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.
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