Author: Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
Published: July 1985

This book is in many ways the Empire Strikes Back of the Dragonlance trilogy: an emotional roller-coaster where the heroes gain the abilities they’ll need to defeat the Big Bads in the final segment, but suffer great losses and setbacks in the process, and it ends on a note that’s dark but not hopeless. And like Empire, I seem to recall that it was the best of the trilogy. Does it still hold up decades later, or am I remembering it more fondly than it deserves? Let’s dig in and find out.

As before, since the early Dragonlance books were TSR’s most culturally significant and financially successful novels, I’m going to spend extra time digging into this book piece by piece. I expect this will probably end up being rather longer than one of my usual posts. (Spoilers will abound, of course.)

Plot

To be honest, the plot here is kind of a mess. It starts slow, the characters split up into multiple separate groups, some of the things they do seem pointless, and they spend a fair amount of the story without much agency. That said, at least they’re not being dragged around by the noses by the gods like they were in the previous book, and the last third or so of the book really gets its shit together and tells a compelling story.

For this book, the authors were freed from the constraints of having to adapt the D&D modules beat-for-beat. You can see from the very first pages how that’s improved their ability to tell a story: there’s a dwarven poem quickly summarizing how they went dungeon-delving for a magical artifact (the events of the Dragons of Hope and Dragons of Desolation modules), and then we see the aftermath of their success where the heroes have to decide what to do next. It’s such a breath of fresh air after the long dungeon-crawling sequences of the previous book, since the authors get to focus on things that actually matter to the plot instead of trying to novelize a bunch of D&D sessions. The magical artifact they went searching for doesn’t end up making a damn bit of difference to the story, so the faster we can get that out of the way, the better.

We open in the dwarven kingdom of Thorbardin, where the heroes have bought safety for their ex-slave refugees by restoring an ancient dwarven artifact to its rightful owners. The prologue, where Tanis, Sturm, and Raistlin argue during the celebration, does a great job of foreshadowing some of the main character arcs. Tanis is fallible and vulnerable, with his near-incapacitation from claustrophobia representing how his self-control is slipping. In a small way, Sturm demonstrates his glory-seeking behaviour and willingness to die for the greater good. And Raistlin gets to be kind of a dick, which is appropriate enough for the book where he falls to the dark side.

The book’s opening hook isn’t much to speak of, though. Apparently the heroes want to head to the famous seaport of Tarsis, which nobody has heard from since the Cataclysm three hundred years ago, so that they can buy safe passage for the refugees to… hell, they don’t actually know where. Somewhere else with fewer dragon problems, I guess? Apparently the reason why nobody’s heard from Tarsis in three hundred years is that the mountain range which bisects this part of the continent has prevented communication between its east and west halves for centuries. Guys, we’ve got a perfectly good solution for that problem! It’s called a boat. Just sail around them! I find it hard to believe that nobody’s ever tried to sail down to Tarsis, a famous seaport, in the past three hundred years.

Frankly, it’s hard to care about the whole “let’s make arrangements for the refugees” plot. We’re here for an epic war between light and darkness, not finding a home for a few hundred farmers, so it feels like a make-work excuse to kick off the plot rather than something exciting or relevant. The refugees are already safe in Thorbardin, if not exactly comfortable, so it doesn’t even feel urgent. It’s such a relief when dragons start blowing shit up to get the heroes involved with the war again, but that won’t happen for another six chapters. Not a great way to start the book.

There’s lots of inter-character conflict from the very beginning. Are they doing the right thing by giving away the Hammer of Kharas, the magical artifact they recovered? What should they do with the refugees? Tanis and Laurana are having issues because he can’t admit his feelings for her and she thinks he’s being a cynical bastard. All this arguing and conflict would be grating and cost the characters a lot of sympathy if they weren’t able to put it aside and function as a well-oiled machine when danger arises. It doesn’t impact their competence, so the reader doesn’t get frustrated by it.

This whole section is full of foreboding: the heroes’ actions are known to the enemy, they’re short on hope, and they’re just trying to escape from the war instead of trying to do anything about it. It establishes an appropriately grim tone, but it would work better if it felt like it was going anywhere. And the heroes eventually discover that Tarsis has been landlocked ever since the Cataclysm, when tectonic upheavals caused the shoreline to retreat about 50 miles, so it turns out that this entire subplot has been completely pointless from the get-go.

