Chronicles of the World of DaoTyr

I. Before the Fireflies

In Verenestra’s household, the young Benarion was an attendant. He could stand near a conversation without becoming its subject, and he found this a more agreeable position than some would have found a place of honor. He had come from the Fey-held country within Silverymoon’s wider sphere. His father was an administrator in regional affairs, working behind the scenes as the city’s power and influence reached farther into the surrounding lands. His mother was a mage of some talent. She worked alongside Naelthir Osathus in the ancient forges, where moon fire and old Eladrin craft mingled beneath Silverymoon’s Mythal. Both served a city whose growing ambitions rested on much older foundations.

Ben’s gifts were noticed early. Magic came readily to him, and his hand learned the blade almost as readily. He was sent to a school of Bladesinging under Verenestra’s authority. She remained its patron and an occasional presence; other teachers corrected his stance and made him repeat difficult passages. He sometimes mistook quickness for understanding. A movement came easily, so he assumed he knew it. Then a small error in balance betrayed him, and he had to look again. He learned from those corrections. Soon he was watching for the things he had overlooked: the shifting of weight beneath an apparently effortless turn, the relation of a spell to the breath and body that gave it form.

The habit followed him out of the school. He noticed a change of weather over familiar trees, the posture of a visiting dignitary, the slight inclination of a traveller’s hat that made one courtesy different from another. He drew these things, or wrote them down. Sometimes he painted what he had passed a hundred times and only that day seen.

People found him easy company. He listened to their stories and troubles without trying to make a place for himself in every account. He could be trusted. He asked questions, remembered answers, and seldom offered more of his own life than the conversation required. He remained unimportant by choice. Before he spoke, he usually asked himself: Who am I in contact with?

It kept him attentive to the person before him, but it also let him remain the observer rather than the observed. Verenestra noticed where that attention went. His sword and magic were developing well. His notebooks had begun to turn to something his instructors were not teaching him. He was watching the mortals.

II. Fireflies. 851 DR

Humans fascinated Ben. Their houses seemed flimsy boxes to him, built with an urgency that scarcely allowed for weather, much less antiquity. Yet they planted trees whose shade mattered to them even when they could not expect to sit beneath it. They spoke of children and grandchildren as if some part of themselves could remain in those other lives. Then they spoke of death with a familiarity that troubled him more than fear would have done. They had so little time. Why did they look beyond it so often?

Some discussed an afterlife as though the life presently in their hands were only a preparation, and not a very important one. Ben would listen, trying to understand. The person speaking had a face he could draw, a voice he could learn to recognize. The other existence had neither. He could not yet comprehend giving so much of the visible life to the invisible one.

He thought of fireflies. An individual light appeared, held the eye, and vanished before he had quite followed its course. So brief a life might pass almost without mention in the reckonings of his own people. But when he looked closely, the darkness was full of such lights. Their brevity made him attentive. He watched humans spend an evening arguing and reconcile before morning. He watched them change a plan that had seemed certain the day before. They made promises with a haste that astonished him, yet sometimes kept them through much of the little time they had. They altered tools and customs without first seeking the permission of centuries. He studied them as seriously as he studied magic. Pages filled with hands, faces, gestures, clothing. He painted the changes they made in the land and tried to understand why one change was welcomed, and another mourned. Reports and artwork went back to Verenestra. She did not tell him what she thought of his observations. He came to believe that she valued them by what she asked him to do next.

In 851 DR, Valen Gildensong was leading a company of elves and humans through Giants Dale and the dangerous northern passes toward the Elder Valley. They were refugees, traveling toward a place in which they hoped to remain. Verenestra, who counseled Valen, asked Ben to accompany his retinue as part of the escort. The work required his blade and magic. It would also bring him among the people he had been trying to understand. He accepted readily.

He began the journey as an observer walking beside his subject. Hunger made that position difficult to maintain. Cold made it ridiculous. The hand whose shape he had been drawing could pass him something he needed; its owner could be afraid beside him, or quarrel with him, or make him laugh when he had thought himself too tired for laughter. They shared watches and fires, danger and suffering. A person whose habits he had recorded one evening might stand beside him with a weapon the next. His concern for the likeness in his notebook became concern for whether the person would be there when the company gathered again.

Valen took kindly to the young Eladrin who fought beside the refugees and afterward sat drawing them. Ben began to share what he knew of Bladesong: a form, a movement, a way to let blade and spell occupy the same moment. His education was unfinished, and he did not pretend otherwise. His companions changed what he taught them. They shortened movements, combined ideas, and discarded things that did not serve their bodies, their equipment, or the ground beneath their feet. Sometimes Ben corrected them. Sometimes he had to reconsider the correction. He made notes about that too.

By the end of the journey, the figures in his pages no longer stood for humanity. They were particular people, and he noticed their absence. With Valen’s support, he remained with a retinue among the northern communities instead of returning immediately to the Fey world. He had come to see how humans lived. Now there were people he did not wish to leave.

III. A New Song. 853–856 DR

When Valen founded the Bladesong Knights in 853 DR, Ben joined them. Verenestra had sent him with the refugees; she had not told him to enlist. The new allegiance was his choice. These people were building something he had helped protect on the road, and his skill could help keep it alive.

The order brought together older practices and the necessities of a young country. Ben’s Bladesong was one contribution among others. He taught what he knew and learned where his knowledge failed. No single moment made the Knights’ art complete. What worked on one road had to be reconsidered on another; a form learned from one teacher met a form learned elsewhere, and both were tried. Ben liked being present for this.

In the north, he supported rangers and patrols with sword and magic. Roads and settlements needed watching. Beyond the more familiar routes lay Fey boundaries that could not be understood simply by knowing where a marker stood. His upbringing and connections within Verenestra’s sphere gave him some sense of whom to approach and what an unfamiliar warning might mean. He served as a modest intermediary when one was needed. He could sometimes prevent a mistake from becoming an insult, or an insult from becoming a battle. He preferred to discover what a stranger intended before answering it with force. When protection required fighting, however, he had been trained to fight. The letters and drawings continued. He recorded the people and places he served, and the changes taking place about them. His notebooks were still those of a scholar, but increasingly the notebooks of someone with a stake in what he observed.

By 856 DR he had served for roughly three years. The northern frontier had become familiar. The great Rainmark stronghold of later centuries did not yet define his experience of that country. He knew routes, communities, duties, and the limits of what the young order could protect. Beyond those limits stood older places. Highspire was one of them. Reports of humanoid activity near the Spire brought a patrol into its approaches. Ben went to help observe and investigate. Toward dusk, the figures they had been watching began to move farther up the rising ground. The patrol followed.

IV. Highspire at Dusk. 856 DR

A shape appeared between the stones, disappeared, and appeared again farther along the slope. Ben watched the place it had left. The eye could give a body to a shadow, especially in that failing light, but a shadow did not choose a route. He followed with the others, keeping the movement in sight whenever the ground allowed it. He remembered the weight of his rapier at his side and the sound of his own breathing. Light remained on the higher stones after the hollows beneath them had grown dark.

Later, he could recover these things more readily than the pursuit itself. A voice remained, but he could not recall its words. Gaps remained where someone ought to have been beside him. He remembered deciding to go farther; he could not remember when that decision ceased to be part of an ordinary duty. By the time he entered Highspire, night had come.

The ruin bore the marks of an intention he could not read. He could recognize workmanship, the deliberateness of an angle or a passage, without knowing what those things had been made to accomplish. A doorway seemed too large for the space beyond it. Elsewhere, the depth of a shadow made him stop and reconsider the wall he had supposed it lay in. The old place did not resemble the works of the new Knights. It had belonged to a world in which other arrangements were taken for granted. Ben could see the remains of those arrangements. He did not know what remained of their power.

Then he heard a cadence in the stone. At first he took it for distant voices, some continuation of the activity he had come to investigate. He stopped and listened. The sound seemed to draw nearer without growing louder. It was as though he had been hearing something from outside a closed room and had discovered that he was already inside it. He moved toward it carefully. There was an opening. The air beyond it was still, and the dark continued farther than another chamber should have allowed. He waited at its edge, trying to place it within what he had seen of the building.

Then he crossed. He had no name for the country beyond. Mortileux was not a word that could explain the sudden loss of the ordinary night: the frontier sounds gone, the air changed, his footsteps giving him no trustworthy measure of distance. Something immense stirred in that darkness. Ben felt its attention before he understood that attention was what he felt. There was something draconic in its magnitude, something his training approached through comparisons and could not encompass. For a moment he seemed to himself no more substantial than one of the brief lives he had been studying.

Yet there was no malice in the presence’s regard. Within it lay the sense of others once near: company so deeply familiar that it had not needed to be thought about. Their nearness had belonged to the order of things. Now that order was broken, its memory remained. Ben felt the absence before he understood that what he was being given was a remembrance. He received no names, no account of a sanctuary or the Six who had rested there together. He knew only that something vast had once been less alone.

