DragonLance Chronicles, Vol. I - Dragons of Autumn Twilight

Out of the heart of nothing, the Mother of Night,
Aswirl in a blankness of colors,

Swooped to the East, into the stare of the sun
And the sky collapsed into silver and blankness.
On the ground Huma lay, at his side a woman,

Her silver skin broken, the promise of green
Released from the gifts of her eyes. She whispered her name
As the Queen of Darkness banked in the sky above Huma.

She descended, the Mother of Night,
And from the loft of the battlements, men saw shadows

Boil on the colorless dive of her wings:
A hovel of thatch and rushes, the heart of a Wilderness,

A lost silver light spattered in terrible crimson,
And then from the center of shadows

Came a depth in which darkness itself was aglimmer,
Denying all air, all light, all shadows.
And thrusting his lance into emptiness,

Huma fell to the sweetness of death, into abiding sunlight.
Through the Lance, through the dear might and
brotherhood
Of those who must walk to the end of the breath
and the senses,

He banished the dragons back to the core of nothing,
And the long lands blossomed in balance and music.
Stunned in new freedom, stunned by the brightness

and colors,
By the harped blessing of the holy winds,
The Knights carried Huma, they carried the Dragonlance
To the grove in the lap of the Mountain.
When they returned to the grove in pilgrimage, in homage,
The Lance, the armor, the Dragonbane himself

Had vanished to the day’s eye.
But the night of the full moons red and silver
Shines down on the hills, on the forms of a man

and a woman
Shimmering steel and silver, silver and steel,
Above the village, over the thatched and nurturing shires.

About the Authors

Margaret Weis

A decade and a half after her first collaboration with Tracy Hickman. Margaret Weis is the
author of ten DRAGONLANCE® novels, the four-volume galactic fantasy Star of the Guardian, co-
author with her husband Don Perrin of The Doom Brigade, Knights of the Black Earth, Robot
Blues and Hung Out. She and Perrin are also the authors of Brothers in Arms, the sequel to
Weis’s The Soulforge. Currently she is hard at work, with Tracy Hickman, on a new DRAGONLANCE
trilogy called The War of Souls. She lives happily in a converted barn in southern Wisconsin
with an assortment of dogs and cats and far, far too many books.

Tracy Hickman

In 1983, when Tracy Hickman was driving across country to start a new job at TSR as a game
designer, he conceived of a world in which dragons would play a big part. That world became
the DRAGONLANCE campaign setting and helped launch Hickman’s career as a major fantasy author.
He has also written, in collaboration with Margaret Weis, the Darksword series and the Death
Gate Cycle, is the designer of the game setting Starshield, and is the author of The Immortals. In
his spare time, not that he has much, he lives in Utah with his wife, two daughters, and two sons.

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