He walked out from beneath the oak trees and came to stand on the path that led back to Qualinesti. He looked into the sunlit, quivering leaves of the aspen trees of his childhood home.
“There are so many things I meant to teach you, Gilthas,” Tanis said softly, “so much I meant to tell you. So many things I meant to say....”
Dalamar rested his hand on Tanis’s shoulder. “You may not have said the words aloud, my friend. But I think your son heard you.”
Tanis turned away from Qualinesti, turned toward the path that led to darkness. He turned back to a house that, no matter how many people it held, would always be empty.
“Let's go,” he said.
Epilogue
A prospect of birds
in the cancelling winter,
first fables of prophets
and roses and swords,
Margaret believed in us all,
believed in our stories:
a patient astronomer
drawn by a gap in the sky
who knows from a thousand years' calculation
that the next star is coming
that all that remains
is the waiting and prayer
and the long tiring business
of notebook and telescope,
until the brightness
consumes the dark,
a brightness conceived
and cradled for centuries,
she can say this is something
I have always expected
this is the harvest of years
And then when she speaks the heavens
remember that she was the one bearing money
and flowers and trips to the city,
incandescence of fireworks
when we gathered in dozens on the summer nights
by the vanishing lake,
and most of all words
she brought us arrayed like galaxies into the forms of belief.
At home by the lake she began the story,
building word after difficult word
until in the telling the world appeared,
until in the waters the stars came down,
and all of the planets
the heavens encircle—
Chislev and Zivilyn,
Raistlin and Caramon,
Palin and Tanin,
Raoul and the little one,
the trining moons
that herald the tides of her magic,
all in the choir of her memory,
where the voice of love
moved on the water
and sang in attendance
as the story rose out
of the lake and the midnight,
the attar of roses
on the farthest shore,
and the winter reverted
to incredible spring
as it always reverts,
and the snow and the spirits
went where they wish
in the lands of belief
as the story begins again.