EUROPEAN HEADQUARTERS Wizards of the Coast. Belgium P.B.2031 2600 Berchem BelgiumTel. +32-70-23-32-77Visit our web-site at Yet how shall we judge by counting the lives. By the size of the field? All these are but symbols: The desperate deed the blaze of blasters, are ever held up Yet all axework still to the courage that stirs slowly facing the fears and the great awful dark the cold empty realmstill the hero comes inhabiting darkness. Uncertain that battle: and known least of all for breath's a deceiver, life's nightfall alone the battle by blood. mere columns of numbers? By the ships there to-gathered? true reckoning runs deeper. in hot haste enacted. the swift ship's firing, as the warrior's meed. must give pride of place in uncertain silence, of war's desolation of unknown inner spaces, uncharted, unhearted, and with his will conquers. and owning the silence. all unknown its ending: by him who has triumphed— and mocks its own victories: tells the truth of the battle.Helm's Saga, song iii, staves 480-498. Grawl.Chapter OneGabriel Connor stood in bright sunshine on the little hill, looking down the dusty single lane road that led down to the center of Tisane Island.You've come this far, he thought. Get it over with.He felt guilty about his own reluctance. He had been avoiding this visit for long enough. He shouldn't have to feel that going to see his family was a chore. Except this was his father, and Gabriel had not heard from his father in more than a year… and he was scared.In the days before his exile from the Concord, Gabriel would normally have taken a public transport—landed at Hughes Island, taken a Blue Sea Lines hopper to Stricken, and then a small "subsidized" hopper from Stricken across the straits to Tisane. But something about such a routing, enjoyable as Gabriel would have found it, made him nervous.
