The Dark Queen

Dragonlance - Villains 6 - The Dark Queen Williams, Michael

For all those who bring their visions to us through music, and most especially the singers
of hope, faith, and love.

Many people have helped enrich the making of this book: We would like to thank Mort Morss
and David Kirchoff for valuable information regarding opals, and for their even more
valuable friendships. John and Annette Rice provided a wealth of horticultural knowledge,
especially regarding desert and mountain foliage. We thank them for their expertise, and
for Sunday afternoons in their home and greenhouse. Sam and Debbie Vaughn shared their
extensive knowledge of hawks and other birds of prey. Debbie's red-tailed hawk, Lucas, is
the real-life character upon which Larken's hawk is based. Debbie is a Licensed General
Falconer, skilled in an art that has adhered to rigorously defined rules and regulations
since medieval times. Falconry is highly dangerous for the uninstructed: we strongly urge
interested parties to consult the North American Falconers Association. We thank our
friend Carla V for her artisf s skill and eye, and her wonderful photos. Finally, we'd
like to thank Jim DeLong for his support, prayers, and perspective during the long months
of writing and revising. Jim, you're a happenin' guy, and it's a blessing to know you.

Thunder rumbled through the tower's polished opal windows and rattled their thin frames
like a Namer's medicine stick. An answer of lightning flickered over the dry white plains
north of the city. Already, sweeping rain fell upon the far port of Karthay and on the
bay-side forests toward the harbors of Istar. Here in the city, above the Kingpriest's
Tower, the afternoon sky grew sullen and tense, and the brilliant gemstone windowpanes
darkened to a deep blue.

From his tower window, opened to the fresh and rising wind, the white-robed man could tell
by the sharp scent and expectancy of moisture in the air and the racing, tumbling black
clouds that the storm was moving swiftly. He turned to his lectern, to the frail ancient
volume that lay open beneath an unlit, solitary green candle, and the new volume, half
copied, beside it. The room dimmed suddenly, and a strong breeze threatened the lacy pages
as they lifted violently under its force. Furtively, he closed the window and lit the
candle. His moss-green eyes sought the tilt of the door, and he assured himself that it
was still bolted. The book was volatile: a collection of druidic prophecies that had been
hidden by the most capable of the Lucanesti elves for over a millennium. It had been
brought to Istar secretly during the collapse of northern Silvanesti, kept in the recesses
of a vintner's private library for years.

The Kingpriest forbade possession of this old, crumbling book and others like it. Copying
it promised certain imprisonment, or even worse, for these were the most forbidding of
times. The second year in the Edict of Thought Control. Outside, the air crackled, and
brown pigeons took sudden wing from the garden's pavement. The rainstorm drew closer. It
soon would hover and crash over the city, washing the dusty stone streets and the brick
alleys, drenching cart and pedestrian, awning and booth/from the sentries on the northern
walls to the longshoremen at the southern piers. Moving south, the man thought. To hover
for some time over the lake, before the mountains would catch and stifle it. The plains
and the desert beyond them would again be cheated of the soothing touch of water. No rain
for them this time. Perhaps not for months, or years. Lightning flickered again over the
northern sky, tracing a final, ragged white line between the gray-blue clouds, like a deep
flaw in a dark gem. The man shuddered and returned to the old book. In the shadowy room,
he began to copy, translating the weblike, interlacing lines of the ancient elven alphabet
into a more legible common text, re-forming the prophecy he had copied through the night,
a text that had come down to alarming events, to an alarming passage.

He dipped his quill into the ink and cocked his hand. “In that time of the world,” he
wrote, "when the dark gods are still imprisoned in the vast emptiness of the Abyss, the
legends of Istar will claim that all evil is banished foreverthat a universal tide of
goodness and light has swept across the continent at the coronation of the Kingpriest. All
civilized Krynn, the legends will say, stands at the threshold of a silver age, an age of
celebration and song, and the softer music of law and ritual.

“It will be the Age of Istar, they say, which a thousand years of histories will praise
and exalt. ”The legends, of course, are wrong. “Wrong about the law, the celebration, the
ritual and song. Wrong about the age itself, which historians will remember as the Age of
Darkness....”

The man looked up from the book and massaged his temples. Half of the next page lay
crumbled into bits, fallen away because of ill-treatment and the book's antiquity. Though
he had reconstructed these very pages with care and skill and druidic magic, some passages
were irretrievable, the pages on which they had been written either missing or
deteriorated into glittering dust. Dust. Like most of the Lucanesti themselves. The book
was as mysterious as the elves who had penned it. Holding his breath, he turned the
fragmented page. Even so, scraps of vellum, light as dust motes, shook loose and hovered
above the book, rising in the heat of the candle.

