Krynn in the NEW New Age

 Finished Dragons of the Vanished Moon by Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis in the comfort of my own recliner this afternoon. 

One thing I found myself pondering, and unless they release another Annotated version, I'll likely never know, is if this on is again drawing from Mr. Hickman's Mormon root and giving us a parable of maybe Revelation. 

As we found out at the end of the last volume, The One God is really Takhisis, who used the reshaping of the D&D multiverse at the end of 2nd Edition to move it somewhere else, right around the time Chaos got banished. 

We open on Mina and her Queen sort of killing Palin and Dalamar. Sort of, because their spirits remain attached to the bodies, which now amble around. Tasslehoff and Conundrum manage to use the Device of Time Journeying to go back, and wind up in Krynn's actual past, meeting such folks as Huma, before winding up in Sanction after Raistlin's arrival, and then springing forward. We find out this is a plot by both the soul of Raistlin himself and the missing 20 Gods currently trying to figure out where Krynn ran off to. 

And it gets ugly. Malys, the great red dragon over;lord dies, the Qualinesti and Silvanesti join together, just in time for the minotaurs to invade Silvaneti territory...Tasslehoff, ends up grabbing Odylia and Gerard and taking them to where the dragons of good are trapped, freeing them in time to save the elves from destruction by Ogre. 

And then, in Sanction we watch how the old Gods return yet again and the fates thereof.

There is one main trilogy that follows this one (I ordered copies, but they aren't here yet), and it was insteresting how many of the problems in there are foreshadowed here. Galdar tries to get Mina to see the people worship and love her, not Takhisis. Similar problems arise in the next trilogy. 

I remembered more or less how this one ended, but there's a hell of a lot of pathos and tragedy in the closing moments. A much better read than what I remember.

Oh, so that's what's going on.

 Finished Dragons of a Lost Star (book 2 of the War of Souls trilogy) today, and it's improved over my memory of my last reading of it. 

We open on the great green dragon Beryl attacking the Citadel of Light, where Palin and Tasslehoff wind up walking off the silver staircase and somehow ending up in Dalamar's tower, which had been in Palanthis, but now floats around Wayreth. (Don't ask. Krynn's physics are nuts.) Palin and Dalamar want Tasslehoff to go back and get stepped on. Tasslehoff doesn't like this, and escapes through a chimney.

Mina and her army are on the move, and taking over Solamnic strongholds. 

Qualinesti falls, but takes Beryl with it. 

Goldmoon, following a river of the dead (who are sucking everyone's magic), winds up in Solanthus, the meeting her former pupil Mina at Dalamar's tower, where (spoiler alert for a 2 decade old book) we find out the One God of Mina is actually Takhesis. 

Now the fun part here is, having read this when it came out, I noticed all the lovely foreshadowing on this read through, which made me very happy. Doesn't change that the timeline on Krynn is FUBAR.

Krynn in the new age

 As a bit of explanation, spent the past week moving, which has curtailed my time to do things, like write reviews on here. 

Dragons of a Fallen Sun picks up roughly 30 years after Dragons of the Summer Flame, in what was referred to as the Fifth Age. (As I gather, the sales of this era were horrid. That they introduced a whole new set of rules to accompany the setting following the departure of the Gods didn't help.)We open on a bit of setting, as we learn the Knights of Neraka (formerly the Knights of Takhesis) now occupy a bunch of land that used to belong to the "good" races, while the Solamnic Knights now occupy some of the "bad areas". Silvanesti is under a magical dome, Qualinesti is occupied. Into this, Tasslehoff Burrfoot (last seen dying under the heel of Chaos [or sitting by a forge with Flint in the afterlife]) warps in, having used the Device of Time Travel to come forward for Caramon's funeral. 

Which, along with the appearance of Mina (think Joan d'Arc, with a shaved head and amber eyes and healing unseen in the Fifth Age) sets the plot in motion. Mina starts by taking over a division of Knights in the name of the One True God, and leads them on a few really campaigns to take ground the Knights of Neraka have coveted, gaining converts among everyone she encounters, including Silvanoshi, King of Silvanost, son of Porthos and Alhana. 

In the mean time, Tasslehoff is running around finding the survivors of the War of the Lance, including Goldmoon, Laurana, and Jenna. (Palin, son of Caramon, accompanies him, as does Solamnic Gerard.) With magic fading, Palin tries to the use the device to go back in time, only to find there is no past before Chaos was banished. 

Goldmoon has been restored to her youth. She's also beginning to find out the dead have not moved on, and indeed are eating magic. Beryl, a big dragon is coming to destroy everything. 

There's a lot more politicking in here than in previous volumes, and it's obvious that the authors have been writing together for a very long time. It's also fairly easy to construe this book, and really, the series as a whole as an apology for Summer Flame. Having last read this as it released, I know most of the surprises coming up later on, but I still found myself sucked back in wondering how this is all going to work out in the end. 

Really well written.