And jumped.
The water was frigid. It spun him around in circles, clogged his lungs and choked him as it dragged him toward its center. He stared into the center of the whirlpool that had taken the Disks, and the book, and now wanted him. The eddies swung him around and around, nearer with every pass. He shut his eyes.
I’m sorry, Blossom, he thought. I won’t be coming home.
Then he was falling… falling… platinum wings rose to meet him, bearing him away.
Epilogue
FOURTHMONTH, 3 A.C.
The tales were right, after alclass="underline" the water was red. Bron had first heard of it a year ago, in an inn near Solanthus-a rough, crowded alehouse where the beer tasted like piss and someone took a knife in the gut almost every night. There were many taverns like it in Ansalon these days: places where folk could gather and trade stories of the world’s many woes. It had been a skinny, brown-skinned man who’d spoken of the red waters-a man with beads in his beard, marking him as Seldjuki by birth.
“I sailed it myself,” he’d said, taking a grim pull from a mug of something that smelled like lamp oil. “Not through the middle, mind-only madmen go that way, and they don’t come out again. But you don’t have to get out far from shore to see it, plain as the burning mountain. Red as blood… they say that’s what it is, the blood of drowned Istar.”
The others in the tavern had scoffed at him, or glared. More than a few had cursed the Kingpriest, and all of the damned Istarans-then the talk had turned to the gods, and it grew worse. The things men said these days would have gotten them arrested for blasphemy in an eyeblink, just a few years ago. Now, everyone hated the gods, dark and light alike.
Bron had listened to the people’s vituperations, his grip on his tankard tight, but he’d done nothing to stop the grumbling. He was one-the other knights had long since scattered-and they were many, bolstered by drink and anger. He’d learned, in the months after the Cataclysm, not to try to defend Paladine against the masses.
It was the same all over. Men reviled Beldinas as much as they’d once adored him, calling him Fumofiro-Doombringer- instead of his old epithets, but their hatred for the gods was much worse. Where was Paladine now? With cities in ruins, forests burned to ashes, new seas where land had been, and new land where seas had roiled… with all the plague and drought and famine rampant… with brother turning against brother the world over, where were the gods?
There could be only one answer, in the people’s minds. The gods had turned their backs on Krynn.
Bron didn’t believe that, but neither did he say so. He’d discarded his armor long ago, to eliminate all evidence of his former life. He’d seen more than one village where the corpses of priests swung from trees while ravens dug at their eyes. He’d seen churches ransacked and pillaged. He’d come to one town in time to find a band of screaming men and women dragging three bodies through the streets-bodies wearing the white surcoats of the Divine Hammer. He’d watched the mob cheer as they threw the corpses on a raging pyre, to burn as the Hammer itself had once burned evildoers. He’d watched them spit on the flames.
And he’d done nothing to stop them. That was why he was still alive.
There were plenty of tales these days, and while many were true-Bron had seen firsthand that Tarsis was land-locked now-many more rang false. But Bron had heard of the red waters again and again. In Palanthas, now Ansalon’s grandest port, every inn buzzed with talk of it. And so, after lingering in the west for two whole years, Bron had resolved at last to see for himself.
It had been a hard journey, for flesh and spirit alike. The world had become a dangerous place since the Cataclysm. Maps were all but useless; most of the old cities were gone, much of the terrain changed. Folk were suspicious of outsiders, and offered no hospitality. Bandits waited to prey on lone travelers, and goblins and ogres and even worse things had returned to the land. The winter, in particular, had been horrendous: Bron had been forced to hole up in a cave in the Khalkists for nearly four months, before emerging half-starved in the spring, into a homeland he no longer knew-an empire that was dead. He’d passed the bones of Micah-a city of ghosts now, its fabled glass towers nothing more than glittering dust-and found the Tears of Mishakal pounded flat. He’d crossed the Sea of Shifting Sands, now a morass of muck from near-constant rain and hail. And finally, this morning, he’d heard it for the first time: the distant roar of the ocean.
It was a strange sound in a place where farms and vineyards had once stretched for countless leagues, and horror gnawed deeper into his belly the closer he got. When he first saw gulls wheeling overhead, the truth hit him fully for the first time: the land of his birth, the land he’d sworn to protect from evil, was gone forever. The empire, the church, the knighthood-all vanished in one terrible day. He’d stopped, standing very still with his head bowed, and hadn’t moved for more than an hour.
He’d come this far, though, and in the end he’d had to go farther. His heart filled with dread, he’d walked the last mile, climbed a grassy hill… and stopped when it ended, suddenly, in a jagged cliff overlooking the sea.
The water that stretched out before him was the usual gray-blue near the shore, and for a long way out. But the cliff was high, and Bron’s eyes were still sharp with youth. The change in color, a league or so out, was obvious. The water wasn’t rusty, or the ruddy brown of clay, as he’d expected to see; it was bright, ghastly crimson. It was the Blood Sea of Istar.
Looking out upon it, Bron thought of the other tales he’d heard, in Palanthas and elsewhere. The crimson waters were unquiet, the mariners said, heaving and foaming as if stirred by some leviathan below. The skies above were darkened a sickly brown-dust still choked Ansalon’s skies, and there hadn’t been a blue sky in years-and dotted with the seething green-black of stormclouds. The tempest had hung over the Sea ever since the Cataclysm, and beneath it a great maelstrom swirled. No ship could escape the maelstrom, once caught in its pull. Demons danced in the waves, waiting to swallow the souls of those who drowned there.
Bron had seen many things in the last three years. He’d watched Xak Tsaroth collapse into the earth from the safe distance of only a mile away. He’d found whole towns laid waste by disease, bodies lying black in the streets. He’d watched men murder each other for a scrap of food, or for no reason at all. But none of it compared to this. He sank to his knees, buried his face in his hands, and sobbed.
“Paladine,” he wept “Oh, my god, forgive us for what we have done…”
He didn’t sense the three men stealing up behind him… didn’t hear the scuff of their footsteps on the dusty ground … didn’t see the cudgels in their hands. By the time he noticed, it was too late; they swarmed in his tear-blurred vision, already on top of him. He turned, reaching for Ebonbane-the sword was the one thing he’d kept from before the Cataclysm-and started to rise. But they were too close: he’d only half-drawn the blade when the leader, a scraggly youth whose blue eyes were dark with hate, brought his club down on Bron’s wrist.
Bone snapped. Pain bloomed. Bron fell, screaming. He never saw the second man’s face; only the club as it caught him under the chin, driving his teeth through his tongue. Blood flooded his mouth as his head snapped back, then darkness swarmed over his vision. He slumped, stunned, onto his side.
He felt a tug as one of them took Ebonbane from him, then another stole his purse. Dimly, he saw legs moving, and heard voices that sounded like they were coming from the bottom of a pit. Something wet and sticky hit his face. Spit.