#battlements

Out of the village, out of the thatched and clutching shires,

Out of the grave and furrow, furrow and grave,

Where his sword first tried

The last cruel dances of childhood, and awoke to the shires

Forever retreating, his greatness a marshfire,

The banked flight of the Kingfisher always above him,

Now Huma walked upon the Roses,

In the level Light of the Rose.

And troubled by Dragons, he turned to the end of the land,

To the fringe of all sense and senses,

To the Wilderness, where Paladine bade him to turn,

And there in the loud tunnel of knives

He grew in unblemished violence, in yearning,

Stunned into himself by a deafening gauntlet of voices.

It was there and then that the White Stag found him,

At the end of a journey planned from the shores of Creation,

And all time staggered at the forest edge

Where Huma, haunted and starving,

Drew his bow, thanking the gods for their bounty and keeping,

Then saw, in the ranged wood,

In the first silence, the dazed heart's symbol,

The rack of antlers resplendent.

He lowered the bow and the world resumed.

Then Huma followed the Stag, its tangle of antlers receding

As a memory of young light, as the talons of birds ascending.

The Mountains crouched before them. Nothing would change now,

The three moons stopped in the sky,

And the long night tumbled in shadows.

It was morning when they reached the grove,

The lap of the mountain, where the Stag departed,

Nor did Huma follow, knowing the end of this journey

Was nothing but green and the promise of green that endured

In the eyes of the woman before him.

And holy the days he drew near her, holy the air

That carried his words of endearment, his forgotten songs,

And the rapt moons knelt on the Great Mountain.

Still, she eluded him, bright and retreating as marshfire,

Nameless and lovely, more lovely because she was nameless,

As they learned that the world, the dazzling shelves of the air,

The Wilderness itself

Were plain and diminished things to the heart's thicket.

At the end of the days, she told him her secret.

For she was not of woman, nor was she mortal,

But the daughter and heiress from a line of Dragons.

For Huma the sky turned indifferent, cluttered by moons,

The brief life of the grass mocked him, mocked his fathers,

And the thorned light bristled on the gliding Mountain.

But nameless she tendered a hope not in her keeping,

That Paladine only might answer, that through his enduring wisdom

She might step from forever, and there in the silver arms

The promise of the grove might rise and flourish.

For that wisdom Huma prayed, and the Stag returned,

And east, through the desolate fields, through ash,

Through cinders and blood, the harvest of dragons,

Traveled Huma, cradled by dreams of the Silver Dragon,

The Stag perpetual, a signal before him.

At last the eventual harbor, a temple so far to the east

That it lay where the east was ending.

There Paladine appeared

In a pool of stars and glory, announcing

That of all choices, one most terrible had fallen to Huma.

For Paladine know that the heart is a nest of yearnings,

That we can travel forever toward light, becoming

What we can never be.

For the bride of Huma could step into the devouring sun,

Together they would return to the thatched shires

And leave behind the secret of the Lance, the world

Unpeopled in darkness, wed to the dragons.

Or Huma could take on the Dragonlance, cleansing all Krynn

Of death and invasion, of the green paths of his love.

The hardest of choices, Huma remembered

How the Wilderness cloistered and baptized his first thoughts

Beneath the sheltering sun, and now

As the black moon wheeled and pivoted, drawing the air

And the substance from Krynn, from the things of Krynn,

From the grove, from the Mountain, from the abandoned shires,

He would sleep, he would send it all away,

For the choosing was all of the pain, and the choices

Were heat on the hand when the arm has been severed.

But she came to him, weeping and luminous,

In the landscape of dreams, where he saw

The world collapse and renew on the glint of the Lance.

In her farewell lay collapse and renewal.

Through his doomed veins the horizon burst.

He took up the Dragonlance, he took up the story,

The pale heat rushed through his rising arm

And the sun and the three moons, waiting for wonders,

Hung in the sky together.

To the West Huma rode, to the High Clerist's Tower

On the back of the Silver Dragon,

And the park of their flight crossed over a desolate country

Where the dead walked only, mouthing the names of dragons.

And the men in the Tower, surrounded and riddled by dragons,

By the cries of the dying, the roar in the ravenous air,

Awaited the unspeakable silence,

Awaited far worse, in fear that the crash of the senses

Would end in a moment of nothing

Where the mind lies down with its losses and darkness.

But the winding of Huma's horn in the distance

Danced in the battlements. All of Solamnia lifted

Its face to the eastern sky, and the dragons

Wheeled to the highest air, believing

Some terrible change had come.

From out of their tumult of wings, out of the chaos of dragons,

Out of the heart of morning, 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.

The fortress stood like an old sentinel guarding the secrets of a bygone era, its stone walls weathered but unyielding under the relentless siege of rain. The waters lapped at its foundations with the indifference of time itself, teasing at the thought of erosion—the final surrender of man's creation to the whims of nature.

It was a gray morning, the sky and the lake one continuous canvas of melancholic hues. The rain fell in steady, vertical lines, as if trying to stitch the fortress back to the earth from which it had once defiantly risen. Within this curtain of rain, not a soul stirred. It was as though life had forsaken this place, leaving it to its silent vigil.

No flags adorned the battlements, no sentries peered into the gloomy distance. The only movement came from the wind's whisper through the crenellated towers, an eerie mimicry of hushed conversations long since faded into the mists of time. This stronghold, once resonant with the clamor of armored feet and the ring of steel, now hosted only the soft symphony of raindrops against stone.

In moments like these, the fortress did not seem real, more a rendering from a poet's dream than a relic of the physical world. It begged for tales of gallant knights and lost loves, of epic battles and sacred oaths sworn upon its now silent halls. The rain, indifferent to human sentiment, continued to fall, painting everything with the sheen of forgotten days.

Stitching the Standard by Edmund Blair Leighton

The painting depicts a nameless damsel on the battlements of a medieval castle making the finishing touches to a standard or pennant with a black eagle on a gold background. In a time of peace the woman has taken her needlework into the daylight away from the bustle of the castle.