Farther in the gloom, another impression gathered about him. It had a different weight. A will was making a vow. He could feel the terrible concentration of the choice, the refusal to let an ending be an ending. He could repeat no words, only the sensation of a promise drawing tight around the being that spoke it. This was the fading trace of Volukai taking the Kai, though Ben knew neither name. It belonged to that older will. It was not an oath being asked of him, nor the intention of the presence that had first regarded him. He tried to turn toward the opening he had entered through. His recollection ended in darkness.

V. The Long Dream

His first records were marks. He put them in the codex whenever he could, counting the intervals he thought might be days. A scholar ought to preserve even a doubtful account. If he could not say what had happened, he could at least set down where certainty ended. But he could not always tell whether he had slept. Sometimes he woke with the sense of a long journey in his legs and found no change in the place around him. Sometimes an unfamiliar place seemed to hold years of his own habitation. The marks accumulated without restoring an order to what they counted.

Weeks became years. The years loosened from their numbers. Whether he had survived the first darkness, or whether surviving was still the right word for what he did there, remained beyond him. He continued. Something continued with him. The immense presence had become bearable. Perhaps it had dwindled; perhaps he had learned to encounter it differently. It did not tell him which. No bargain, no promise of service, no hour he could later identify as the beginning of their bond.

When a memory began to fail, it sometimes answered him. He would be trying to recover a face, finding only the arrangement of lines he had put on paper, and suddenly the person would turn. There was the particular movement of the mouth before speech. There was the voice, including the small hesitation he had never thought to record. A campfire warmed his hands. Someone laughed on the far side.

He knew these things had happened. For a while, he also knew they were happening again. The presence brought other remembrances. He entered places whose use he understood while he was in them, although he had never seen them before. There was a sense of welcome, of others at ease near one another. He could feel that each had a place. He could not have drawn a plan of the whole or written a history of what had made it possible. His own memories and those of his companion sometimes occupied the same room. A refugee fire burned within the feeling of an ancient sanctuary. Human voices spoke through a peace older than the company they belonged to. He accepted the meeting until he tried to distinguish its parts.

The presence helped him reach what he was losing. He attended to what it brought, giving it the nearness of being remembered with someone else. Neither sustained the other alone. Between them, a place became where recollection could be lived. After a time, he had work to finish there. Pigment dried at the edge of a shallow dish while he considered a color. Someone moved before he had finished a drawing, and he looked up with familiar impatience, then smiled. A question put aside the evening before returned while his hands were occupied with something else.

Sometimes a painted sky would remain more clearly in his memory than the place beneath it. He could recall mixing its grey, the small amount of blue he had added, the need to leave a pale space where the light was breaking through. Around that work lay a day he could almost recover: a voice behind him, weather at a window, the pleasure of having nowhere else he must be. There were ordinary interruptions. They made the life convincing long after he had ceased asking whether it was a life. He grew older. At first the changes were slight. A movement required more care. His hands looked different resting on a page. He found he was less eager to demonstrate what he knew, though he remained quite capable of being confidently wrong. In some matters patience came. In others he had to keep learning it.

He continued to draw and paint. When he put an old study beside a new one, the difference could astonish him. The subject had altered, but so had the person looking. The younger hand had pursued every detail with an urgency that left little room for the thing itself. The older one sometimes left a patch of paper untouched. There were people in those pictures. There were years he could afterward recover only through the certainty that he had loved someone during them. There were losses, reconciliations, and stretches of happiness that had no event at their center. Work was done. Company was welcome. Evening came without his fearing what would follow it.

The life would have been easier to dismiss if it had been nothing but torment. Yet he had been happy in it, and impatient, and absorbed in work that mattered to him. He had been glad to see someone. He had stayed silent when he ought to have spoken and spoken when listening would have served better. Such memories did not have the distance of a tale told to him. They belonged to the person he had become. The presence was woven through that becoming. Sometimes it was close enough to seem a companion beside him; sometimes he scarcely noticed it. He could not remember a version of this life from which it was wholly absent.

The rapier remained as well. He had modestly enchanted it when he carried it into Highspire, a good weapon for a young Bladesinger. Over its long life, it was used and kept, cared for, and worked upon. Further enchantment entered its making. He would retain moments of that work without being able to recover the whole: the familiarity of the metal in his hands, the blade as it had been, the blade afterward. The change did not come to him as a single marvel. It gathered a history.

As his own years grew long, he thought more and more about what would become of it after his death. The rapier had ceased to be merely the weapon he expected to carry on his next duty. He had kept it through too much of his life for that. Someone should receive it. By then, he often thought of the lost son. The name was Benarion. The absence did not fit the life he could recount. He could not follow it backward to a clear beginning. Yet it returned with the certainty of love: someone younger was missing, someone he cared for, and he could not set it aside because it was too hard to explain.

In still moments, he felt darkness around that younger one. It did not seem quite the darkness of death. There was something waiting within it. Ben found himself making provision for the son. He considered what might be useful to a young man, what should be preserved, what might survive until it was needed. The thought could enter a contented day without making it sorrowful. At other times the absence was so sharp that he had to stop what he was doing and wait for it to ease. He made the rapier a memorial. But he could not think of the memorial as something finished, with no one left to receive it. It required an heir.

Years of care went into that contradiction. He returned to the weapon, held it, remembered why he was keeping it. It lay across his aging hands with a familiarity that went beyond his ability to account for. Only very late did he understand. The young man in the darkness was himself. Beyond the life he was living, Benarion still lay in Mortileux, the young Eladrin who had crossed the threshold and had not yet awakened. He had been reaching toward his own sleeping life. The dream had recognized it before the old man could, giving him the absence and the love before it gave him understanding.

Knowing this did not wake him. It did not tell him how the two lives touched, or how a thing kept here might find its way into the hands of someone lying elsewhere. He understood the relationship more clearly than the world in which it had become possible. He remembered the young Knight’s eagerness. He remembered the privacy, the pleasure of being useful, the belief that a sufficiently careful observer could come to understand almost anything. He could regard those things tenderly now. He no longer needed to correct the boy before he could care for him. There was still somewhere for that young man to go. Ben left him the sword.

It was an ancestral weapon now, though the lineage by which it passed could not be traced to fathers and sons. The hand that had first carried it would receive what the old hand had kept. The memorial was also an inheritance. He could not explain how it would be delivered; he knew who it was intended for. By the reckoning of that life, he was about two thousand years old when it ended. He was content. Questions remained, and so did the people he had lost. Yet the years behind him had held work and affection, and the things left unfinished no longer required him to stand watch over them. The presence was near. He rested without trying to discover what the next moment ought to contain. His hands relaxed. He thought of the young man in the dark and of what he had left for him. Then his last breath passed.

VI. War Cries

A hundred voices answered another hundred. Ben drew breath and opened his eyes. The chanting pressed against him from every side, fierce cries of war and power driven higher by a voice above them all. He raised a hand toward his face. The movement was too quick. He looked at the fingers and waited for them to become the fingers he remembered. They did not.

His body was young. His chest filled easily with air. A heartbeat ago he had reached the end of a long life and had been ready for it. Now his heart was beating violently, and there was an army outside. For a little while the two certainties left no room for thought. Then training returned in a form small enough to use: stay still; listen; find the danger before it finds you. When he moved, something tore at his shoulder.

The cloth beneath his armor had stiffened and weakened. Fittings and fabric gave way under his touch. He caught at his cloak, and part of it came off in his hand. The rest slid from his shoulders into a heap of rotten threads and dust. He watched the dust settle. He had worn that cloak into Highspire at dusk. He had also lived so long without thinking of it that its return to his attention seemed impossible. His codex lay nearby. The binding scarcely held the leaves together. Their edges were dark and softened, breaking away beneath the lightest handling. He opened it a little, enough to recognize a drawing and the writing beside it.

His own work. The young hand, with its haste and its confidence that there would be time to put everything in order. The rapier lay within reach, its edge bright. He took it up. He knew the balance, but the knowledge did not end with the young Knight who had carried it into the ruin. He remembered keeping this blade through the long years. He remembered considering what the lost son would need. He had left it. He was the one who received it. The sword remained in his hands while he tried to make one truth displace the other. Neither yielded. The metal was cool and solid, bright among the ruined possessions, carrying a history the rest of the room could not explain. The cries outside forced him to attend to something else.

Draconians filled the camps beyond his hiding place. They gathered about an ancient black monolith, and upon it stood the figure whose bellowing voice raised their answering cries. Ben could not understand the language. He understood the ordering of a host, and what it meant when many separate bodies waited upon one will. He called inwardly for his companion. For a time there was little answer. Its quiet frightened him. Through all the years of the other life he had rarely needed to ask whether he was alone. Here he had awakened young among enemies, and the one being who might have shared his bewilderment had fallen almost silent. He waited, listened, and began the work he knew.

