The Dark Queen

by Michael Williams

  Then the dust in his hands rose and mingled with the blinding air.

  You have done your part, the voices proclaimed. I will let you live for now.

  He knew better than to ask for the woman, the bride-the beautiful girl crafted of dust opalescent and promised him years ago by the dark voice in the clerestory. She would not come. He knew that he had been deceived. Duped and humiliated, weaker than he had ever imagined himself to be, the King-priest watched helplessly as the cloud darkened and solidified and poured out the opened windows.

  * * * * *

  Emerging from the temporary stonesleep that had saved him from Takhisis's anger, Stormlight watched from the foot of the Tower as a new whirlwind stirred on the balcony.

  Dark sand eddied and rose, and within it the flat, opaque dust of the glain opals. The elf saw three shapes intertwined in the heart of the cloud: Tamex and Tanila, their amber eyes glittering with a strange, reptilian identity…

  And the other one, bearded and long-haired …

  The one with sea-blue eyes.

  The shapes were insubstantial, ever shifting, sometimes indistinguishable from each other, sometimes individual and distinct. He watched, horror-stricken, and he knew, as the sand and opal dust rose into an enormous, boiling cloud above the tower, that his old friend was no more and that the fabled city they had sought together was nothing but glittering, hollow marble.

  "Beware, Istar," he whispered, retreating through the streets toward the gate, the burning fields, and the people beyond who were his care and charge.

  "Beware in the years to come. For the ground is unsteady."

  Larken watched in alarm as the storm rose over the city.

  A deep, brooding shadow settled on the tallest of Istar's towers, and above the marbled horizon swirled a shapeless cloud, shot through with wind and lightning.

  Suddenly, the cloud took form and settled on the spire, dark wings emerging from the whirling chaos. Now a tail, now a thick, muscular neck and a strong reptilian jaw.

  With a cry, Lucas vaulted into the air. Wheeling once above the mouth of the pass, he shot south ahead of the building storm. In dismay, Larken watched him fly-watched her people scatter in fear and panic.

  Now a dragon perched atop the Kingpriest's Tower-a dragon of cloud and spinning sand. Slowly the wings began to flutter and fan, and Istar Lake buckled and rolled as a fierce wind passed over it. The clouds above the stormy image wheeled about it like indignant desert birds, and the air itself buckled in sheets of violet lightning,

  in a hundred whirlwinds racing throughout the northern sky.

  What is it? Vincus signed to the bard.

  Nothing. Nothing but a storm.

  But the shape, Vincus insisted, his dark hands emphatic. It looks like …

  Nothing, Larken signed. Nothing more than sand and old malice.

  Then the raging wind rushed over them all.

  Far worse than the sterim in the central pass, Takhisis's vengeance was swift and powerful. The alder trees were torn from their roots and hurled against the walls of the pass. Their crash and splinter and the cracking of rocks was deafening: all around Larken, the Plainsmen sought cover, as the wind tunneled through the Western Pass, whipping down into the plains and the desert beyond.

  Now, in the ear-splitting racket of wind, in the breaking of nature, Larken took up her lyre.

  The wind buffeted her frail song back to her, and, breathless, she stood in the mountain pass as the world uprooted around her.

  In the midst of chaos, she found herself peculiarly calm. There was a passage-a way past the shriek shy;ing wind and the devastation. And she knew that the answer lay somewhere in her memory.

  "Something perilous," Stormlight had told her. "And altogether new."

  She touched the lyre's strings, gathered her last shreds of courage and hope, faced the stormy dragon and began to sing.

  Fierce, driving sand clawed at her throat, and the wind took away her breath. Her voice flowed through the lyre, inaudible above the clamor, and yet she continued, singing despite the fact that no one could hear her, not even Vincus, who stood clinging to her, holding them both down, his face averted from the driving wind.

  She could not even hear herself.

  My song will not abandon me, she thought. It is the last thing I have against this chaos. And I will sing it until the world breaks in two.

  So the song of the bard warred against the shriek of the wind for a long hour, while a dozen Plains shy;men huddledJix alarm and forks of lightning flick shy;ered through the distant wings of the dragon. Twice Larken lost her footing-once she even fell, but Vin-cus's sinewy arms hung on to her, his dark head bent above her trembling shoulder as he stood in the wind like a strong rock in the sterim.

  Through it all Larken kept singing, sending all the verses and music she knew into the relentless assault of the wind, composing new melodies with a wild and reckless invention.

