saw his people die, one by one, each death

painful and terrible to witness. A dream in which the Thon-

Thalas river ran red with blood.

The War of the Lance ended. Queen Takhisis wa~ defeated.

Cyan Bloodbane was forced to flee Silvanesti, but he left smugly

satisified with the knowledge that he had accomplished his

goal. He had inflicted upon the Silvanesti a tortured dream from

which they would never awaken. When the elves returned to

their land after the war was over, they discovered to their shock

and horror that the nightmare was reality. Lorac's dream, given

to him by Cyan Bloodbane, had hideously altered their once

beautiful land.

The Silvanesti fought the dream arid, under the leadership of

a Qualinesti general, Porthios, the elves eventually managed to

defeat it. The cost was dear, however. Many elves fell victim to

the dream, and even when it was finally cast out of the land, the

trees and plants and animals remained horribly deformed.

Slowly, the elves coaxed their forests back to beauty, using newly

discovered magicks to heal the wounds left by the dream, to

cover over the scars.

Then came the need to forget. Porthios, who had risked his

life more than once to wrest their land from the clutches of the

dream, became a reminder of the dream. He was no longer a

savior. He was a stranger, an interloper, a threat to the Sil-

vanesti who wanted to return to their life of isolation and seclu-

sion. Porthios wanted to take the elves into the world, to make

them one with the world, to unify them with their cousins, the

Qualinesti. He had married Alhana Starbreeze, daughter of

Lorac, with this hope in mind. Thus if war came again, the elves

would not struggle alone. They would have allies to fight on

their side.

The elves did not want allies. Allies who might decide to

gobble up Silvanesti land in return for their help. Allies who

might want to marry Silvanesti sons and daughters and dilute the

pure Silvanesti blood. These isolationists had declared Porthios

and his wife, Alhana, "dark elves" who could never, under

penalty of death, return to their homelands.

Porthios was driven out. General Konnal took control of the

nation and placed it under martial law "until such time as a true

king can be found to rule the Silvanesti." The Silvanesti ignored

the pleas of their cousins, the Qualinesti, for help to free them

from the rule of the great dragon Beryl and the Knights of

Neraka. The Silvanesti ignored the pleas of those who fought the

great dragons and who begged the elves for their help. The Sil-

vanesti wanted no part of the world. Absorbed in their own af-

fairs, their eyes looked at the mirror of life and saw only

themselves. Thus it was that while they gazed with pride at their

own reflections, Cyan Bloodbane, the green dragon who had

been their bane, came back to the land he had once nearly de-

stroyed. Or so at least, it was reported by the kirath, who kept

watch on the borders.

"Do not raise the shield!" the kirath warned. "You will trap us

inside with our worst enemy!"

The elves did not listen. They did not believe the rumors.

Cyan Bloodbane was a figure out of the dark past. He had died in

the Dragon Purge. He must have died. If he had returned, why

had he not attacked them? So fearful were the elves of the world

outside that the Heads of House were unanimous in their ap-

proval of the magical shield. The people of Silvanesti could now

be said to have gained their dearest wish. Under the magical

shield, they were truly isolated, cut off from everyone. They were

safe, protected from the evil of the outside world.

"And yet, it seems to me that we have not so much as shut the

evil out," Rolan said to Silvan, ''as that we have locked the evil in."

Night had come to Silvanesti. The darkness was welcome to

Silvan, even as it was a grief to him. They had traveled by day

through the forest, covering many miles until Rolan deemed they

were far enough from the ill effects of the shield to stop and rest.

The day had been a day of wonder to Silvanoshei.

He had heard his mother speak with longing, regret, and

sorrow of the beauty of her homeland. He remembered as a child

when he and his exiled parents were hiding in some cave with

danger all about them, his mother would tell him tales of Sil-

vanesti to quiet his fears. He would close his eyes and see, not the

darkness, but the emerald, silver and gold of the forest. He would

hear not the howls of wolf or goblin but the melodious chime of

the bell flower or the sweetly sorrowful music of the flute tree.