During the days that followed, he observed the camps from concealment. He watched who could interrupt whom, where orders traveled, which gatherings dissolved and which became companies ready to move. He kept what he had seen apart from what he merely suspected. His mind could lose its way in a memory, but a task with a beginning and an end helped him find the present camp again. Sometimes, when he was very still, the Vestige whispered.

A phrase might suggest command or rivalry. A gesture became comprehensible without the words accompanying it. Fragments of meaning met what he could observe, although he could not always recover them when he tried to repeat them to himself. The name Severin became attached to the figure on the monolith. Ben came to understand his importance, and something of the hierarchy beneath him. He did not learn the language. He learned enough to recognize that the preparations were nearing their purpose. For roughly a week he watched. An interval of waiting could still become another room, another age, the expectation of an old body. Then footsteps passed close enough to hear, and he was in Mortileux again. People beyond this place needed his report. He held to that when he could hold to little else.

VII. Dusk Again. 1510 DR

On the far side of the boundary, Yultha fell, and the protection she had held failed with her. Ben did not witness her death. In Mortileux, he heard thunder move through the old place and felt the air and stone answer together. The camps broke into motion. Orders passed through the waiting ranks. The gates opened. Pale light lay beyond them. It was scarcely more than the light left in an autumn sky, yet his eyes watered at the sight of it. The Draconians went toward it in their hundreds. Ben watched the movement, measuring what he knew of the host against the chance before him. He waited for a space he could use, then moved.

The passage had not opened for his sake. It was carrying war into the country he served. He could neither stop the host from where he stood nor remain behind and warn anyone. His opportunity lay within the same catastrophe. He took it. Noise and movement crowded the crossing. For an instant he could not tell whether he was leaving Mortileux or remembering his first step into it. He held the rapier close and continued toward the light. Cold air touched his face. He was atop Highspire. Above him lay an open sky, and the cool wind of an autumn dusk moved through the remains of his clothing. He stopped long enough to look up. Even the paleness hurt his eyes.

The invasion was still unfolding about him. He could not stay there. He turned toward the country beyond the Spire, seeking a way to reach his people. He had followed the patrol into dusk in 856 DR. He had returned to dusk in 1510. Six hundred and fifty-four years lay between the evenings. Ben had not yet learned what they had taken.

VIII. After the Return

Ben tried first to give a report: the camps in Mortileux, Severin upon the monolith, the ordering of the host. He separated what he had observed from the less certain impressions the Vestige had given him. The people questioning him had good reasons to listen. They also had reasons to doubt the man who had come from the direction of the invasion in the remains of ancient armor, carrying a disintegrating book and an immaculate sword. They asked his name and his service. He gave both. Benarion Naïlo, Bladesong Knight. He had joined when Valen founded the order. The questions began again.

He supposed he had explained himself badly. Setting aside the long life and its impossible inheritance, he began with the retinue and the patrol. These ordinary things seemed to trouble his listeners almost as much. They kept him under watch while they examined his account. Ben understood caution in a place under attack, but understanding did little to ease his bewilderment. He had come to return to duty and was being asked to prove that he had ever held it. Rainmark made that bewilderment larger.

The northern country now held a stronghold: walls and dwellings, stores and refuges, a school of arms. Things had been added, repaired, made customary. He could not connect those generations of labor with the frontier he had left behind. There were Bladesong Knights everywhere. They belonged to an institution old enough that its beginning required no daily thought. Customs Ben remembered taking shape were settled practice. Other things had changed until he recognized only the beginning of a movement, or the purpose of a form whose details were new to him.

He watched a familiar turn of the blade end in an unfamiliar way. The question came readily: who had taught that variation? Then he began to understand how many teachers might stand between the answer and his own life. They told him the year. He asked again, and received the same number. He could subtract. The answer was not beyond his ability. But knowing the sum did not make Valen’s voice remote, or place his human companions where the number said they must be. The patrol could seem nearer than that morning. His youth could seem distant beyond the quiet centuries of the life in which he had grown old.

He could find no place to stand from which all of it lay in the proper direction. Gradually his knowledge, his possessions, and the peculiarities of his condition made the simpler explanations harder to sustain. Suspicion gave way unevenly to the possibility that something extraordinary had happened. It was enough to allow a different kind of care. Eventually he was taken to Silverymoon. There, they gave him quiet, an examination, and help in attempting an account of his experience. His days could be arranged around something other than alarm. People brought him histories of the interval he had missed.

Some days he could read them. On others, a single name required him to close the book. Valen Gildensong was dead. Ben remembered wanting to show him a drawing. He remembered the living man taking an interest in it. There were other deeds in the history, consequences and endings of which Ben had known nothing. They did not make his memory false. They made it one small part of a life that had continued beyond his sight. The page could tell him when that life ended. It could not give him another evening in which to speak to its owner. His human companions, too, had lived their remaining years within the great absence. Some might have been remembered; some might have left little that could now be found. He wanted to know whether they had been happy, what they had made, which of the things they had discussed beside the fire had come to anything.

He had missed their living as completely as their deaths. Once he had wondered how they could spend so much of their short existence thinking about another life. Now he caught himself listening for the voices of people whose whole remaining future had already passed. He had learned something about their difficulty without finding an answer. He began to draw again. At first it required less of him than a conversation. A hand resting before him was there to be looked at. The light on a face belonged to the hour in which it fell. He could attend to these things without deciding which of his lives had taught him to see them.

He began making notes as well. Many were plain accounts of the present day: where he was, whom he had spoken to, what had happened that morning. He tried to give the day an order the older memories could not take from it. They sometimes took it nonetheless. A remembered room could interrupt the room about him. He might reach for something that belonged to the long life, or begin an answer whose listener was not there. On waking, he still sometimes expected the caution of an old body and was startled by the strength with which he sat up. He remained amiable. People still found him willing to listen. His privacy endured too, though now it was not always a preference. There were things he could not say without losing the thread of what he was trying to explain. The Vestige had become talkative.

Its quiet in the first days after awakening had passed, but speech had not brought the clarity Ben wanted. He asked about a place and felt as if he had once been welcomed there. He asked about danger and was answered with a grief whose object he could not identify. It could speak at length while leaving the smallest practical question unanswered. He grew impatient with it. Sometimes he had to put down what he was doing and wait until he could listen without trying to force its meaning into his own words. There was no other being to whom he could speak of the life in which he had grown old. The presence had been there. Whatever it was, whatever relation its old remembrances bore to the world outside them, they had sustained one another. He did not simply want it gone. He wanted to understand it, and he wanted to know whether it was well.

The rapier stayed near him through those days. He could not tell what further power might awaken in it, or account for all the workings that had already changed it. The weapon itself was plain enough beneath his hands. It had acquired a history within a life other people might have been tempted to call unreal. Ben could remember leaving it for the lost son with a tenderness that unsettled him. Now he was required to receive that tenderness. In youth he had known how to be useful to other people, and how to keep himself from becoming the subject of too much concern. He had not learned what to do with a gift the old man had left him. Sometimes he could only hold it, remembering.

As his attention steadied, he began asking more often for news from the north. Highspire still called to him. He could not tell whether the pull came from the place, the Vestige, or the unfinished portion of his own story. Its strength did not make him trust it. He had lived too long among things he could feel but could not explain. There were reasons to return that did not depend upon obeying the call. He had watched the Draconian host assemble. He had heard Severin raise it to fury. People were in danger because of the passage through which he himself had escaped. He could not let the uncertainty of his own life be a reason to withhold the help he could give.

The order he had joined remained, though he would have to discover what his allegiance meant among its present members. The people it protected were not substitutes for those he had lost. They had their own work, quarrels, affections, and things they hoped to accomplish. Some had begun telling him about them. He found himself asking how the work had gone. He remembered what someone had been worried about and wanted to know whether it had been resolved. A person’s absence from the usual company had begun to matter to him again. He was not recovered when he began preparing for the journey north. The two lives still overlapped, and the Vestige still answered in meanings that would not become explanations. Some mornings, his own hands looked unfamiliar to him.

But there was also a day to attend to, and people in it. He sorted the pages he would carry. Among the remembered faces were drawings of people he had met since his return. Their likenesses were no more complete than the older ones. He still had things he had not yet thought to ask them. He put those pages with his other work and made ready to take them north.

Yet Another Chance, the Story of Ulf and Eberwulf

The old man stepped down from his cart, a dour look on his face, his boots sticking in the mud of Wall Gate road. He braced himself with his hand on the cart as his old hip wound forced a wince.

“Hey Ulf,” called the stocky red-cloaked man, bits of armor shining from beneath in the dim morning light. “We got another one for you. Keldren, he was. Served 9 months. No known kin. Take him to your safest yard and mark him well. Someone might come some day.” he stared solemnly at the old man, his eyes turning down to the body that spilled out both ends of his barrow.