  Then, slowly, the cloudy dragon drew itself up and sailed high above the Kingpriest's Tower.

  As it took to the air, a wave of immeasurable silence-a last calm before the final, strangling tem shy;pest-rolled forth over the lake. The cloudy dragon followed, a swirling figure of sand, its broad wings beating slowly over the dark waters.

  In that sudden silence, Larken, still singing, dis shy;covered that no sound came from her throat-none but a faint, exhausted rasping.

  It is over, she thought, still trying to sing, opening her^ eyes and cradling the lyre like a sleeping child. I have done I can all to stand against the beast.

  Then, in the flash of a second before her last frail note slipped into fear and despair, as she held to her song with her ruined voice, the cry of a hawk frac shy;tured the expectant silence.

  Like a herald, Lucas flew north, out of the pass, in the fore of a great rumbling. Then the Istarian Mountains gave back Larken's lost song. It powered forth, strong, clear, and sweet, resounding with magic she had never known she possessed, of a love that sheltered her adopted people. Larken heard her own voice surge over her, echoing off the facets of a thousand rocks, a chorus magnified and deepened, echo upon echo, until the ground shook under her feet.

  At the edge of the lake, the shape of the dragon began to crumble and fall, harmlessly sifting into thtsvvater. The lake hissed as it received the fiery sand, and great columns of steam rose from the boiling surface. A horrendous shriek of anger and futility drowned swiftly in the rising song, and the steam hovered in the air, molding itself into the form of a bearded Plainsman warrior, a spiked tore about his neck and a celestial sadness in his countenance.

  Then a soft rain fell from the steaming clouds, and the last image of the Prophet vanished into the Istar shy;ian skies.

  Neither sand nor salt would ever be the same: every crystalline structure changed to the core, all geology translated, no mineral of Krynn would ever again harbor a god.

  For a moment the Kingpriest's Temple looked like a shining spire in the afternoon sun, pristine and washed.

  Larken's song-her last song-had done this.

  "So be it," she whispered, softly, absently, her thoughts on old memories, on private, inexpressible things. "Things will change after this. Things will have to change."

  Beside her, to her great surprise, Vincus nodded in agreement.

  The bard had spoken, and for the first time in a long time, her people had heard her voice.

  Another voice thundered in the depths of the Abyss.

  In black fire Takhisis rolled and raged, stirring a hot and lethal wind. The godlings scattered before her, twittering like bats.

  Defeated! By a squeaking bard and her attendant elves!

  The darkness whirled in disarray, the Abyss span shy;gling with bright stars, white and violet and crimson.

  Slowly, the goddess enfolded herself in the leath shy;ery sheath of her enormous batwings. She soothed herself in the permeating darkness, turning and calming her anger.

  Perhaps this time they had won.


  Perhaps these petty weaklings, in their great good fortune, had postponed her entry into Krynn for a few, paltry hours.

  But Fordus was dead, his insurrection crushed. She had seen to that.

  Now, her thoughts burst in flames on the tough, leathery surface of her inner wings. As though she watched a mural of light take form and evolve, Takhisis guided the images, shaped them and gave them purpose.

  The fire from her anger and magic splashed violet and crimson and white in the leathery cocoon of her folded wings. It shone upon a burning, collapsing city, the fall of great towers and the rending of the earth.

  It shone upon the Kingpriest's Tower, where the most powerful of her minions sat amid the dust of a hundred opals, chanting the last of a hundred spells she would begin to teach him today.

  Oh, it was not the inalterable future. Not yet. But in dream and insinuation, through his guilt and through the darker promptings of his heart, she would bring the Kingpriest to this spell, this moment, this pass.

  Her time would still come, was still coming.

  The Kingpriest would see to it all.

  Epilogue

  It is fitting that I, who am voiceless, should have the last word.

  The druids have kept me well for a hundred years. Even in the Rending-the time that others call the Cataclysm-they sheltered me and nurtured me through the long night of this Age of Darkness.

  for Takhisis won after all. She stopped the rebel shy;lion, turned us all back to the deserts south of Istar, and though the bravery of the elves prevented her early entry into the vulnerable world, she came later and more violently, when the city of Istar was torn asunder by her return, and millions died as the continent split in her fury.

  In all this enveloping darkness, it has not been so dark for me.

  Here in the north of Silvanost, in the last years of a long and happy life, I write in the final pages of the book Vaananen gave me in his chambers a century ago.

  "One will ask for it soon," he told me. "And yoiji will know it is right."