The narrator then takes us aside to give us a brief history of Tarsis. The authors are still heavy-handedly trying to convince us that the gods nuking the entire the world was a rational response to the upper management of Istar getting uppity, and it’s still not convincing. Modern-day Tarsis is represented as godless, with repeated emphasis on the false beliefs of its people, and it’s a land of misrule where people have become insular and hostile in response to their misfortune. The part about them being bitter towards the Knights of Solamnia for centuries because they couldn’t save everyone from the Cataclysm is just… come on, folks. What are a bunch of knights supposed to do about a gigantic meteor destroying the continent? Wave their swords at it? It feels like an excuse for some contrived conflict.

Fortunately for our struggling plot, the dragonarmies choose the day the companions arrive in Tarsis to conquer the city. But… why? Looking at a map [1] and judging by what we’ve been told so far, it looks like Tarsis is an isolationist shithole in the middle of absolutely nowhere that’s no threat to their plans at all. Don’t they need this army up north, where the real fighting is? This city doesn’t seem to have any resources that anyone wants, and they haven’t been an economic or military powerhouse for a few hundred years, so why even bother?

This is another instance of something that bothered me in the first book and which I’ll probably be complaining about regularly: the dragonarmies feel less like real armies and more like an author-driven force that shows up out of nowhere sometimes to push the plot forward. Real armies have strategic goals they want to accomplish, but the dragonarmies’ goals just seem to be “take shit over and be evil,” and it’s not clear how what they’re doing furthers any objectives. Real armies have logistics, but here the dragonarmies seem to have just teleported past a hundred and fifty miles of barren plain without anyone noticing. We’re told almost nothing about the strength, disposition, or goals of the forces of evil, and the geography of Krynn is often quite vague, so we have no way to know how much of a threat they are in any given region at any given time.

The root cause of this problem is that fantasy authors always want to have epic Tolkien-style clashes of armies, but they don’t know the first thing about how war works. Tolkien had a huge amount of scholarly experience with ancient war and first-hand experience with modern war, so his logistics and tactics actually make a lot of sense. His many imitators tend to have armies that just teleport around, don’t need food or roads or wagons, and attack with tactics that belong in Hollywood movies rather than a real pre-modern setting. Curiously, though, Weis & Hickman will do a much better job with the second big army battle of this book… but we’ll cover that once we get there.

Anyhow, the heroes get arrested and there’s a courtroom scene where Sturm gets to demonstrate his nobility and compassion, contrasting it against the intolerance and suspicion of the Tarsian people. He then meets Alhana, a mysterious elven lady who turns out to be the Silvanesti princess, and they have a real “doomed love at first sight” moment.

No, thought Tanis sadly, the silver moon itself was not higher or farther out of Sturm’s reach.

But the red moon is no problem, right, Sturm? (Rimshot, mug to camera.)

Then the dragonarmies attack, everything goes to shit, and our heroes are split into two groups who won’t meet again for the rest of the book. This is rather a shame, I think. The more separate points of view you have, the harder it is to keep the book’s pace humming along because you keep having to switch between disconnected storylines, and when you have fewer characters in each group you have fewer opportunities for character-developing interactions. But then again, the sheer size of the group which the authors have assembled — thirteen characters, not counting the Knights! — means they didn’t really have a choice. At that point you have to either split them up, write some characters out of the story to get it back down to a manageable level, or accept that some characters are going to be forgotten about in the background.

The authors do the best job they could with it; when the group splits up, they devote lots of consecutive chapters to each group’s story instead of rapidly switching between them, which avoids killing the pacing too badly. I wish they’d ditched some non-essential characters, though. Goldmoon and Riverwind particularly stand out for having absolutely nothing to do and no role to play for the entire book, so I wish they’d been left behind.

The first group we follow (Tanis, Sturm, Caramon, Raistlin, Tika, Alhana, and the two useless baggages) head across the continent to the forest home of the Silvanesti elves, where the elven king thought it would be a great idea to use a dangerous magical artifact to defend his lands. Now he’s been trapped by it in a weird nightmare dream-state that’s making his fears bleed into the real-life forest, turning it dark and creepy. The whole “king using a magical glass orb that drives him crazy” shtick is another Tolkien-inspired shenanigan, but the details are different enough to make it feel like inspiration rather than pastiche. Silvanesti itself, with its bleeding trees and green mists, is a much better take on the “scary forest” trope than Darken Wood from the previous book. It quickly devolves into a surreal sequence of phantasmagoric horrors where each of the heroes has a dream in which they face their deepest insecurities, and most of them “die” gruesomely in the process.

I’m of two minds about this whole subplot. On the one hand, it’s full of good character moments, including one (Raistlin killing dream-Caramon) that continues to affect the plot for the rest of the book. On the other hand, it feels like nothing but character moments, since none of the heroes except Raistlin have any agency in the dream. We mostly just watch them wander around and suffer for a while until Raistlin clobbers the Big Bad at the end. Said villain is the ancient green dragon Cyan Bloodbane, who plays more of a role in the associated D&D module (Dragons of Dreams), but only makes a bland cameo appearance here and could easily have been written out of the plot without losing anything.