“Greetings, traveler of the long night. Your watch has passed. The moon rises to guide thee home,” Ulf said solemnly while touching a small silver amulet at his chest, a moon and its shadow. “Help me lift the fella, brother Hammond,” Ulf said as he bent over to grab hold of the dead man’s feet. He saw the boots with buttons, each a seven-pointed star, and he marked them well. “The war never really ended, did it?” he said grimly as he lifted with a grunt.

The two men heaved the dead man into the back of Ulf’s old cart; the weight flexed the weathered wood and the wheels rocked slightly in the mud. An old mule flapped his lips loudly up front at the jolt, as if waking from a nap.

“You just hold steady there, you old lout,” Ulf said to his trusted beast of burden. He grabbed a dark crimson tarp and gently pulled it over the dead man. “It’ll be done by nightfall,” he said, turning back to Hammond, who fidgeted in his pouches and held out a dark leather gauntlet.

“For your trouble.” He pushed five silver into Ulf’s hand.  “Let’s hope this’ll be the last. I suspect not. No. I suspect not,” Hammond trailed off, turning in place and getting his barrow moving away.

“Till we meet again,” Ulf hollered back as he mounted the cart slowly with one leg straight. “Let’s get on out of here, Wil. I got an apple; says you can get me there before dusk, you slowpoke.” He whistled loudly to spur the cart into motion. The old wheels lurched out of the mud, pointing the cart west out of Northguard’s westernmost gate toward the hamlet of Silvershard.

As if it were music to his ears, Ulf heard his empty pocket jingle with the sound of silver for the first time in a week.

The cart meandered down the worn trail. A periodic arch of oak branches provided some shade from the rising sun. As the heat rose, Ulf shifted his pale blue hat and wiped the sweat forming on his brow. This road and the rocking took him back again to the memories he would never be able to forget.

* * *

He lay there in shock as the echo of the air turning into fire and heat washed over him, while a stone pillar collapsed as he tried to take cover. He was pinned by the fallen rubble, and his mind was filled with the pain of his crushed left hip. He gasped and stared up at the sky, ashes floating in the air and falling like a grey rain. He thought of survival and flight, but the stones were too heavy to move. He jerked with all his strength and only managed to realize the unbearable pain of a shattered hip.

He saw another soldier fleeing and yelped, “Help, brother. I’m stuck.” The man looked back briefly, and fear alone was in his eyes. He never broke stride. The terror had taken hold.

Suddenly he saw a suit of bright armor charging around the corner. He no longer had words, only pain, but he waved at the figure. The man strode forward, soot and dirt caked on the golden metal armor of a Bladesong Knight. The man quickly assessed the situation and began lifting stones off of him. Ulf could feel lightness and pain, and then he went black.

The next time he awoke, she was standing over him, her bright blue eyes filled with tears, her face stained dark, her long brown braid half open.

“Aleyda. My heart,” he mumbled through delirium and pain.

“You had better live, Ulf,” she said as she wrapped a large cloth around his waist, trying not to make his pain worse. She adjusted him onto a small, wheeled hand cart. “We must get out of Northguard now. You’re no good to fight.” Her eyes looked like she had seen things no one should see.

“They came suddenly, the red draconians … came when Brando brought you to me. They would have killed me too,” she hesitated, putting her hand to her stained face, “but Brando gave them more steel. He bought us time to escape. Rest now.”

She took hold of the cart handles and pulled it with resolve out of town to the west. The cart wobbled as Ulf fell in and out of consciousness. He could see the oak bows flickering the light of his incoherent vision.

* * *

Ulf pulled back from his sharp reverie, even as the cart rocked him slowly still. His eyes cast out west, rising through the wind-swept lowlands of Giants Dale and rising up the foothills of the western mountains, now casting growing shadows back across the dale. Rainmark squatted on the uplands, under a veil of hazy grey clouds. Still following upward, the mountains rose, and Papadin’s high peaks sat shrouded in grey-blue storm clouds, rippling with wind and shadow, stirred by the setting westerly sun. Above it all loomed Mount Olostian, fang-like, piercing the sky, its snow-capped brightness like a glowing beacon. Peace and uneasiness washed over him as he watched the violence of the daily cycle play out again in the valley and the mountains.

As Ulf’s cart approached the hamlet of Silvershard, the old man watched the road fork off to the quarry path north. He knew this route better than most, and certainly what lay at its end. Tapping Wil’s flank, he whistled sharply, and the old boy leaned off the main road into a denser stand of old oaks. They meandered down a grade of turns and Ulf saw the edge of the old quarries off in the distance – giant square holes of grey granite walls dropping down into darkness. They skirted just east of the main quarry and there along its edge lay a small oak-rimmed meadow. Ulf could see the mid-day sun casting small, bright beams into the shadows below. The cart pulled to a stop.

Ulf’s eyes adjusted, and he saw the graveyard before him: clusters of moss-covered gravestones and statues, doors carved into granite rocks, all under a deepening canopy of ancient oaks to shield them. When they first chose this site, it was convenient for the miners and quarrymen who died in the harsh, dangerous labor of stone. Over time, the locals realized that this graveyard survived desecration and was easier to hide from above, safer from dragons and their pawns. Ulf didn’t know exactly how long it had been here, but at least as old as Northguard itself.

He looked around to see that all was in order in this precious sanctum. It had been several months since his last visit. His eyes were drawn to a deeper section, then darted to a nearby patch of moonflowers he liked. Pale blossoms on long stems vibrated in the light breeze and glowed against a dark boulder.

Ulf gingerly stepped down from the cart. “Thank you, kind sir,” he said to Wil. “As promised,” he said, pulling out a fresh apple and holding it out for the mule to take. He patted the animal’s thick neck and back to unharness him. “There now, get some grass too, while you’re at it.” He turned him back around so he could graze away from the graveyard.

Before getting to business, he sat at the edge of the cart next to the dead Bladesong Knight and pulled out an old carved pipe. The name “Keldren” echoed in his mind. “Was that with an i or an e?” he wondered now. He figured he’d go with an “e” on the headstone. He puffed for a while, pondering how such a man had come to die and why he’d managed to warrant no notice or memorial but himself. Well, he would keep his bargain to Sir Hammond and make sure this man was noted.

He reached into the back and grabbed the spade he hadn’t been able to part with; though cracked-shafted, its handle had worn smooth to fit his right hand.  He walked warily among the stones, closer to the graves, casting his gaze across old memories back through time. He used his knife to cut a big handful of moonflowers and held them to his nose. Tears began to well in his eyes. He walked a bit deeper and knelt beside a plain, knee-high stone column with a circular tuft of dry green moss on top. There, written simply along its face, was “Lady Aleyda.” He smoothed a few leaves from the moss and cleared a little around the base. Then he placed a handful of the moonflowers he’d gathered on top, as if on an altar. He felt the place watching him make his pilgrimage again. There he made an arcing crescent gesture with his hand, knelt, and began his prayers.

Something inside him stirred as he closed his eyes and his heart turned to the love he carried with him. The shadows of this place somehow stirred.

* * *

Flashes of her filled his mind. Aleyda’s blue eyes, looking both scared and brave. Helping his broken body off the cart into a small shed where they could hide and shelter. Working tirelessly to stabilize his wound. Going back and forth with food and whatever herbs and medicine she could find by foraging. He drifted in and out of awareness, but he could tell she wasn’t sleeping. As the time blurred, she looked tired. He could tell she was sick. He urged her to take rest too or to find a healer for them both. The lone healer in Silvershard, old mother Thalia, was off to Northguard and, possibly, never coming back to her three generations of children. They nursed their strength on foraged apples, stolen honey, and cow’s milk from the farm they were hiding at. But Aleyda couldn’t fight it. On the 4th day, Ulf woke, and Aleyda did not wake. He wept like a man with nothing left, and that was close to true. After a few days of helplessness and near starvation, a farmer’s son found them. They took him into their home and finished the job Aleyda started … of saving his life.

* * *

Ulf wiped his eyes as he opened them in quiet contemplation. In his lowest moments, he told himself that he had to stay alive, because she had sacrificed everything for him. There had to be a reason for that. What was the point of letting her sacrifice go to waste? So, he always kept on.

His eyes watched the moonflowers shine in the shadow, flickering in the slight breeze. He knew he could not linger long, because he had digging to do and needed to bury a man.

Ulf rose up slowly, grabbing his shovel. Then he heard ragged shuffling behind him. He turned and saw out of the treeline a man-shaped shadow, shuffling at a great speed. He watched in rising panic as the horrid thing jumped up onto the back of his cart and descended onto the knight’s body in one violent, pouncing motion. Growling and thrashing sounds broke the peace of the graveyard.

