in the lonely notions
of Lorac Caladon,
Speaker of Stars.
Restless in Silvanost,
drawn by cold light,
by the intricate forest of magic,
to the North he came,
to glittering Istar
where the tests of High Sorcery
awaited his judgment,
his ordained mathematics,
and the first test past,
and the second surmounted,
he stood as if satisfied
high on the parapets
in doubtful, striated light,
the vaunt of his intellect
over the globe of the city,
where the green luminescence
of the dangered orb
called to him out of the Tower’s heart.
In the pathless forest
at the end of all centuries,
he would hear the song
as it tumbled from thought
into faceted memory,
singing, perpetually singing,
AFTER THE SECOND
THERE IS NO OTHER.
O THE TESTS ARE BEHIND YOU
SPEAKER OF SUNS
AND THE SONG OF THE ORB
IS THE SONG OF YOUR MIND
IN THIS ANCIENT TOWER
HOLLOW AND LOVELESS
WITH LONG DEPARTURES.
O THE TESTS ARE BEHIND YOU
SPEAKER OF SUNS
BUT I SHALL LIE HERE
the orb said, shimmering
AS HISTORY FOLDS
IN THESE FLOURISHING WALLS
AS THE TOWER CRUMBLES
AND WITH IT THE MIND
THE FIRST HIGH BATTLEMENTS
THE HOUSE OF THE GODS
BUT I SHALL LIE HERE
AS THE FOREST WITHERS
AS THE PLAINS DESCEND
INTO WINTER AND NOTHING
UNLESS THE SONG OF YOUR THOUGHTS
WHICH IS EVERYTHING, IS THE WORLD,
CONTROLS AND SUBDUES
AND INFORMS THE MYSTERY.
TAKE ME TO SILVANOST
SPEAKER OF SUNS,
TAKE ME TO FREEDOM
TO THE COUNTRY OF GREEN ON GREEN.
Perhaps it was love
in the crystal heart,
in the refraction of light
and beguiling light,
love meeting love in his long belief,
in dire mathematics,
in the mapped parabola
of the trining moons,
but there in the Tower
six reasons converged
the hand of the prophet
the nesting heart of his will
the hurdling thought
the summoning crystal
and always the ruinous moment,
all of them settling
in grim alignment,
the orb the sixth
like a heart in his hand,
like a fluttering light
a firebrand he carried
to ignited Silvanost
in the numbered days.
I AM BRINGING THEM FIRE,
he said to himself,
I AM BRINGING THEM LIGHT
IN THE OLD GODS’ STORY.
I AM THE FIRST
I WILL SAVE THEM
IN THE RISING EARTH
I WILL SAVE THEM
AND THE OLD WORLD PIVOTS
AWAY FROM MY GUIDING HAND.
So he said to himself,
and the shapeless horizon
shaded to green
and redoubling green
as out of his last dreams
arose Silvanesti,
tangible, fractured in light.
III
And outside the forest
the world collapsed,
a mountain of fire
crashed like a comet
through jewelled Istar,
through the endless city,
and the Tower, unmanned and unhouseled,
split like a dry stalk
in the midst of the ruinous flames,
and out of the valleys
the mountains erupted,
the seas poured forever
into the graves of mountains,
the long deserts sighed
on abandoned floors of the seas,
and the highways of Krynn descended
into the paths of the dead.
As hail and fire
in a downpour of blood
tumbled to earth,
igniting the trees and the grass,
as the mountains were burning,
as the sea became blood
as above and below us
the heavens were scattered,
as locusts and scorpions
wandered the face of the planet,
Silvanost floated on islands of thought,
immaculate memory
gabled in cloud and dreaming,
untouched by the fire,
by the shocks of the Rending,
and from tower to tower
from the Tower of Sorcery
down to the Tower of Stars,
drowsy in thinking, Lorac imagined
an impossible dream of salvation,
a country bartered in magic,
renewed in his mind
to a paradise won
in a ranging study.
And so it appeared in the orb,
in the waking hours,
in the suddenly secret
lodging of light
as the globe lay buried,
masked and unfabled
in the Tower of Stars,
the ancestral tower
of Speakers, of Silvanost,
buried for centuries.
While the continent burned
and the people of Qualinost
wandered through ash
and the outer darkness,
Silvanost floated
at the edge of their sight,
absent and glorious,
down to the edge of their dreams.
Lorac watched from the Tower of Stars,
from the heart of the crystal,