At least it’s a solid introduction to an important element of the rest of the novel’s plot: the dragon orbs, a set of magical artifacts that can control dragons. Seeing how badly things go wrong when the wielder isn’t able to control one sets up the stakes for the heroes’ two forthcoming attempts to use them, and it’s good to have macguffins that give the heroes clear goals to follow. Until now the dragonarmies have been invincible, so this book badly needed a way in which the heroes could make a difference instead of following their initial “run and hide” plan.

With the Silvanesti conflict done, we swap over to the group whose adventures will occupy most of the rest of the novel: Laurana, Gilthanas, Tasslehoff, Flint, Elistan, and some random Knights of Solamnia. Once again — hooray! — we start a section of the book by cutting out a long dungeon-crawl (the events of the Dragons of Ice module). It’s summarized by a poem told from the point of view of a bard from the tribal culture of the Icewall Glacier, where they’ve gone to seek another dragon orb. Many scenes of pointless ass-kicking of walrus-men are avoided, and they even kill a Dragon Highlord off-screen. Not only is none of that terribly relevant to the main plot, but it shows the reader that Krynn has other cultures who perceive the heroes in a unique way.

The action picks up with the party taking their newly looted dragon orb by ship from Icewall to Ergoth, the western islands where the refugee elven nations have established their governments-in-exile. I have to call out the great world-building in this section. The Silvanesti and Qualinesti have basically colonized the lands of the indigenous wild elves, the Kagonesti. They’re on the brink of war with each other, they’re angry at the humans, and they don’t give a shit about the Kagonesti, so everything is a simmering powder keg of potential conflict. It shows that some problems on Krynn are way bigger than the heroes, something they have to survive instead of something they can solve while they breeze through, and it’s all deeply rooted in the history of the setting.

It’s a great depiction of colonialism. Even the friendliest of the Silvanesti and Qualinesti elves don’t make any effort to understand or empathize with the Kagonesti; they just use them and ignore them as if they’re beneath notice, effectively enslaving them and making their traditional way of life impossible. It’s a big change from the gully dwarves of the first book — the Kagonesti are treated with compassion by both the heroes and the narrator, so it’s only the other elves who think they’re degenerate barbarians. They’re an object of pity rather than the butt of a joke, which is so much more compelling.

It also sets up a thorny situation which the heroes can’t resolve with violence. The Qualinesti confiscate the dragon orb for themselves, and fighting an entire nation of elves for it would be suicide. Laurana’s father is an obdurate dickhead who’s all “I have no daughter” and refuses to listen to her, giving her lots of sympathetic drama. Derek Crownguard, the only survivor of the Knights who went on the glacier quest with the heroes, is an obstreperous tool whose idea of diplomacy is to tell the elves to go fuck themselves. The elves think Elistan is a charlatan who’s just pretending to be a cleric of the true gods. Basically everything that can go wrong is going wrong, and the only way out is for the heroes to steal the dragon orb and go on the run from thousands of angry elves. It’s a good low point for the protagonists which shows us that they’re on their own; nobody’s on their side at this point and no irritating gods have shown up to fix their problems for them.

Except… then they kinda do. Silvara, a Kagonesti elf who helps them escape, is clearly some sort of supernatural guide type. She’s suspicious as hell, knows all kinds of things she shouldn’t be able to know, and between her name and the legend she tells during their boat trip, it’s pretty obvious what she is and whose side she’s on. But I appreciated the added tension, and I wasn’t too frustrated by the heroes failing to figure it out because it’s more obvious to the reader, with our expectations about storytelling conventions, than it would be for people inside the story. We know that if someone tells a campfire story in a book, it will inevitably turn out to be relevant to the plot somehow — they don’t.

We urgently need some tension in this part of the plot, too, because the flight from Qualimori is a long segment of the book that could have been cut way down. The heroes have zero agency — once the stakes of “what’s Silvara’s game?” are established, there’s nothing they can do but trail behind her, look at scenery, and occasionally announce “Boy, I sure am suspicious!” It’s another long sequence with a lot of character work and little plot development, and this book already had one too many of those. Still, at least Silvara makes a much less irritating supernatural guide than Fizban did in the last book. She’s clearly desperate and limited in her abilities, so it doesn’t feel like she knows everything or has the power to solve everyone’s problems.

Speaking of which, Fizban suddenly returns! Out of nowhere, with no explanation! And immediately starts breaking the fourth wall!