Not knowing what it was, he mustered what courage he had and stumbled forward as quickly as he could, raising his shovel. When he reached it, flesh flew everywhere. Without pause, he tried to hit the thing in the head as hard as he could, knocking it off the cart and splintering the cracked haft of his shovel in two. The thing screamed a horrific squeal, hissing, and touching its head. As it looked at him in deep confusion, Ulf could see its pale, empty eyes. This thing was no man, but undead! A grave ghoul! In horror, he realized he was no match for this dark evil and backed away, stumbling. He turned and tried to run away in pure fright. Maybe he could hide somewhere?

As he frantically stumbled through the gravestones, pushed by fear, he passed into the darkest area. He kept going deeper into the oldest part of the yard where he had not been in years, where the oaks were old and gnarled. A moss-covered mausoleum rose in the green gloom before him atop a small mound, and he decided to hide behind it. With his heart hammering, he finally glanced back to see if the thing was following him. Fortunately for him, it was much more attracted to eating the dead than the living … for now.

As he stepped onto the mound, his hip twinged and his leg gave way. He stumbled forward and fell hard against the turf. Then, suddenly, he fell into darkness. He hit a hard, flat stone surface, and dust and moss fell all around him.

He was inside an old mausoleum and could see the light streaming in from the giant hole he had just created. He knelt, turned around, and saw a long granite sarcophagus with a carved shape atop it. The craftsmanship and motifs looked old and elven. Just behind it, a shelf on the wall glowed. Sitting upon it was some kind of ever-burning candle, shining with a faint blue light, opposite a square dark lantern that appeared to have gone dark in prior eons. There, shimmering in the dim blue magical light, were a massive sword propped against the wall and an armor stand holding a shimmering plate-mail breastplate.

Ulf stumbled forward with urgency, trying to grab the head-high weapon. But as he reached up to grasp the long handle, he realized the sword was taller than himself. He frantically tried to get a hold of the weapon anyhow, but the weight and awkward space were too much for him – it came crashing down with a clang alongside the sarcophagus. He looked down at the weapon now and saw it for the first time. This was no ordinary weapon! It was magnificent! However, he realized he might not be able to defend himself with such a large and heavy weapon. Maybe in his younger days…. He hurriedly turned back and grabbed the breastplate, as the three-legged wooden stand fell back against the floor.  He knelt behind the sarcophagus, opened it, and put it on. “This just might help me get out alive!” he thought. Just as he opened the two halves, he saw the candle flicker and brighten slightly. Or had he imagined that? He looked down and saw the large letters carved in the metal of the breastplate, “EBERWULF”. He couldn’t help but call the name under his breath: “Hmmm… Eberwulf.” As he spoke it and ran his fingers across it, a brief flash flickered, and Ulf was wearing the breastplate. He looked down in amazement and shock at his own empty hands. He suddenly felt a boost of courage. He stood and felt his arms filled with life. His hip wasn’t aching at all, now that he thought about it. He put his hand on the head carved in the sarcophagus and spoke softly. “Bless you, Eberwulf, for you might give me another life for the second time in this lifetime. And I am still paying for the first time!” He bent down toward the sword and noticed its long flamberge blade first. Then he saw the pommel had the 7-pointed star of the Bladesong Knights and the guard had the moon and shadow, symbol of none other than his own mistress, Sehanine Moonbow. “What in all the blazes of great fortune, my lady.”

He then solemnly knelt before the sarcophagus and made the sign of the crescent moon. “Eberwulf. I shall return to renew your burial, after a bit.” Standing tall, he easily laid the sword up on the mossy slope and pulled himself out of the hole as if twenty years had gone off his body in a moment.

Ulf marched out of the shadowy inner part of the graveyard toward the light, with confidence equal to the fear he had felt moments ago in flight. He flexed his arms and hands, gripping the sword tightly, and felt it ready to move for him. He’d never felt this kind of strength before and had known only frailty since his perilous flight long ago from Northguard.

He stalked forward and found the ghoul still feeding on the dead knight, lost in a necromantic hunger Ulf could never comprehend. He raised the blade high over his head and spoke, “Go back to your death.” With these urgent words, the ghoul threw its head back to look at him, its face covered in gore.

Then Ulf let the blade swing down and around in one motion, severing the ghoul’s neck in one scythe-like swing. Its head toppled down into the puddle of remains. That’s when the stench hit Ulf like a wave, and he bent over and vomited uncontrollably.

He stepped away from the bloody cart and sat on the mossy ground for a time, contemplating all that had befallen him. That’s when he saw Wil, grazing slowly back up the road, content and unaware.

After taking Rendelreign from Castle Edderoth, Vesper, Kaeliss, and Dirk made off with two artifacts: the correspondence of Matildae and the hand of Volukai, and traveled through a shadow portal to the Caves under Enimdere, called Underroot. There, they fashioned a laboratory of deep power with help from a local illithid cabal called the Metathrein Syndicate. Xalathrien, the so-called Nightmare Farmer, leads this cabal, from whom the Bladesong knights previously recovered the sword. The sword thieves took this place because it is imbued with mythal magic, and Kaeliss and Vesper can manipulate the magic to keep the sword docile and still… for now. Dirk destroyed the Slaad guards who worked for the Metathrein, and the laboratory is now safe from the illithid. Safe, until they decide what they will do with this, the most magical and most evil of all blades.

The Kingdoms and Ages of Siluvaria

The history of Siluvaria is measured in kingdoms lost, gods divided, and the three great catastrophes by which the shape of the modern world was made. In Old Khepathia, some seven and a half millennia ago, when Bahamut and Tiamat were yet joined in love, the six Swords of Creation were forged amid the wars of the Cathidic Blight. That first age perished in the Sundering, about 4000 DR, when the divine wyrms were divided and the world passed into the age of Ethilistyr, the Dream Water. There Bahamut and Tiamat made war, the first Scintilliant spread across Siluvaria, and the six women remembered as the Anum Batai, the Sword Mothers, came at last to Highspire. Ethylistyr ended in the Rending, around 2000 DR, with the death of Tiamat and the ruin of the old order. Thereafter arose the soaring elven kingdoms of Orsolon, the flying cities and the great Mythals, in the high Age of the Scintilliant. That age in turn passed away with the First Rime of the Frostmaiden, at the beginning of Dale Reckoning, 1,510 years ago.

What follows is called The Song of the Sword Mothers, composed by Verenestra, archfey of the court of Lady Vivianna of Gildensong. Tradition holds that Verenestra wrote the verses upon dried leaves in an ink of wine, soot, and her own blood, and made only three copies: one for the Lady of the Valley, one for the Bladesong Knight Loralin Galdirion, and one for Lady Glasshair of Rainmark.

THE SONG OF THE SWORD MOTHERS

As written upon the Autumn Leaves by Verenestra

Six Mothers came beneath the starry glow,
The Anum Batai, summoned by Mystra’s word,
Five thousand five hundred years ago.

Yet older were the Blades beneath their hand,
For twice a thousand years before their choosing
They had been wrought in lost Khepathia’s land.

There love had kindled in the elder light,
When Bahamut lay beside Tiamat,
And Glory had not yet been sundered from the night.

Six swords they wrought while yet the gods were one,
Three born for Glory and three born for Doom,
Before the marriage of the wyrms was done.

Then Volukai dreamed beneath the poisoned deep,
And through the earth the Cathidic Blight awakened,
Like blackened roots arising out of sleep.

And hatred entered where love once had lain,
Till Bahamut and Tiamat took their names apart,
And heaven learned the ancient taste of pain.

Thus came the Sundering beneath a wounded sky,
The first of three great wounds that shaped the ages,
When love divided and the stars learned how to die.

Yet Mystra gathered what the gods had wrought,
Lest six unmastered swords unmake the Weave,
And bound their fury unto mortal thought.

For steel alone remembers neither breath,
Nor pity, grief, nor consequence of choosing,
And power without a heart is kin to death.

Therefore she sought six keepers for each blade,
Six living tethers fastened to the world,
That mortal hands might govern what gods had made.

Before the Seven Daughters came to fame,
There were the Six, the Mothers of the Swords,
And every blade was wedded to a name.

Three were given unto shining Glory,
And three unto the darker house of Doom,
And thus divided stood the ancient story.

Yet neither good nor evil dwelt alone,
For every sword remembered its first forging,
When dragon love had made all six as one.

Through Ethylistyr the Mothers kept their ward,
While Dream Water shimmered beneath the moons,
And mortal hands grew accustomed to the sword.

Then from the swords arose the Mythal fire,
As elves first learned to weave the land with magic
And lift their hidden cities ever higher.

The Cathidic Blight withdrew from root and stone,
And Volukai passed eastward into darkness,
While green returned to countries overgrown.

In those years the young Scintilliant took wing,
Beyond the ancient bounds of Ethylistyr,
And elves first dreamed of Orsolon’s coming spring.