  How was I to know that the one who would ask for it would be the one to whom it was already given? One who would return it mysteriously, giv shy;ing it to me so that I might finish what had been written there?

  In the aftermath of the storm and the singing, we tended to the injured and gathered the dead. Five more perished in Takhisis's rage over the mountains.

  For a day we lingered, offering prayer and song. When we started our trek back through the desert, picking our way through rubble and wreckage, Larken chose as our rear guard one of the Que-Nara, a man named Raindiver, whom the others had jibed and ridiculed when, aided by the zizyphus seed, I slipped past him into Fordus's camp.

  This time he was more vigilant. We had not gone a mile when word reached us up the column that Stormlight was approaching, and with him twoscore survivors-perhaps a dozen of the freed Lucanesti- all bent for the safety of the desert fastness.

  They were good reunions. Plainsmen and bandit embraced and traveled south in harmony, caring for the elf-children like adopted sons and daughters. Shaken by what had just come to pass, all of them for shy;got the bickering and strife of the months and years in the Prophet's rebellion. They saw each other clearly for the first time since Fordus had moved on Istar.

  All except Gormion. Unchanged, the bandit cap shy;tain whined and menaced, lied and inveigled, but her words had lost their power to wound and divide. Now, Stormlight's followers ignored her. It was as though the curse under which Larken had labored fell on Gormion's conniving head.

  She lived the rest of her short life in the desert, finally falling victim to a guardsman's arrow in an ill-advised attack on a caravan. She had always said something like that would probably happen to her.

  I do not know what became of the druid Vaana-nen, except that he was no more after the Battle of Istar. I have since thought many times on the things he did for me. To honor him, I have taken his name as my patronym.

  So his name begins this story and ends it.

  Stormlight and Larken, on the other hand, created a different story.

  When they met again, neither spoke of Fordus. Once Stormlight tried to tell Larken what had hap shy;pened, tried to put words around what he had seen pass through the Tower window to join the whirl shy;wind dragon in the hushed Istarian sky. But a resounding chord from Larken's rediscovered harp silenced him.

  He was gone long ago, she told him.

  Neither, in my hearing, brought up the subject again.

  I knew by the time our company reached the plains that a new, quiet understanding had passed between Fordus's bard and his interpreter. The enmity between them had dissolved, and the dis shy;tance as well. They conversed in whispers-Storm shy;light was delighted to hear, for the first time, Larken's speaking voice-and they spoke also with their eyes on long walks in the high, wind-torn grass as we traveled south toward the desert's edge.

  Lucas the hawk, still Larken's loyal companion, kept a greater distance now, his circles expanding to surround two people instead of one.

  It did not surprise me, two years later, to hear that they had wed.

  I left the forest for the last time at the birth of their child-a golden-haired girl who resembled her mother, and with the strange, distant cast of her father's eyes. But by then, the Que-Nara had aban shy;doned their fear of the imilus and joined in the par shy;ents' joyous celebration.

  At which Larken sang.

  Her voice, it is true, had been ruined according to all bardic standards. The wind and the scarring sand had taken from her a singular and famous gift.

  Yet she made something new from that damaged instrument. From that tattered voice arose a depth of phrasing, a power of celebration and creativity thaV her clear, exalting, and sometimes mimicking voice had never owned. No, the sands never again altered or melted at her singing, nor did water rise from the desert nor storms subside. Instead, the hearts of lis shy;teners transformed. Accompanied by her harp, the new songs turned fear into faith, and sorrow into resolution and joy.

  Songs of her own composing, all.

  False prophecies passed for truth in Fordus's time. Now, a century later, Takhisis has returned. She stalks like a lion across Ansalon, and it is time for new prophecy-true words to stand against her in the continuing darkness.

  I am no prophet, but this I write, in the ninety-seventh year since the Rending.

  The half-elven child I saw in the desert, held by her mother as gracefully, as lovingly, as that mother once held the shallow drum of her calling …

  That girl will be a mother as well, and a grand shy;mother, and a great-grandmother.

  For Larken and Stormlight peopled my vision, and from their line, two centuries from now, a child will be born under a gilded orb, and the Namer's task will be easy that night.

  Goldmoon, they will call her.

  Priestess of Mishakal. She will dry the tears and commence the healing. And she will not travel alone, but gather others to her.

  And their deeds will echo like the lost song in the mountains.

  Hear the word of the prophet.

  Vincus Uth Vaananen

  Silvanesti

  97A.C.