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.