Then concord flowered for a little while,
And all six Mothers journeyed north together,
Through forest deep and many a starlit mile.

At Alenthia Feiren they made their spire,
The house that later tongues would call Highspire,
Where sixfold magic burned like sleepless fire.

Long ere the Rending, there the temple stood,
Raised unto Mystra and the living Weave,
White above mountain, river, field, and wood.

There every Sword of Creation found its rest,
And all six Mothers dwelt beneath one roof,
Each blade made still against its keeper’s breast.

Even dragons came beneath that sacred stone,
Ghinaetria and Angmehridon together,
When copper and green had not yet warlike grown.

First among the Mothers stood Sciabelle the bright,
Priestess of Corellon, keeper of the Emerald,
Thalorien gleaming with green and deathless light.

Then came the Sisters, three who walked with Doom,
Acertiana bearing cold Rendgray,
Whose shadow made the brightest chamber gloom.

Thayertiala bore Rendlereign the Pale,
Whose edge could sever sovereignty from kings,
And make the mightiest covenant grow frail.

Aetheiatala bore Rendpyre’s crimson flame,
The blade that makes immortal blood remember
That even deathless things may lose their name.

And Mystra trusted these three hearts to hold,
The darkness sleeping in the Swords of Doom,
For mortal love seemed stronger then than gold.

But high above, the stars began to bleed,
For Tiamat’s wrath had entered all creation,
And hatred ripened from an ancient seed.

Then came Kanre Charrir, dragonborn and white,
The sole non-elven Mother of the Six,
Who bore Aeltharion like a star of light.

The Ivory Blade was given to her line,
And blood remembers what the years have buried,
For oath and sword remain by old design.

But Vaelorin, the Crimson, went to one called fair,
An elven-seeming Mother named Emoria,
With midnight eyes and softly silvered hair.

Yet Emoria was a woven lie,
For underneath that borrowed face was Iggwilv,
Mother of witches, hidden from Mystra’s eye.

Thus poison entered quietly through the door,
Not borne by armies, dragonfire, or darkness,
But by one smiling woman on the temple floor.

She whispered where the Mothers came to pray,
And turned the hearts of Glory against Doom,
Until old fellowship began to rot away.

As sun and moon divided in the height,
So Glory looked on Doom with growing loathing,
And Doom mistrusted every child of light.

Beyond Highspire the Scintilliant spread wide,
Their kingdoms rooting beneath Orsolon’s shadow,
While mortal nations gathered at their side.

And Tiamat claimed the breathing earth,
While Bahamut withdrew unto the heavens,
And every quarrel found a darker birth.

For centuries the Anum Batai knew no peace,
The hidden splinter driven ever deeper,
Until even memory begged the wound to cease.

Then came the eve appointed unto fate,
Three thousand five hundred years before this singing,
When Doom’s three Mothers gathered at the gate.

There Acertiana and her Sisters swore the Kai,
The dreadful Vow of Immortnish unbroken,
And bound themselves to Doom, no more to die.

For lords of Dream Water had found beneath the ground
The sleeping flesh of Tiamat herself,
Where the Queen of Dragons lay in darkness bound.

Then came Azinon, master of the streams of time,
To guard Vaelorin from the gathering treason,
Walking through years as others walk a climb.

Before the Six he tore away the guise,
And Emoria was named as Iggwilv,
The Mother of Witches naked before their eyes.

Then Sister rose against Sister beneath the dome,
And Doom drew steel on Sciabelle and Kanre,
While thunder shook the ancient mountain home.

Azinon seized the Crimson from the fight,
And bore Vaelorin down the roads of time,
Beyond the reach of Doom and mortal sight.

Far hence he gave the blade to Springfield’s hand,
That one unborn might answer ancient treason
When Doom returned again to mortal land.

But Thalorien shattered in that bitter hour,
And Sciabelle fell beneath the Swords of Doom,
Her green blood burning through the stones like flower.

Then Tiamat was stricken beneath the world’s dark wall,
And Alenthia Feiren broke upon the mountain,
When heaven answered to the Dragon Queen’s fall.

That hour men afterward named the Rending,
The second wound by which the world was measured,
And Dream Water came unto its ending.

Thereafter came the Orsolon in flight,
Their silver cities wandering above the forests,
And Mythals burning underneath the night.

For long the Swords of Doom knew hidden rest,
Scattered from Highspire and from one another,
While Orsolon’s bright cities ruled the west.

But the three Sisters had escaped the grave’s dark door,
Their Vow transformed them into deathless wraiths,
Neither women of flesh nor Mothers anymore.

Then Matildae came beneath a veiled moon,
And with her brother stole the sword Rendgray,
And Highspire learned that Doom returns too soon.

Her brother then was called Vizix the Veiled,
Though Volukai moved behind the mortal naming,
And many truths beneath that name lay sealed.

They fled aboard the haunted Kellis Ilbyrn through the gloom,
And without their swords the three lost even themselves,
Becoming wandering Mothers bound to Doom.

Rendlereign vanished where the oldest shadows reign,
In forgotten corners of Siluvaria,
And none who sought its resting place returned again.

Rendpyre fled beyond the mortal wild,
Into the shifting countries of the Fey,
Where road and year and memory are beguiled.

Thus sword and Mother share one deathless chain,
And neither wholly lives without the other,
Nor may the wraiths be slain while blades remain.

Until the three return to Highspire’s stone,
The Anum Batai wander through the ages,
Seeking what was theirs and theirs alone.

Yet in their curse abides a bitter grace,
For while the Sword Mothers haunt the mortal world,
Doom cannot wholly show its final face.

The blades may murder, sunder, burn, and mar,
Yet something deeper sleeps within their making,
A final wound reserved for moon and star.

And Tiamat, long fallen, walks once more beneath the sky,
Returned when Vecna’s banishment tore the old seals,
And ancient wings are heard again on high.

But not until three Dooms return beneath the spire,
And Rendgray, Rendlereign, and Rendpyre stand together,
May the oldest purpose wake within their fire.

Then shall the Dragon Queen behold her ancient foe,
And all the Scintilliant shall hear Highspire calling,
From mountain crown to caverns far below.

Then shall the Sixteen gather beneath the darkened sun,
And Siluvaria remember its first morning,
When dragon, elf, and sword were newly one.

And whether Highspire shall become their tomb or door,
No Mother sings, no dragon knows, no god has spoken,
For that last verse is written nevermore.

The Scintilliant are a family only in the oldest and strangest meaning of that word: sixteen great dragons descended through different lineages from the first powers of dragonkind, born across different ages of the world and bound to one another by blood, rivalry, memory, and ancient obligation. Some remember siblings whom the younger wyrms know only as legends; some inherited territories from their forebears, while others seized their realms through fire and slaughter. No two are alike. Each has become an expression of the country it inhabits, as singular in temperament as in magic, whether guardian, tyrant, oracle, recluse, or monster. For the peoples living beneath their shadows, a dragon is therefore never merely a dangerous animal but a permanent fact of geography and history. Villages leave offerings, kings negotiate treaties, roads bend around forbidden mountains, and generations inherit rules concerning which lakes must not be crossed or which names must never be spoken beneath certain stars. A benevolent dragon may inspire reverence and even love; a cruel one may keep whole provinces in terror. Yet even the kindest inspires unease. Where a dragon reigns, awe is always attended by anxiety, gratitude by caution, and every upward glance carries some measure of trepidation, for the oldest truth of Siluvaria is that a dragon may love the people beneath its wings and still remain a dragon.

Taken together, the Scintilliant are less a council than a broken pantheon. They are sixteen survivors of the first ordering of dragonkind, each carrying some fragment of the ancient powers unleashed by the division of Bahamut and Tiamat and Sardior’s failed reconciliation. Some became guardians, some tyrants, some hermits, and some things for which mortal languages have no comfortable political name. Their territories overlap the kingdoms of Siluvaria without truly belonging to them, and their feuds are older than many mountains.

Thus the Dragon War of 1497 DR was never simply a war against dragons. It was the moment when the ancient disagreements of the Scintilliant ceased to remain above and beyond mortal history. Sixteen elder wyrms had endured into the age of elves and humans. When the war ended, only thirteen remained.

THE SCINTILLIANT

The Sixteen Dragons of the Scintilliant

Ghinaetria, the Verdant Crown
An immense bronze-green dragon whose scales carry the shifting colors of leaves after rain, Ghinaetria is among the oldest surviving guardians of western Siluvaria. Her dominion lies chiefly over Isalia, where the oldest forests remember her passage and certain trees are said to bend toward her when she flies overhead. Ghinaetria commands wind, rain, and growing things, and her breath falls as a green-golden storm that causes roots to burst from the earth. Patient and intensely territorial, she has little affection for kings or governments but tremendous loyalty to places. Mortals who protect the land may earn her friendship; those who injure it discover that her patience is measured in centuries, but her vengeance in minutes.

