Dragons of the Autumn Twilight - Margaret Weis [209]
Tanis did not answer, nor did the mage speak again. Both sat silently, one continuing to stare south, the other glancing up into the great voids in the glittering, starlit sky.
Tasslehoff sank back into the soft grass beneath the pine trees. “No hope!” the kender repeated bleakly, sorry he had followed the half-elf. “I don’t believe it,” he said, but his eyes went to Tanis, staring at the stars. Tanis believes it, the kender realized, and the thought filled him with dread.
Ever since the death of the old magician, an unnoticed change had come over the kender. Tasslehoff began to consider that this adventure was in earnest, that it had a purpose for which people gave their lives. He wondered why he was involved and thought perhaps he had given the answer to Fizban—the small things he was meant to do were important, somehow, in the big scheme of things.
But until now it had never occurred to the kender that all this might be for nothing, that it might not make any difference, that they might suffer and lose people they loved like Fizban, and the dragons would still win in the end.
“Still,” the kender said softly, “we have to keep trying and hoping. That’s what’s important, the trying and the hoping. Maybe that’s most important of all.”
Something floated gently down from the sky, brushing past the kender’s nose. Tas reached out and caught it in his hand.
It was a small, white chicken feather.
The “Song of Huma” was the last, and many consider the greatest, work of the elven bard, Quivalen Soth. Only fragments of the work remained following the Cataclysm. It is said that those who study it diligently will find hints to the future of the turning world.
SONG OF HUMA
Out of the village, out of the thatched and clutching shires,
Out of the grave and furrow, furrow and grave,
Where his sword first tried
The last cruel dances of childhood, and awoke to the shires
Forever retreating, his greatness a marshfire,
The banked flight of the Kingfisher always above him,
Now Huma walked upon Roses,
In the level Light of the Rose.
And troubled by Dragons, he turned to the end of the land,
To the fringe of all sense and senses,
To the Wilderness, where Paladine bade him to turn,
And there in the loud tunnel of knives
He grew in unblemished violence, in yearning,
Stunned into himself by a deafening gauntlet of voices.
It was there and then that the White Stag found him,
At the end of a journey planned from the shores of Creation,
And all time staggered at the forest edge
Where Huma, haunted and starving,
Drew his bow, thanking the gods for their bounty
and keeping,
Then saw, in the ranged wood,
In the first silence, the dazed heart’s symbol,
The rack of antlers resplendent.
He lowered the bow and the world resumed.
Then Huma followed the Stag, its tangle of antlers receding
As a memory of young light, as the talons of birds ascending.
The Mountains crouched before them. Nothing would
change now,
The three moons stopped in the sky,
And the long night tumbled in shadows.
It was morning when they reached the grove,
The lap of the mountain, where the Stag departed,
Nor did Huma follow, knowing the end of this journey
Was nothing but green and the promise of green
that endured
In the eyes of the woman before him.
And holy the days he drew near her, holy the air
That carried his words of endearment, his forgotten songs,
And the rapt moons knelt on the Great Mountain.
Still, she eluded him, bright and retreating as marshfire,
Nameless and lovely, more lovely because she was nameless,
As they learned that the world, the dazzling shelves
of the air,
The Wilderness itself
Were plain and diminished things to the heart’s thicket.
At the end of the days, she told him her secret.
For she was not of woman, nor was she mortal,
But the daughter and heiress from a line of Dragons.
For Huma the sky turned indifferent, cluttered