“Was it a nice funeral?” he asked. “Did lots of people come? Was there a twenty-one gun salute? I always wanted a twenty-one gun salute.”

“I—uh…” Tas stammered, wondering what a gun was.

Please stop — I’m trying to stay immersed here. That said, at least his divine interference is much more restrained in this book. He takes Tasslehoff on an adventure and contributes cryptic comments, but he doesn’t do the sort of “gods do everything and give the heroes no choices” crap that we saw in Dragons of Autumn Twilight. That said, I’m still baffled by how low-key his contributions are given that he’s an avatar of Paladine, the chief god of good. When the Queen of Darkness is taking an active role and bending entire countries to her will, why wander about pretending to be a senile old man? It works out for him in the end, but it seems like it could have worked out faster and easier if he’d been more directly helpful and less manipulative.

The heroes now fragment even further. Sturm and Derek buggered off a few chapters ago to take the dragon orb to Solamnia, and now Tasslehoff and Fizban wander off to visit the gnomes while the rest go forge some dragonlances off-screen. It’s not a serious pacing issue, since at least we’re not trying to follow all of them at once, but the problem is that we’re following the characters who are doing things that don’t matter to the plot and ignoring the group that’s actually doing something interesting.

Sturm’s trial, where Derek accuses him of disobedience and cowardice in the face of the enemy, is a great theme-supporting sequence. The fractious politics of the Knights of Solamnia, like the elves’ cold war, show us how the forces of good are divided against each other, and the way they’re locked into empty ritual and tradition without understanding the meaning behind their rules will come up again and again. It’s fantastic character development for Sturm, too, as he faces the very real possibility of losing his chance to become a knight if he does the right thing.

And then we get to Fizban taking Tasslehoff to visit Mount Nevermind, home of the gnomes, which really did not thrill me. I genuinely dislike the gnomes. They’re an entire nation of steampunk mad scientists, creating ridiculously impractical and dangerous inventions to do the most basic of tasks. It’s the same sort of immersion-breaking setting mismatch that you’d get if Coppola had cast Jerry Lewis in Apocalypse Now. They’re not more punching-down losers like the gully dwarves, thank goodness, but they’re extremely silly in an unrealistic way that contrasts badly with the otherwise gritty story — we’re trying to establish some serious stakes here and instead the authors are taking us on a detour through a Dr. Seuss cartoon. Furthermore, the whole Mount Nevermind section has little dramatic tension or impact on the plot, so it just feels like an excuse for the authors to show off some of their worldbuilding.

Fortunately, this is where the story finally starts getting its act together. Representatives of all the various human and elven nations come together to figure out what to do about the war and the dragon orb, and Fizban and Tasslehoff are present to watch the proceedings. The council’s politics are as intractable as they are straightforward: each group has good reasons to disagree with the others, there are assholes on all sides, and the elves’ threat to go to war with the Solamnians to get the stolen dragon orb back makes diplomacy excruciatingly difficult. It’s a great setup for a scene, but it would have been better if the authors had given us more details about the broader situation. Where are the dragonarmies? What are they doing right now that presents a threat? No idea — it’s all left vague.

The dragon orb getting smashed is such a great plot twist. The heroes fought and bled for it, everyone wants it, we’re repeatedly told that it’s the last hope against the dragons, and then Tasslehoff smashes it to pieces because he sees that it’s the only way to avoid losing the war before it’s even begun. Since the council’s stakes have been so clearly established, it doesn’t feel like a shaggy dog story where they spend ages getting the orb and then lose it, shrug, and continue on — it’s a desperate sacrifice for the greater good. And it’s a deliberate decision that fits Tas’ character perfectly, which is a relief after all the railroading of the last book. Then the rest of the off-screen heroes show up with dragonlances and convince everyone to work together.

Meanwhile, we’ve been doing occasional cutaway chapters to what’s been going on with Tanis and his crew since they left Silvanesti, and it turns out to be… not much. They want to bring the Silvanesti dragon orb to the city of Palanthas, but it’s a long boat journey and they don’t have enough money, so they start a travelling circus. Raistlin does elaborate magical illusions, Tika dances, Goldmoon sings, and so forth. It’s cute, showing a bit of what the characters’ lives could have been like if they hadn’t been thrust into heroing, and it’s good character development for Raistlin when he gets a taste of genuine contentment but decides that his quest for power is more important than even happiness, but ultimately it’s a long stretch where nothing much happens. The only major event is Tanis running into his old ex-girlfriend Kitiara, who’s become a powerful Dragon Highlord in the service of the Queen of Darkness, and having a fling with her which demonstrates his inner turmoil and lack of direction.