So as not to further disturb the fragile, precious pages, he raised his thick sleeve very
slowly and exhaled into it, then read on: “... were wrong about the gods. True, the great
lance of the hero Huma will strike a near-mortal blow against the Dark Queen...”

Silently, the reader marveled. Huma's heroism, a thousand years in the past, lay in the
future for the ancient writer. This book was over a millennium old. And yet it now read
like news of tomorrow. "This queen, Takhisis of the Many Names, he will banish to the
Abyss, where she and her barbarous minions will wait and brood in a sunless chasm, far
from the warm and living world they desire to influence and rule.

“To reclaim her power, it would take ...” The man swore a mild, silent oath. The text
broke off again, the sides of the ancient page lost forever, and words of the prophecy
with them. But perhaps a more powerful spell, he mused. Perhaps I can still reconstruct...
But that would have to wait until the others left for the service. Too noisy for now. With
a shrug, he picked up where the text continued.

"... that forms her body from the dust of the planet, restores her entry into the
disheartened world. But until that time there will be other ways faceted, more regularto
enter for a moment, for an hour, though the stay is brief and tantalizing in its brevity.

"Lightning is one way, and the powerful surge of flowing water another. For a
timesometimes a minute, sometimes an hourthe goddess will be able to channel her spark and
spirit into a blinding flash in the western sky or the tumble of waters in the dark
Thon-Thalas. For that brief and glorious breath, the world will spread before her, green
and vulnerable in all its prospect...

“And then it will vanish, and what remains for her is Abthalom, her prison in the dark,
shrieking swirls of the Abyss. ”Then, on one desert night, well into the reign of the last
Kingpriest, the change will begin unexpectedly.

“Will begin like this. ”Reveling in a thunderstorm, riding the jagged lightning over the
red mesa south of Istar, Takhisis will watch and exult as the black desert lies exposed to
fire and power, and sudden torrential rains the first in three years, the last ever in the
Istarian desertbatter the desolate salt flats at the foot of the Red Plateau. When the
lightning strikes the stand of black crystals she will scarcely notice, until the storm
subsides and she finds herself hovering, a tiny spark in the heart of a glittering shard.
“How she will remain there, how she can linger, is a mystery unknown to druid or priest.
And yet, by this peculiar accident, she will find a way back to the world. ”Oh, yes, the
form she takes will be brittle. When she molds her new body into the shape of a snake, of
a jackalfinally a womanit will be a full year before she learns the art, before she can
take shape without breaking or crumbling. Even after that, her stays will be short-lived,
for without notice her crystalline flesh will crumble to salt, to sand, to dust, and she
will be forced back to Abthalom againback to the swirling darkness. “To await a housing
more amorphous. A home borne of water and slow time and the incantation of a powerful
priest.” The man lifted his eyes from the book. Water and slow time? Incantations? Not
enough to piece together the puzzle of this prophecy. But the crystals. He could learn
more of the crystals. He bent over the book, reading again. “But after a dozen years,
Takhisis will achieve a foothold of sorts in her old, accustomed haunts. She will dwell in
the crystals for days, sometimes for weeks, a malign, animate spark that shapes the
glittering stones to whatever form or guise takes her fancy. ”As a woman, as a warrior, as
a viper or dragon, she can be all but indistinguishable from flesh and scale and blood.
Beware her footprints. The massive weight of a waterless body will make them too deep for
her size. And so, in those regions of Ansalon where sand and salt and crystal abound, the
Dark Queen will begin to thrive and flourish.

“She will stop revolts and start them, depose a king and set a duke of her liking in his
place. She will misdirect caravans across the Istarian desert so that all who travel with
them die of exposure and thirst. ”She cannot remain, cannot establish herself, but her new
presence will be stronger and remain longer than it ever has in lightning and dreams.
Slowly she will regain her influence in Ergoth, in Thoradin, in the court of the
Kingpriest at Istar."

