Astralas, open your arms:
I shall pass through your fingers as brindled light,
as a vision from the brows of a weary king.
Hasten to Istar, domed and templed,
where sunlight refracts on bronze and silver,
on crystal and burnished iron.
Ten visions there you shall read and interpret,
in that comfortable city where truth without pain governs the span of the hand,
glitters like moonlight over immovable waters.
But you, Astralas,
impressed for your terrible voyage,
cannot make truce with the wind and the water in the breath of your veins,
because they are with you forever.
The trees wept blood at my departure, staining the whiteness of birches and butternut, glittering dark on the maple and oak, blood that was falling like leaves in a thousand countries, greater than augury, sprung from prophetic wounds, as I sailed through the mouth of ancient Thon-Thalas like a prayer into endless ocean.
In the mazed and elaborate swirl of omens, of long prophecies, comes a time when you stand in the presence of oracles, but what they foretell is mirrors and smoke.
When I reached the Courrain
I was standing on deck, despair having moved to the country of faith, and slowly the coast took a shape and a name, as the forest dwindled to Silvanost, green on water on green.
At long last, to portside lay the watch fires of Balifor, the manhandling country of kender, of hoopak and flute and rifled treasuries.
The smoke from the coastline mingled with clouds from the mountains in the high air resolving to nebulous hammer and harp, to veiled constellations, as the shores of Balifor sighed with departures of gods.
North and west along the coast, cradled by pine-scented wind, by infusion of hemlock, the long plains climbed into mountainous green, and everywhere forest and ocean, ocean and forest twined with the westernmost haze of the damaged horizons, until the traveler's fancy supposes Silvanost rising again in dreams of retrieval, but instead it is priest-ridden Istar, sacrifice-haunted, where freedom is incense, the long smoke rising destroyed in its own celebrations.
There in the branching seas, in warm waters harmful and northern, the wind took me westward skirting a desolate land.
IV
Now the sea is a level and heartless country, boiling with unsteady fires:
The salt air smothers the coastal lights, but the mast, the shipped oars, ignite with the corposant, and all through the water a green incandescence, and often at night the coastline is dark, obscured by the luminous reef by the Phoenix of Habbakuk, low in the canceling west, and the wind and the water are borrowed and inward as light.
And on those same nights, on the face of the waters, unexplainable darkness embarks from the starboard to port like a dream beneath memory as though from the ocean a new land is rising, proclaimed by the distant and alien calls of the whales.
The compass needle flutters and falls into vertiginous waters, and waking to sunlight fractured on spindrift, the impervious jade of the ocean below you, you dismiss the night, you turn it away, which is why this song returns to you quietly at full noon, when the assembled sea is changing past thought and remembrance above the eternal currents.
And now the northerlies rising fierce, equatorial, the madman's wind, the mistrals of prophecy, guiding me into the bay.
Karthay tumbled by to the portside, the city of harbors where the sorcerer's tower waits out the erosion of mountains, as the northerlies lifted my boat from the waters' embrace.
Into the Bay of Istar we rushed like an unforeseen comet, like a dire thing approaching the webbed and festering streets, the harbor's edge where the wind sailed over me, calming the vessel at the feet of the mountainous piers: where the wind sailed over me, catching the web of the kingdom as it blew where it wished, and none could tell where it came or went, and it dove through the alleys, vaulted the towers, and lay waste the house of the last Kingpriest.
The augurers took it as one immutable sign, to add to the bloodtears of alder and vallenwood, to the pillared eruptions of campfire and forge, to the flight of the gods and the gods returning.
And the sound of my coming was a warning sign.
Ten visions, O Istar, lie sleeping in the great crystal dome of your Kingpriest's Temple, where the walls recede from the plumb line, where foundations devolve through corundum through quartz, through limestone through clay, to the half-fallen dreams of foundation.
Ten visions lie sleeping and my song has awakened them all.
For my words are the leveling wind, are the blood of the trees and the fire on the shores, the gods walk in my song, where ten visions waken in the hands of my singing:
I offer them, glittering, shattered, and the gods break in my hands.
V
Istar, your army in Balifor is a gauntlet, clenched on a quicksilver heirloom.
Your priests in Qualinost are dazzlements of glass fractured on red velvet.
Your light hand in Hylo steals breath from the cradle:
Ice on the glove.
In Silvanost, the white thighs of the women wade through the muddied waters of Thon-Thalas.
Your sword arm in Solamnia entangles in filaments, in the spider's alley.
Your children in Thoradin dream away ancestries of green earth and sun.
The shards of remembered Ergoth collect to a broken vessel from dispersion they call the planet's twelve corners.
One name on the lips of Thorbardin the rows of teeth unmarked gravestones.
Your fingers in Sancrist fumble the intricate hilt of a borrowed sword.
But, Istar, the last song is yours, the song at the center of songs:
A bleached bone on the altar.
VI
And last generation of Istar, pure generation, born of bright stones drawn from the crown of a mountebank's hat, whose goodness is ordinance, precise, mathematical, stripped of the elements in the hearts fire and the earth of the body, in the water of blood and the air's circumference:
You have passed through your temple unharmed until now, but now all of Istar is strung on our words on your own conceiving as you pass from night to awareness of night to know that hatred is the calm of philosophers that its price is forever that it draws you through meteors through winter's transfixion through the blasted rose through the shark's water through the black compression of oceans through rock through magma to yourself to an abscess of nothing that you will recognize as nothing that you will know is coming again and again under the same rules.
So says the wind in one tongue only, pronounced in the movement of cloud and water, given voice by the rattle of leaves.
In the breath between waiting and memory it stalks elusive as light and promise.
So says the wind in the long year preserved in the heart'srecollection, and always it yearns for another and blessed year that the heart might have been in its wild anointing.
And the wind is always your heartbeat, is breathing remote as the impassive stars, and it moves from arrival to leaving, leaving you one song only.
Oh, that was the language of wind,
you say, and what does it mean
to the leaves and the water,
and always is what it means.
Colors of Belief
Arryl Tremaine stepped into the common room of Timon's Folly, the inn where he was staying, and immediately noted the eyes that fixed on him. He was clad in simple traveling clothes. Those in the inn could not know for certain that he was a Knight of Solamnia, but they COULD mark him as a foreigner. That in itself brought attention enough. Had he not prudently decided to leave his armor back in his room, the rest of the patrons would not have pretended that they were looking anywhere but at him.