Time of the Twins

“Raistlin?” said Tas, puzzled, glancing around. Then he understood. Crysania was going to Raistlin! Somehow, magically, he was calling to her and she was going to find him! Tasslehoff dashed out into the corridor of the Temple after Crysania. Surely, she would make Raistlin fix the device...

Once in the corridor, Tas glanced up and down and spotted Crysania quickly. But his heart nearly jumped out on the floor—she was running so swiftly she had nearly reached the end of the hall.

Making certain the broken pieces of the magical device were secure in his pouch, Tas ran grimly after Crysania, keeping her fluttering white robes in his sight for as long as possible.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t very long. She immediately vanished around a corner.

The kender ran as he had never run before, not even when the imagined terrors of Shoikan Grove had been chasing him. His topknot of hair streamed out behind him, his pouches The brilliant light still filled the corridor, illuminating the bodies of the dead and dying. Cracks gaped in the Temple walls, the ceiling sagged, dust choked the air. And within that light, Tas could still hear the voice, only now its lovely music had faded. It sounded harsh, shrill, and off-key.

“The gods come...”

Outside the great arena, running through Istar, Caramon fought his way through death-choked streets. Much like Crysania’s, his mind, too, heard Raistlin’s voice. But it was not calling to him. No, Caramon heard it as he had heard it in their mother’s womb, he heard the voice of his twin, the voice of the blood they shared.

And so Caramon paid no heed to the screams of the dying, or the pleas for help from those trapped beneath the wreckage. He paid no heed to what was happening around him. Buildings tumbled down practically on top of him, stones plummeted into the streets, narrowly missing him. His arms and upper body were soon bleeding from small, jagged cuts. His legs were gashed in a hundred places.

But he did not stop. He did not even feel the pain. Climbing over debris, lifting giant beams of wood and hurling them out of his way, Caramon slowly made his way through the dying streets of Istar to the Temple that gleamed in the sun before him. In his hand, he carried a bloodstained sword.

Tasslehoff followed Crysania down, down, down into the very bowels of the ground—or so it seemed to the kender. He hadn’t even known such places in the Temple existed, and he wondered how he had come to miss all these hidden staircases in his many ramblings. He wondered, too, how Crysania came to know of their existence. She passed through secret doors that were not visible even to Tas’s kender eyes.

The earthquake ended, the Temple shook a moment longer in horrified memory, then shivered and was still once more. Outside was death and chaos, but inside all was still and silent. It seemed to Tas as if everything in the world was holding its breath, waiting...

Down here—wherever here was—Tas saw little damage, perhaps because it was so far beneath the ground. Dust clouded the air, making it hard to breathe or see and occasionally a crack appeared in a wall, or a torch fell to the floor. But most of the torches were still in their sconces on the wall, still burning, casting an eerie glow in the drifting dust.

Crysania never paused or hesitated, but pressed on rapidly, though Tas soon lost all sense of direction or of where he was. He had managed to keep up with her fairly easily, but he was growing more and more tired and hoped that they would get to wherever they were going soon. His ribs hurt dreadfully. Each breath he drew burned like fire, and his legs felt like they must belong to a thick-legged, iron-shod dwarf.

He followed Crysania down another flight of marble stairs, forcing his aching muscles to keep moving. Once at the bottom, Tas looked up wearily and his heart rose for a change. They were in a dark, narrow hallway that ended, thankfully, in a wall, not another staircase!

Here, a single torch burned in a sconce above a darkened doorway.

With a glad cry, Crysania hurried through the doorway, van ishing into the darkness beyond.

“Of course!” Tas realized thankfully. “Raistlin’s laboratory! It must be down here.”

Hurrying forward, he was very near the door when a great, dark shape bore down on him from him behind, tripping him. Tas tumbled to the floor, the pain in his ribs making him catch his breath.

Looking up, fighting the pain, the kender saw the flash of golden armor and the torchlight glisten upon the blade of a sword. He recognized the man’s bronze, muscular body, but the man’s face—the face that should have been so familiar—was the face of someone Tas had never seen before.

“Caramon?” he whispered as the man surged past him. But Caramon neither saw him nor heard him. Frantically, Tas tried to stand up.

Then the aftershock hit and the ground rocked out from beneath Tas’s feet. Lurching back against a wall, he heard a cracking sound above him and saw the ceiling start to give way.