Fate directing, in the hour before dawn, a small boat landed on the stony shore below the ruin of Bloodwatch. A goblin slipped out, prowling. In silence, Dalamar sat while the intruder scouted the ruins, waited to hear footsteps coming near, almost hoping…
The last light of the fading stars cast a shadow, a slim dark mark on the ground. He smelled the reek of goblin's breath and sat stony still, pretending to notice nothing. A steel blade hissed free of its sheath. Dalamar turned, all his will pouring into the ruby ring, directing the magic. The goblin's eyes went wide, its jaw dropped as it pulled one rattling gasp of air into its lungs, then fell over, dead. Using the goblin's own knife, Dalamar saw that the blood had indeed dried in its veins. He found nothing but brownish dust wherever he cut.
In the summer of the year, Dalamar Nightson went north to the ruins of the City of Lost Names and roamed through the wailing streets, searching for what artifacts of magic he might find. He found none, and it seemed to him that someone had been there recently before him. He did unearth a chest filled with a great richness of jewels, necklaces, brooches, rings, and tiaras. None had any magical value, but he took some of the pieces. Most he left hidden beneath his own warding spell.
He went into the Kharolis Mountains in the autumn, walking 'round and 'round the terrible ruins of Zhaman, which the dwarves of Thorbardin now named Skullcap, that fortress which, so legend says, the great mage Fistandantilus caused to be built. What treasure of magic must lie in there! Dalamar listened to the wind and the wailing, but he found no ghosts except for those of dwarves. They had nothing to say to him that did not have to do with the great wars of days gone when fabulous Zhaman was destroyed in the turmoil that ravaged Krynn after the fall of Istar. He would gladly have entered in to see what wonders lay hidden, but the towers had melted and run down the side of the hill upon which it stood, making the shape of the skull for which it was named. All entrances were sealed.
From there Dalamar went to winter in Tarsis, tired of smelling the sea and eating fish in the port cities. Walking upon the ancient seawall of a city that had not stood in sight of the sea in the three hundred and more years since the Cataclysm had reshaped the world, he looked out over the dry plain that had once been a harbor, at the hulls of sea-abandoned ships now serving as hovels for the poor folk of the city who lived cheek by jowl with the outlawed, the bandits, and all those who preyed upon the weak. Five hundred years later, one hardly saw the outlines of hulls, for work had been done to expand each hulk and repair age's damage. Ramshackle rooms had been added on, taken off, added again-all in haphazard fashion.
Outside the breakwater that now broke no water lay the Plains of Dust and, beyond, the foothills of the Kharolis Mountains, nearly a hundred miles distant. Dry wind blew off the plains, gritty with dust and stinking of piles of the garbage Tarsians had long been in the habit of pitching over their walls as though there were still swift currents of water to carry it all out to sea.
Dalamar turned from the hulks and left the wall, walking down into the city. He went through the marketplace, past booths where dark-eyed girls sold flowers and stalls where old women hawked brightly painted pottery. All around the smell of food hung-roasting meats, simmering soups, and fat loaves of bread haloed in steam.
In the darker corners, up against the wall beyond the central plaza, he found the quiet shops where mages gathered, Nuitari's Night, The Three Children, Wings of Magic, all the places where mages in Red robes, Black, and White came to trade magical artifacts for spell components, spell components for spellbooks, and gossip for news. He went into the Old City where he found ruins not unlike those he'd seen in other lands, only these lay within the walls of Tarsis itself. There he found the Library of Khrystann, that underground chamber filled with books and scrolls, very little of it in reasonable order.
Tarsis the Beautiful, Tarsis the Ruin… Dalamar found the place to his liking. He rented chambers above a mageware shop in the marketplace, near the iron gate in the wall where one passes through to the street behind the library. He recalled tales of the war, stories told of how Alhana Starbreeze had met with a disparate band of travelers questing after a dragon orb. There had been a mage among them, that one whose eyes were like hourglasses, whose skin was like gold, but not the gold of sun-the gold of metal. He remembered what had been said aboard Bright Solinari on the way from Silvamori: tales of a mage who made a Silvanesti Wildrunner shudder. Remembering this, Dalamar listened in the marketplace, he haunted the mage-ware shops, curious and hoping to learn about this mage who had broken a green dragon's spell. He heard nothing, and he wondered if Raistlin Majere was gone from the story of Krynn as the Wildrunner had sworn him gone from the story of Silvanesti.
This year Dalamar had no need to make his living charming rats from warehouses. The baubles out of the City of Lost Names sold handsomely in the marketplace. He settled into winter, spending much of his time in the library in the Old City, among old books and ancient scrolls. He made a further study of herbs, and he expanded his studies to include knowledge of magical runes of all kinds. In a city where half the land is ruin, where outlaws and bandits roam freely outside the walls and in, this last was a good study to make. In short time he knew how to speak the two runes of ancient Istarian-in exact cadence, with perfect focus-that would kill a man standing. He knew the three runes first etched by dark dwarf mages in the bowels of Thorbardin that would find an enemy in his bed and kill him there. He tried that out on a man who lived out in the hulks, a petty thief who'd had the mad idea of picking his pocket one day when he was walking in the market. The man died screaming. No one knew what had befallen but Dalamar, watching the death in a scrying bowl.
In a city where mages congregated, his name became familiar and respected. A rune-master they named him, and his reputation spoke of one who had gathered as many secrets as runes are said to keep. In midwinter he took a lover, and she was no elf but a human woman whose shining black hair fell all the way to her heels, whose eyes were the color of an aspen's bark, gray and sweet. He did not shy from the outlander, as he had done in the past. He was tired of the celibate bed, and he found her swift to laugh and slow to complain of a mage who walked in shadows and kept more secrets than she did hairpins.
He decorated his bedchamber with a tapestry woven in Silvanesti, a lovely weaving of the forest in spring, and he bought a half-case of Silvanesti wine, the kind that tastes of autumn. He drank the wine as one drinks the memories of all that is lost to him, bitterly and sweetly. When spring came again, Dalamar parted with his lover, unwilling to be chained by her expectation of the resumption of their affair upon his return. She didn't weep. She only laughed, and she did not look back when she walked out the door. He stood for a while, breathing the last wisps of her perfume, the musky odor of some golden oil imported from Northern Ergoth, then he sealed his chambers with invisible locks, with warding spells and secret traps. That done, he took up his pack and went down the stairs to pay his landlord rent for the next full year before he left the city. He had, at last, a home.
Into Valkinord he went. He found no magical scrolls, no secret artifacts, and again he saw that someone had been before him. He did find a small shrine to Nuitari, hung with shadows and the thin gray lace of spider webs. He cleaned it and stopped to worship, alone in the dust with the wind and the ghosts, the wanderer among the ruins. He found himself thinking about the Tower of High Sorcery and the hidden forest of Wayreth. Some sources told him that the forest lay at the edge of Icewall Glacier, others declared it would be found in the north part of Abanasinia. Still others took oaths that Wayreth Forest stood near Qualimori- no!-just beyond Tarsis. The forest found, one still had to locate the Tower which, all stories agreed, moved within the forest as easily as fish move in water. In there, no mage would find his way unless he was invited or unless he had so clear a focus on his goal, so unwavering a will to gain it, that nothing of the forest's magic could confuse or deter him. At night he dreamed about the Tower, but in the morning when he woke, he remembered only the barest threads of the dream, the faintest whisper.