Time of the Twins

Walking away from the thicket, Tanis felt guilty. He shouldn’t be leaving her alone, he knew. He shouldn’t be wasting precious time. All his warrior senses protested. But there was one thing he had to do, and he had to do it alone. To do otherwise would have seemed sacrilege.

And so Tanis stood at the bottom of the hill, summoning his courage to move forward. Anyone looking at him might have supposed he was advancing to fight an ogre. But that was not the case. Tanis Half-Elven was returning home. And he both longed for and dreaded his first sight.

The afternoon sun was beginning its downward journey toward night. It would be dark before he reached the Inn, and he dreaded traveling the roads by night. But, once there, this nightmarish journey would be over, He would leave the woman in capable hands and continue on to Qualinesti. But, first, there was this he had to face. With a deep sigh, Tanis Half-Elven drew his green hood up over his head and began the climb.

Topping the rise, his gaze fell upon a large, moss-covered boulder. For a moment, his memories overwhelmed him. He closed his eyes, feeling the sting of swift tears beneath the lids.

“Stupid quest,” he heard the dwarf’s voice echo in his memory. “Silliest thing I ever did!”

Flint! My old friend!

I can’t go on, Tanis thought. This is too painful. Why did I ever agree to come back? It holds nothing for me now... nothing except the pain of old wounds. My life is good, at last. Finally I am at peace, happy. Why... why did I tell them I would come?

Drawing a shuddering sigh, he opened his eyes and looked at the boulder. Two years ago—it would be three this autumn—he had topped this rise and met his long-time friend, the dwarf, Flint Fireforge, sitting on that boulder, carving wood, and complaining—as usual. That meeting had set in motion events that had shaken the world, culminating in the War of the Lance, the battle that cast the Queen of Darkness back into the Abyss, and broke the might of the Dragon Highlords.

Now I am a hero, Tanis thought, glancing down ruefully at the gaudy panoply he wore: breastplate of a Knight of Solamnia; green silken sash, mark of the Wildrunners of Silvanesti, the elves’ most honored legions; the medallion of Kharas, the dwarves’ highest honor; plus countless others. No one—human, elf, or half-elf—had been so honored. It was ironic. He who hated armor, who hated ceremony, now forced to wear it as befitting his station. How the old dwarf would have laughed.

“You—a hero!” He could almost hear the dwarf snort. But Flint was dead. He had died two years ago this spring in Tanis’s arms.

“Why the beard?” He could swear once again that he heard Flint’s voice, the first words he had said upon seeing the half-elf in the road. “You were ugly enough...”

Tanis smiled and scratched the beard that no elf on Krynn could grow, the beard that was the outward, visible sign of his half-human heritage. Flint knew well enough why the beard, Tanis thought, gazing fondly at the sun-warmed boulder. He knew me better than I knew myself. He knew of the chaos that raged inside my soul. He knew I had a lesson to learn.

“And I learned it,” Tanis whispered to the friend who was with him in spirit only. “I learned it, Flint. But... oh, it was bitter!”

The smell of wood smoke came to Tanis. That and the slanting rays of the sun and the chill in the spring air reminded him he still had some distance to travel. Turning, Tanis Half-Elven looked down into the valley where he had spent the bittersweet years of his young manhood. Turning, Tanis Half-Elven looked down upon Solace.

It had been autumn when he last saw the small town. The vallenwood trees in the valley had been ablaze with the season’s colors, the brilliant reds and golds fading into the purple of the peaks of the Kharolis mountains beyond, the deep azure of the sky mirrored in the still waters of Crystalmir Lake. There had been a haze of smoke over the valley, the smoke of home fires burning in the peaceful town that had once roosted in the vallenwood trees like contented birds. He and Flint had watched the lights flicker on, one by one, in the houses that sheltered among the leaves of the huge trees. Solace—tree city—one of the beauties and wonders of Krynn.

For a moment, Tanis saw the vision in his mind’s eye as clearly as he had seen it two years before. Then the vision faded. Then it had been autumn. Now it was spring. The smoke was there still, the smoke of the home fires. But now it came mostly from houses built on the ground. There was the green of living, growing things, but it only seemed—in Tanis’s mind—to emphasize the black scars upon the land; scars that could never be totally erased, though here and there he saw the marks of the plow across them.

Tanis shook his head. Everyone thought that, with the destruction of the Queen’s foul temple at Neraka, the war was over. Everyone was anxious to plow over the black and burned land, scorched by dragonfire, and forget their pain.