The man's eyebrow raised. She would be coming here. Why not? He had secretly expected it.
Quickly he mined his memoryof rain, of the Istarian desert, of the last downpour by the
Red Plateau. Could it really have been twenty years? She might already be here. With a
rising apprehension, he turned the page. “Takhisis will guard her newfound power
jealously, but there will be other gods in the Abyss, just as eager to enter the world
arid turn the tide of history to their liking.” A sharp rap on the door startled the man.
With a desperate, reflexive lurch he slammed the fragile book shut and hid it beneath his
austere, blanketed cot. “I am surprised,” he marveled bleakly. “How remarkable.” Inwardly
he cringed at the damage he had surely done to the delicate volume. The lad at the door
stood stooped and deferential, apologetic. After a barrage of the boy's tedious and
lengthy explanations and many obeisant hand gestures, the man longed for the other servant
the voiceless one. “The Kingpriest,” the boy finally said, steepling his hands, his eyes
cast to the floor, “requests the pleasure of your company.” The man nodded, snuffed the
green candle, and followed the lad from the room. As they walked down the cool torchlit
corridor, toward the Council Hall and the great and ever-pressing business of state,
another roll of thunder sounded high above the city, the smell of ozone pressed into the
man's nostrils, and the first wave of rain washed over the harbor.

The Lady shriekeda shriek that would echo for a century in the Abyss where she hovered on
the dark airless currents of chaos. Takhisis furiously snapped her wings and shut her eyes
against the vision unfolding before her. Where had this warrior come from? How had he
escaped her notice?

She had to know. And so, raging, she looked again at the man certain to thwart her plans
to enter the world in a shape that was her own and would hold its boundaries amid the
physics of Krynn. He was a tall Plainsman, with unusual sky-blue, no, sea-blue eyes that
stared past the flaming walls of her coveted Istar. His face was windburnt and ruddy, with
a thick stubble of red beard unusual among his people. He wore a massive golden tore,
inlaid with black glain opals, its ends knobbed and twisted at his throat. The opals. So
he was protected.

Takhisis guessed him to be about thirty by the faint lines on his handsome, tanned face,
by the fine lacing of silver in his auburn hair. He stood at the gates of a city in
flames. The Kingpriest's Tower burned gloriously, its sovereign dead, its swarm of clergy
defeated and scat- tered like pigs . . .

Except for one. One white-robed figure held his hands aloft in exultation. She could not
see the lone cleric's face, but for a moment a hot wind billowed back his sleeves and
exposed the red oak leaf tattoo on his left wrist. Druid. They were always there to vex
her.

Then the vision wavered, brushed by the dark wings of another god. Takhisis whirled in the
blackness of the Abyss, her enemy a faint glimmer at the edge of sight. Already too far
away to follow, to punish. Speed of a god. But now all of themthe druid, the warrior, the
Plainsmen armyfaded from view as black fire washed over her vision. Takhisis shook with
another angry scream, but continued to watch as the Plainsman moved into her sight again,
his eyes still cool and distant. Now he walked through the burning portals of Istar, to
seize possession of all that lay before him. And beyond him. From the way he moved, the
sweep of his massive hand, Takhisis knew this man had never seen a defeat, never cried one
tear in the humiliation of surrender. And then, in the Dark Lady's vision, the shifting
blue of those confident eyes turned and fastened on her, and for the first time since the
Dragon Wars, since the Great Lance had banished her to this swirling nothingness, she felt
the claws of fear rake her heart. Locked in his stare as the scene dissolved, Takhisis
spun in a slow circle, realizing that if she could not destroy him in time his rebel
armies would lift her hard-wrought chains from all of Ansalon. This Plainsman would
destroy her long and tedious work with the Kingpriest of Istar: her quiet, narcotic
presence in the cleric's dreams, the controlled feeding of her plans into his sleeping
mind. The Kingpriest was more powerful than Takhisis had imagined. More learned in lore
and godcraft than any mortal in the history of this world. He had barred all the gods from
the face of Krynnall of them, from high Paladine to low Hiddukel, from Zeboim of the seas
to the three lunar children. They could return only fitfully, brieflyfaint flickerings in
rock crystal, in spindrift, at the blazing edge of meteors, or in the latticework of ice.
Then, when the light faded, the meteor cooled or the snow melted, their worldly stay was
over, and they returned to Concordant Opposition, to the Ethereal Plane. To Abthalom, the
Abyss, where they shrieked and glided and waited to return. But the Kingpriest was mortal.
He could not last for long beneath the weight of his own momentous spellcraft. To bind a
god is exhausting work, Takhisis thought with a chuckle. They would find him, sooner or
later, gibbering in his tower. Then it would rain fire, and the gods would return. But if
Takhisis had her way, they would return to find her already in power. They would find her
fully enthroned amid her darkest minions, and even the gods would bow to her magnificence.
Already, through her insinuations, the Kingpriest had banished the magic-users, the elves,
all bards, and every unorthodox scholar. Philanthropists and intellectuals had been
stripped of power and riches, then sold into slavery to the mob of priests who swarmed
through the Kingpriest's Tower, seeking favors, preferment, and bribes. The Lucanesti
elves, or what was left of them, the Kingpriest had imprisoned in the opal mines beneath
the city, where they slaved to gather more of the fabled glain amid the rising rubble and
dust of thirty years' labor. Next to the Kingpriest, theirs was the most important service
to her. For the black glain opals were the key to the goddess's intricate plot. She had
tried to enter the glain opal once. The gem was filled with moisture, a stony blood that
would nourish and sustain her indefinitely in hostile Krynn. Godsblood, the Lucanesti
miners called it. She could only imagine the power, the havoc. She would be loose upon
Krynn, were there a way to inhabit the stone ... So in a thunderstorm Takhisis had tried
to enter the gem, but the flat black opacity blocked and scat- tered her energy and light.
Shrieking in pain and anger, spread to the eight corners of the air in an explosion of
fragmented light, the goddess regath-ered, tried again. Was shattered again. The stone was
impermeable, proof against her priest-bound energies. But if the smooth, flawless stone
were broken . . .

