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 sooth shy;ing 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 alpha shy;bet 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 alarm shy;ing 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 empti shy;ness of the Abyss, the legends of Istar will claim that all evil is banished forever-that 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 sil shy;ver 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 thou shy;sand 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 histori shy;ans 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 dete shy;riorated into glittering dust.