Clairistel the Radiant
Sister to Ghinaetria, Clairistel was a magnificent pearl-white dragon whose translucent scales caught daylight and fractured it into halos of spectral color. Called the Radiant, she wielded light as both weapon and healing power and could cross the boundaries between worlds wherever sunlight touched living water. Clairistel possessed a grave and compassionate nature, regarding power as an obligation rather than a privilege. When the lost dragon god Sardior attempted to enter the mortal world through Prismeer in 1497 DR, Clairistel opposed him and was destroyed. For several years afterward, witnesses throughout Isalia reported seeing strange rainbows at sunset, even beneath cloudless skies.

Abothilon, the Deep Bell
The ancient cobalt dragon Abothilon sleeps beneath the mountains and drowned caverns of Ethylistyr, where his breathing is sometimes mistaken for distant thunder. His great horns curl backward like those of a ram, and the scales along his throat shine with blue mineral fire. Abothilon commands stone, subterranean water, and vibration. His roar can travel through mountains for miles, breaking walls without disturbing the grass above them. Slow to anger and almost impossibly contemplative, he may remain silent through an entire mortal audience before answering a single question. Earthquakes in Ethylistyr are traditionally called the turning of Abothilon, and miners still leave silver bells at deep shafts to announce themselves before entering his country.

Xyclodenes, the Eye of the Sun
Among the most magnificent of the Scintilliant, Xyclodenes is a colossal gold dragon whose wings shine like hammered metal beneath the noon sun. His golden fire once guarded the high mountains against things that climbed from older darkness, and for millennia his appearance above the peaks was regarded as an omen of protection. Xyclodenes possesses terrible powers of revelation: disguises fail beneath his gaze, invisible creatures cast shadows before him, and deliberate falsehoods become difficult to speak in his presence. Noble without being gentle, he expects courage from those who petition him and has little tolerance for self-pity. Of all the Scintilliant, he most closely resembles an ancient dragon-king.

Tsuamlin, the River of Heaven
Long and serpentine, Tsuamlin is a silver-blue storm dragon of Earlann whose antlered head and trailing mane give him an appearance unlike the great western wyrms. He rarely walks upon the earth, preferring clouds, rivers, waterfalls, and mountain mist. His breath is not flame but a roaring torrent of electrically charged rain capable of sweeping soldiers from a battlefield. Tsuamlin is mercurial, humorous, vain, and fascinated by music. He has been known to answer an insult with a flood and a beautiful song with a century of friendship. Several rivers of Earlann are said not merely to belong to Tsuamlin but to be extensions of his dreaming body.

Yropa, the Mountain Mother
The great amethyst dragon Yropa was once among the most beloved of all the Scintilliant. Her vast wings shimmered violet, rose, and blue, and ancient Siluvaeren traditions remember them spread above the earliest elves as a shelter against the terrors of the young world. Yropa commands formidable psionic power, entering dreams, moving objects without touch, and speaking directly into minds across tremendous distances. She awakened Baertolaine as a psi warrior and later bore Skylla into the Dragon War. Yet Yropa’s fate became one of the great tragedies of the Scintilliant: corruption transformed her luminous hide into black crystal threaded with violet fire. Something of the Mountain Mother survives within that terrible form, imprisoned behind the power that claimed her.

Rioko, the Laughing Thunder
Rioko is a great copper dragon, broad-winged and scarred, whose mountainous territory lies among the western reaches of Earlann. His horns curl outward like a stag’s crown, and lightning-blue markings cover his muzzle and breast. Rioko delights in contests, riddles, improbable wagers, wrestling matches, and mortal celebrations, but the apparent levity conceals an extraordinarily perceptive mind. His thunderous breath can shatter fortifications, while his laughter itself can break enchantments of fear and despair. Rioko despises tyranny above nearly every other vice. More than one petty lord has invited the charming old dragon to dinner only to discover by morning that the gates of his prison had mysteriously been torn from their hinges.

Halakthia, She Who Walks Between Stars
Perhaps the strangest of the Sixteen, Halakthia is a slender indigo crystal dragon whose scales resemble fragments of a winter night. Tiny points of light move beneath them like distant stars. She inhabits remote peaks and abandoned places where the barriers between planes grow thin. Halakthia can step briefly outside ordinary space, appearing miles away without crossing the intervening country, and her breath creates a field of glittering darkness in which distance becomes unreliable. She speaks softly, rarely intervenes in mortal affairs, and seems to perceive time differently from other beings. Prophets seek her and usually regret doing so. Halakthia seldom tells anyone what will happen. She tells them what must happen for something else not to occur.

Shotomio the Moonstone
The legendary moonstone dragon Shotomio possessed scales of milky silver that became almost transparent beneath moonlight. His domain encompassed dreams, reflected light, illusion, and the invisible pathways by which the Feywild touches Siluvaria. Gentle in speech but ferocious in defense of the innocent, Shotomio maintained particularly close relationships with elves and the benevolent fey. During the Dragon War, he answered the assault upon Silverymoon and confronted Angmehridon. On Flamerule 12, 1497 DR, Shotomio was destroyed defending the city. Siluvaeren astronomers claim that a previously unknown white star appeared near the moon that night and has never vanished.

Graelmentha, the Moss Queen
A vast emerald-brown forest dragon, Graelmentha is so thoroughly overgrown that trees take root between the scales of her back. Moss hangs from her jaw, mushrooms flower along her tail, and small birds sometimes nest between her horns. She inhabits the oldest forests and seldom flies unless greatly disturbed. Graelmentha’s breath carries spores that can produce either miraculous fertility or choking fungal death, according to her will. She is maternal, suspicious, and profoundly slow in judgment. Mortal kingdoms mean almost nothing to her. She remembers forests where cities now stand and regards three hundred years as a reasonable period in which to consider an apology. Druids say that when Graelmentha finally dies, she will simply lie down and become a mountain.

Miabra, the Veiled Flame
Beautiful and deeply dangerous, Miabra is a slender red-gold dragon whose scales darken toward black along her wings and extremities. She has always moved nearer to mortal politics than most of her kin, cultivating relationships among elves, drow, archmages, smiths, and royal houses. Miabra possesses extraordinary command of magical flame and can burn enchantments themselves, stripping spells from objects without necessarily destroying the objects that bear them. She is intelligent, seductive, secretive, and difficult to place among either the benevolent or tyrannical Scintilliant. Miabra values promises intensely, but cares little whether the promises themselves are virtuous. Her involvement in the histories surrounding Caelithar and the Crimson Blade has ensured that no serious history of the Swords of Creation can entirely escape her shadow.

Orthmeck the Black
Called Old Black Orthmeck in the frightened stories of the eastern marches, Orthmeck is an immense ancient black dragon whose body has grown monstrous with age. More than two hundred feet from snout to tail, he possesses a strangely bone-white face, enormous glasslike horns, and a rasping cough that can be heard through the marsh long before he appears. Orthmeck rules poison water, decay, acid, and the drowned dead. His swamp has become almost an extension of his body, its twisted trees and black pools seeming to awaken when their master is threatened. He is vicious, avaricious, enormously intelligent, and possessed of a memory for insults that borders upon religious devotion. Yet he despises Angmehridon, and that hatred has occasionally placed the old monster on the useful side of history.

Diracticla, the Iron Tempest
The terrifying Diracticla is an iron-gray dragon whose armored scales overlap like the plates of some celestial war machine. She rules among the eastern mountains, where ruined fortresses and abandoned roads testify to the kingdoms that once attempted to oppose her. Diracticla breathes a storm of metallic shards and magnetic force capable of tearing weapons from soldiers’ hands and armor from their bodies. She admires discipline, hierarchy, engineering, and war conducted with ruthless precision. Unlike Orthmeck, who rules through terror and appetite, Diracticla genuinely believes domination produces order. Her armies therefore march beneath laws, standards, quartermasters, and carefully measured supply trains. Of the hostile Scintilliant, she may be the most dangerous strategist.

Angmehridon, Old Rusty Horns
The elder green dragon Angmehridon is the dreaming horror of the deep forest. Roots and vines grow across his enormous body until a sleeping Angmehridon can be mistaken for an overgrown hill beneath the trees. His horns have weathered to the brown-red color that gives him his mocking mortal epithet, Old Rusty Horns. Poison is among the least of his powers. Angmehridon enters dreams, cultivates fear, plants desires, manipulates memory, and may spend decades preparing the corruption of a single enemy. He would rather persuade a hero to betray everything they love than kill them. Yet beneath this almost incomprehensible patience lies a peculiar terror: Angmehridon fears children. Something in their unfinished minds resists the pathways by which he enters the dreams of adults, and this ancient fear will eventually become central to his undoing.