His imagination paled before the reality, however. He could

not believe that such beauty existed. He had spent the day as in

a waking dream, stumbling over rocks, tree roots, and his own

feet as wonders on every side brought tears to his eyes and joy to

his heart. .

Trees whose bark was tipped with silver lifted their branches

to the sky in graceful arcs, their silver-edged leaves shining in

the sunlight. A profusion of broad-leafed bushes lined the path,

every bush ablaze with flame-colored flowers that scented the

air with sweetness. He had the impression he did not walk

through a forest so much as through a garden, for there were no

fallen branches, no straggling weeds, no thickets of brambles.

The Woodshapers permitted only the beautiful, the fruitful, and

the beneficial to grow in their forests. The Woodshapers' magi-

cal influence extended throughout the land, with the exception

of the borders, where the shield cast upon their handiwork a

killing frost.

The darkness brought rest to Silvan's dazzled eyes. Yet the

night had its own heart-piercing beauty. The stars blazed with

fierce brilliance, as if defying the shield to try to shut them out.

Night flowers opened their petals to the starlight, scented the

warm darkness with exotic perfumes, while their luminescent

glow filled the forest with a soft silvery white light.

"What do you mean?" Silvan asked. He could not equate evil

with the beauty he'd witnessed.

"The cruel punishment we inflicted on your parents, for one,

Your Majesty," said Rolan. "Our way of thanking your father for

his aid was to try to stab him in the back. I was ashamed to be Sil-

vanesti when I heard of this. But there has come ~ reckoning. We

are bemg made to pay for our shame and our dIshonor, for cut-

ting ourselves off from the rest of the world, for living beneath the

shield, protected from the dragons while others suffer. We pay for

such protection with our lives."

They had stopped to rest in a clearing near a swift-flowing

stream. Silvan was thankful for the respite. His injuries had

started to pain him once more, though he had not liked to say

anything. The excitement and shock of the sudden change in his

life had drained him, depleted his energy.

Rolan found fruit and water with a sweetness like nectar for

their dinner. He tended to Silvan's wounds with a respectful, so-

licitous care that the young man found quite pleasant.

Samar would have tossed me a rag and told me to make the

best of it, Silvanoshei thought.

"Perhaps Your Majesty would like to sleep for a few hours,"

Rolan suggested after their supper.

Silvan had thought he was dropping from fatigue but found

that he felt much better after eating, refreshed and renewed.

"I would like to know more about my homeland," he said.

"My mother has told me some, but, of course, she could not know

what has been happening since she. . . she left. You spoke of the

shield." Silvan glanced about him. The beauty took his breath

away. "1 can understand why you would want to protect this"-

he gestured to the trees whose boles shone with an iridescent

light, to the star flowers that sparkled in the grass-"from the

ravages of our enemies."

"Yes, Your Majesty," said Rolan and his tone softened. "There

are some who say that no price is too high to pay for such pro-

tection, not even the price of our own lives. But if all of us are

dead, who will be left to appreciate the beauty? And if we die, I

believe that eventually the forests will die, too, for the souls of the

elves are bound up in all things living."

"Our people number as the stars," said Silvan, amused, think-

ing that Rolan was being overly dramatic.

Rolan glanced up at the heavens. "Erase half those stars, Your

Majesty, and you will find the light considerably diminished."

"Half" Silvanoshei was shocked. "Surely not half!"

"Half the population of Silvanost alone has perished from the

wasting sickness, Your Majesty." He paused a moment, then said,

"What I am about to tell you would be considered treason, for

which I would be severely punished."

"By punished, you mean cast out?" Silvan was troubled.

"Exiled? Sent into darkness?"

"No, we do not do that anymore, Your Majesty," Rolan

replied. "We cannot very well cast people out, for they could not

pass through the shield. Now people who speak against Gover-

nor General Konnal simply disappear. No one knows what hap-

pens to them."

"If this is true, why don't the people rebel?" Silvan asked, be-

wildered. "Why don't they overthrow Konnal and demand that

the shield be brought down?"

"Because only a few know the truth. And those of us who do

have no evidence. We could stand in the Tower of the Stars and

say that Konnal has gone mad, that he is so fearful of the world