The moisture within it would house her a thousand years. Godsblood indeed. That, too, she
would put into the hands of the pliable Kingpriest. Thirty years in the forming had been
Takhisis's plans. Three decades as she drew closer and painfully closer to the moment when
disastrous, irretrievable eventsCataclysmic events, she thought, with a sinister
smilewould rise amazingly out of the Kingpriest's droning, everyday pol- icy. It had taken
that long to push the city, the continent, the very matter of the world to the edge of a
precipice lovely and sheer. Now she was only five years away, six at most, from that
moment when some regular rite or cere- monya few words changed, along with a powerful
magic, and most of all, a fostered, vaunting pridewould collapse the city, the government,
the empire, and rend asunder the face of Krynn. It would be a summoning ritual that would
seem harmless and ordinary, perhaps even beneficent to all the clergy by then. But in it,
the Kingpriest would chant words that, ten years earlier, he would have found blasphemous,
abominable. He would breathe into the dust of a thousand stones, seeking his dream, his
shadow. So that her spirit might move freely in the world long denied her, he would shape
her a body from the watery glain dust. And she would be homeon the throne of Krynn, as
Istar fell and the world was renewed in chaos. But all of this would fail, be grievously
delayed at best, if the rebels prospered. There Would be no compliant Kingpriest if this
bearded Plainsman ever saw his campaign through. Perhaps no Cataclysm. How could she have
missed him! Her dark wings fanned the liquid void of the Abyss. Light rushed at her
suddenly, as great gaps in the fabric of her prison plane opened briefly, tanta-lizingly
on the bright world that Huma and the gods had denied her, and mountains, seas, and
deserts rolled under her cold eye. “There is great power in knowledge, great freedom,”
Takhisis whispered to herself. Her dark heart yet full of fear, she composed her vast mind
to call forth the broken pieces of the Plainsman's history, for in his past, she thought,
lay her best weapons against this horrifying future. The black wind congealed and wavered,
and Takhisis spread her wings and rested on its thrumming current. Scanning the past,
searching for the key to this mystery, she saw ... . Nothing. His past had been erased.
Sargonnas again. Oh, she knew the power behind such veil and vanishment. Quickly the
goddess glanced around, her brilliant black eyes flickering over the gloom, the void.
Scavenging wings circled at the edge of sight, and a mocking laughter rose from the
darkness. Sargonnas. He wanted to be first as well. But he was a buzzing insect to her,
insidious vermin in the barren night. Takhisis would treat with him later. This
red-bearded rebel was more immediate, perhaps more dangerous. The Plainsman was a hunter,
no doubt. They all were. And a fighterÇlse why the great threat to her plans? But there
was more. There had to be more. The past denied her, Takhisis rummaged the present of her
new adversary. Scenes of a bright and relentless desert rushed at her. Twice more she
brushed away the obscuring wings of Sargonnas. When she bellowed, the rebellious god drew
back, tucked into the safety of the void. She had not even discovered his name. Not yet.
She knew he had some kind of power with words. He spoke, and then the tribe moved, always
finding the water they needed in their desert travels. She had watched him as he grew
older and changed, his words taking on the colors of war, and his adoptive people
gathering to make armies of men who respected him and women who not so secretly wanted
him. His enemiesgoblin and ogre, Solam-nic and Istarianfell before him by the thousands.
At the end of every battle, there was a new song sung about this hero. A small blond
singer stood ever at his side, unkempt, her beauty masked by dry wind and miles of

travel, a shallow flat drum in her hand and a hawk upon her thin arm. Her features were
those of the Plainsmenthe high cheekbones, the deep brown eyes with their intelligent
fire. Though she was lithe and long-limbed and gracefully formed, she was rough and
awkward in movement, as though unaccustomed to the rule of her own body.