Oondarr, the Red Tyrant
Oondarr is an enormous deep-crimson dragon, blackened along the belly and crowned with forward-sweeping horns like the blades of a war helm. He does not merely accumulate treasure. He accumulates power. Oondarr breeds soldiers, selects bloodlines, builds fortifications, appoints generals, studies roads, stockpiles grain, and measures civilizations according to whether they can be conquered. Beginning in 1485 DR, he deliberately breeds a superior strain of orc infantry and sends them against the borders of Gildensong, beginning the long escalation toward the Dragon War. Six thousand of his orcs eventually descend upon Edderoth itself. Oondarr’s flame burns an unnaturally dark red and can melt enchanted metal. Proud, disciplined, patient, and utterly imperial, he does not dream of destroying Siluvaria. He dreams of ruling it.

Arauthator, Old White Fang
Far to the north dwells Arauthator, the colossal white dragon called Old White Fang. His scales are not clean white but the colors of glacier ice, old bone, and storm cloud, while his wings become almost invisible against falling snow. Arauthator commands cold on a geographical scale. Lakes freeze beneath his passage, blizzards follow his anger, and his breath can turn stone brittle enough to shatter beneath a hammer. He is savage but not stupid, an important distinction lost upon many who have died in his country. Old White Fang possesses the patience of winter itself. He may stalk an enemy for weeks without revealing his presence, allowing cold, hunger, and fear to do most of his killing. He attacked Elandreth Filarian during the winter elf’s journey south from Methedra Vale and remains one of the great sovereign terrors of the extreme North.

The Dragon Wars at Gildensong

1485 DR: Oondarr begins breeding a stronger and more disciplined strain of orc infantry in the eastern reaches. The first companies are sent west to test themselves against the Bladesong Knights at Tiruandar, beginning what is at first dismissed in Edderoth as another season of border violence.

1486 DR: The fighting widens into what becomes known as the Long Orc War, with battles spreading through the countryside of Earlann. At Memorianne, Miraedriel, a wolf-riding Bladesong Knight, destroys Urthgati, a demon of Lolth whose appearance reveals darker powers moving behind the orc offensive.

1487 DR: Orthmeck leads a goblin host against the elven city of Leandor in Isalian. Barrot Ithae, a human sorcerer and Bladesong Knight, organizes a daring sortie from the besieged city and breaks the attack, temporarily checking Orthmeck’s advance.

1495 DR, the Year of the Witchlight War: The Clockwork Coven captures Zybilna within Prismeer, an extradimensional realm deep within Siluvaria. In the same year, Vivianna’s sister, the witch Skylla, is angrily rebuked for reasons never publicly disclosed and removes herself to Silverymoon. Ogdinnion (Magister at Edderoth) later reports that Skylla departed with a substantial cache of arcane instruments stolen from the Vinespeakers.

1496 DR: Elandreth Filarian, a winter elf from the legendary Methedra Vale, arrives in Silverymoon bearing extraordinary news: a third functioning mythal lies hidden among the mountains of the extreme north. The discovery will prove crucial before the coming war is finished.

1497 DR: The Year of the Dragon War

The border conflicts erupt into the Dragon War, also remembered as the War of the Scintillant. Battlefronts spread across the High Forest and throughout Siluvaria. The Scintilliant, the twelve ancient dragons that have claimed the greater Siluvarian world since antiquity, descend into open war against one another and the peoples beneath them. By the war’s end, only nine will remain.

Ches 18: Word reaches Edderoth of the first great defeat of the Argent Legion by Orthmeck’s draconians at the Battle of Jalandhar. Gildensong responds immediately, dispatching 350 Bladesong Knights north to reinforce the Siluvaeren armies.

Tarsakh 1: The first of the terrible void zones, the Milentioch, manifests in Siluvaria. The fortress of Umgareth falls to the draconians and is rechristened Verminar. Thousands of draconians pour into Giants Dale, and Northguard is lost. With the ordinary roads collapsing under the advance, the elves of Isalian open the hidden ways of the Faenkalla to refugees, supplies, and military traffic. By this point the Bladesong Knights have been reduced to only 493 active knights.

Mirtul 1: Yropa the Wise is seen for the last time, bearing Vivianna’s sister Skylla into the gathering war. Neither rider nor mount is seen again by reliable witnesses.

Mirtul 7: Orthmeck and Angmehridon attack Silverymoon. The archmage Telmachion is slain, together with seventy-five Bladesong Knights, during the catastrophic Battle of the Fourth Shield.

Mirtul 28: Amid mounting losses, Ithilbre Glasshair is elevated as the 124th High Captain of the Bladesong Knights.

Kythorn 15: The Argent Legion wins its first major victory against the combined forces of Oondarr’s orcs and Orthmeck’s draconians at the Battle of Three Fronts. Victory comes at a terrible price: another sixty-four Bladesong Knights are killed. Facing the possible destruction of the order, High Captain Ithilbre begins the unprecedented conscription of Gildensong citizens into the knighthood.

Kythorn 24: Oondarr comes against Edderoth itself. Six thousand orcs descend upon the Elder Valley and lay siege to the city and Castle Edderoth, bringing the Dragon War at last to the heart of Gildensong.

Flamerule 12: Shotomio the Moonstone defends Silverymoon against another assault by Angmehridon and is destroyed in the battle. At the same time, Orthmeck lays siege to Everlund, and the city falls.

Later that summer: With Edderoth still threatened, powers older than Gildensong enter the war. The Far Darrig, deep fey out of Faywell, emerge into Edderoth and fall upon Oondarr’s besieging army, routing the orcs and liberating the city. Above the walls, colossal wyrms meet in battle. Castle Edderoth is scarred by their violence, and the ancient Diamond Tower of Valen Gildensong is shattered.

Eleint 13: The lost dragon god Sardior appears within Prismeer and attempts to cross into the Prime Material World. Clairistel the Radiant, sister of Gnimetria, opposes the manifestation and is destroyed.

Nightal 15: Elandreth Filarian and Baertolaine, Champions of the Witchlight, ignite the lost mythal of the Gherivon and destroy the avatar of Sardior. Across Siluvaria, the surviving dragons of the Scintilliant retreat to their lairs. The Clockwork Coven is destroyed and Zybilna is freed. The great Dragon War is effectively over, although the armies it created remain.

The Long Aftermath

1498 DR: The dragons have withdrawn, but their war does not end with them. Draconian armies continue to plague Isalian, while Silverymoon sends troops south to reinforce the depleted Bladesong Knights in the campaign to retake Northguard.

1499 DR: Oondarr’s orcs, now commanded by General Orol Kul, seize the ruins of Myth Adofhaer and fortify the surrounding country. Their new stronghold becomes known as Blood Moon Vale, an enduring base for Oondarr’s power in the region.

1500 DR: The Blood Moon orcs unleash purple worms against Crystal Bed, threatening to destroy the settlement from below. The archfey Orius brokers an extraordinary alliance between the Bladesong Knights and the drow of House Theradril. Together they drive back the worms and restore the community. Afterward, Orius takes up residence at Edderoth, bringing another powerful fey presence into Vivianna’s court.

1502 DR: Gildensong begins the largest defensive works undertaken in generations. Fences, fortified roads, walls, watch posts, and borderworks rise along the principality’s eastern frontier deep within the High Forest. Much of the immense expense is borne by the Dessarin Hold and House Enimdere, binding commercial wealth ever more closely to the military defense of the realm.

1503 DR: The draconian general Ziburizet enters Edderoth under diplomatic protection, claiming possession of Shadowtop and demanding that Gildensong recognize his conquest. Vivianna’s court refuses. During the failed negotiations, Ziburizet attempts to assassinate Moonbow, but loses his black sword in the ensuing melee and escapes with the assistance of a concealed abishai, a fiend bound to draconic power. The abishai is subsequently revealed as Nicandlin, the hidden architect of the Clockwork Coven’s attempt to restore Sardior. More disturbing still, the abandoned black sword is identified as Rendgray, one of the primordial Swords of Doom.

1504 DR: The campaign to recover Shadowtop begins. What is intended as a decisive offensive hardens into a brutal siege that will consume more than two years, drawing knights, money, and supplies from across Gildensong.

1505 DR: After a succession of costly battles, the Bladesong Knights retake Shadowtop. Victory exposes a deeper betrayal. Evidence reveals that Skylla, sister of Vivianna, has been working alongside Nicandlin and Ziburizet. All three escape capture, taking with them the body of Kannoth, the ancient vampire, for purposes unknown.

Divination performed afterward reveals something still more troubling. Kannoth is not merely an ancient vampire but an incarnation, vessel, or manifestation of a far older being from ancient Daotyr: Volukai, an elder power of immense and uncertain nature. Thus the war that began with Oondarr’s breeding pits in 1485 ends its second decade not with peace, but with the discovery that dragons, draconians, witches, and orcs have been moving across the surface of a much older game.