She was small, almost elven, and the white-blond hair was odd, freakish among the dark
Que-Nara. She was the kind of child they would, during the Age of Dreams, have left
exposed to the elements and fates. At their most merciful, they would have left a child
such as she with sedentary villagers, where she would live life as a changeling, an
oddity, in a humdrum farming hamlet where no one would ever look at her anyway.

But this one was different. Imilus, they called her kind“gifted outlander.” She traveled
with the Que-Nara, singing the old songs of their legends, inventing new songs as the
stories passed into myth. There was power in her voice; she could be formidable ...

Takhisis's laughter rumbled viciously in the dark void. There was history between these
two, the hero and the outlander, a subtle energy that surrounded them, creating a space, a
distance. The Plainsman ignored the girl's worship and spoke to her sel- domly, foregoing
a place beside her at the nightly fires to watch and patrol with his warriors. Occa-
sionally, he even took other women, indifferent to her obvious heartbreak. More often he
spoke to and fought alongside another: a small Lucanesti male, with the dark braided hair
and mottled, opalescent skin of his kind. This elf was ropy and flexible, a sinewy
specimen who would never tend toward extra weight. He wore the leggings and tunic of the
Que-Nara, yet his overshirt spoke of his own peopledark blue to ' match the height of the
sky, or brown to match the depth of the desert, depending on how you looked at the
garment, which way the light caught it. Another outsider, this elf. And more interesting.
Takhisis chuckled, and the darkness shivered and tilted. The elf fought without spear or
throwing knife or kala. Hands and feet alone were his weaponry all the protection he
thought he would ever need. Takhisis sighed in relief as the images of these three
continued to flicker and dance in the darkness of the Abyss. The opals protected them all,
proof against her magicthe tore of the Plainsman, the skin of the elf. Nonetheless, all of
them were outlandersall treading a very narrow path of acceptance and power in this tribe
of clannish, superstitious people. An easy structure to alter, to invade, to break. The
pieces of her plan were coming together. Ah... my fragile, pretty singer, Takhisis cooed
to the light-haired girl, your song of Istar's fall at your beloved's hand will never be
sung. For he cannot outrun me, the little man cannot resist me, and you ... I will shatter
your song like glass. The elf would be easy. Revenge must be what he was after, revenge
and freedom for his hostage people. So it always was for the Lucanesti. In the intricate
world of elves, oppression had made them simple, binding them, freeborn and slave alike.
She could not destroy them herselfthe opalescence of their skin and blood saw to that. But
again and again, the Kingpriest was useful. His mines were filled with the Lucanesti,
digging and dying. Takhisis turned in the great void and laughed low and sweetly. A slight
echo of her uncertainty still rang in her ears. She rode the warm, swirling nightwinds of
the Abyss through darkness on dark- ness, darkness layering darkness until those places
where light had fled entirely seemed hazy, almost pale compared to the kind of darkness
that surrounded thema gloom of the spirit. Arcing outward in the perpetual blackness,
fluttering her pennons, she dropped straight down ten thousand fathoms, plummeting,
falling, dreaming, until at length she floated amid a wild, universal hubbub of stunning
sounds, a cloud of confused, disembodied voices, drifting through the hollow

dark. Through that negative plane of terror and chaos, borne on the nightwinds that
whirled about her, buoying and buffeting her, indifferent to the continual whining and
whirring of voices at the edge of nothingness, murmured the hysterical gnatsong of the
damned. She spread her wings and turned in a hot dry thermal, rising to the lip of the
Abyss, to the glazed and dividing firmament beyond which she could not travel. It looked
forbidding, mysterious, like thick ice on a bottomless pool. Like the black face of the
raw glain opal. There, in the heart of nothing, Takhisis banked and glided, aloft on the
current of her own dark strategies.

*****

Behind her another shadow glided relentlessly at a safe distance, its own black wings
extended like those of a giant scavenger, an enormous predatory bird. Takhisis's consort,
Sargonnas, banished into the Abyss along with his powerful mistress, had hidden in the
deepest shadows to observe the same vision billowing out of the darkness. He saw the same
burning city, the collapsing tower, and the elf and the girl and the blue-eyed man whom
they followed.