The reason I haven’t mentioned any of this yet is because it’s basically irrelevant to the plot. By the end of the book they’re still nowhere near Palanthas, and nothing they do (using the dragon orb, finding Berem, meeting Kitiara, etc.) will become important until the next book, so I don’t have much to say about it. There are lots of irritating coincidences, too — how convenient is it that Tanis’ crew take the one ship in all of Krynn where the Green Gemstone Man is working as a sailor? And then Tanis gets ambushed in the one alley that his ex, whom he hasn’t seen for five years, is walking past? Unlike the other plotline, it doesn’t feel like events are happening naturally here.

Anyhow, back to the stuff that matters. Sturm is made a sub-commander of the Knights’ forces reinforcing the High Clerist’s Tower, which guards the mountain pass between the dragonarmies and the city of Palanthas, and Laurana, Flint, and Tasslehoff come along and bring a bunch of dragonlances. This is the darkest point of the novel, where a small force of knights is besieged and starving and expecting to die any minute now at the hands of the overwhelming forces arrayed against them. Things go from bad to worse, with the supply lines behind them closed by snow and Derek’s vainglory turning into genuine megalomania; he gets half the defending force killed in a meaningless sortie, dying in the process. But even when presented with the opportunity to escape, the heroes choose to stay because they’d rather go down fighting than be responsible for the destruction of Palanthas.

This whole sequence, with a handful of demoralized troops besieged by a vastly superior foe and led by a paranoid madman, feels like it owes a lot to the Minas Tirith battle in Lord of the Rings, but once again there are enough differences in the scenario to make it a homage rather than a ripoff. Also, it’s far superior to any of the previous army-related scenes in how it handles logistics. The Knights need to worry about their supply lines being cut off. The dragonarmies use sensible withdraw-and-envelop tactics against the Knights’ sortie. The Dragon Highlord pulls their forces back before the dragons attack to avoid breaking their own lines with dragonfear. For the first time in this series, it feels like attention has been paid to the details of how a military operation would work instead of “Suddenly, an army is here! Oh no!”.

It’s a great opportunity for character development, with each of the heroes finding their own source of inner courage to stay and fight. We get Sturm’s defining character moment, where he finally snaps and tells the Knights to go fuck themselves, and it’s fantastic. His entire character arc for two books has led up to the moment where he realizes that to be a good person, he can’t live within the Knights’ confining framework.

It all comes to a climax in a dramatic attack on the Tower, after the heroes have figured out that its strange layout is because it was designed, centuries ago, to be a trap for dragons. Sturm is killed by Kitiara while giving Laurana time to bait the trap — oh no! How could Kitiara kill her fellow astronaut? [2] His death is a great cap to his character arc, though. I can’t see any way that either a happy ending or a meaningless death would have worked for him — he always needed to die for his principles, and his death shows the Knights the folly of their hypocritical rules and causes lasting change. It’s not merely killing off a character for dramatic impact, but the satisfying and inevitable culmination of a long arc.

Everything else was gone: his ideals, his hopes, his dreams. The Knighthood was collapsing. The Measure had been found wanting. Everything in his life was meaningless. His death must not be so. He would buy Laurana time, buy it with his life, since that was all he had to give. And he would die according to the Code, since that was all he had to cling to.

Laurana manages to activate the Tower’s dragon orb, luring the opposing blue dragons into a deadly trap and scattering the draconians in the opposing army, then has a dramatic confrontation with Kitiara atop the fortress walls. Sturm’s death is used as an opportunity for character development, with lots of time spent on the aftermath of the heroes’ Pyrrhic victory and its effect on the survivors instead of rushing along to more plot beats. By the end, we feel like we’ve witnessed a turning point — every victory for the heroes comes at great cost, but they’ve demonstrated that the forces of evil aren’t unstoppable and that it’s possible to win if everyone works together and doesn’t lose hope.

Characters

One big reason why this novel’s plot feels stronger than that of Dragons of Autumn Twilight is that we finally get some decent villains. The last book had Verminaard, an over-the-top Dark Lord stereotype who got little character development and then died like a chump. In this book we get Derek, a narcissistic shit of a Knight, and Kitiara, the half-sister of Caramon and Raistlin who’s done a wholehearted heel turn and embraced evil out of pure self-interest. Both of them have a human-scale sort of evil that feels compellingly realistic rather than cartoonish.

Derek Crownguard, a high-ranking Knight of Solamnia who leads a powerful political faction, is the very picture of toxic masculinity: argumentative, sexist, insecure, and petulant whenever he doesn’t get his way. He uses constant microaggressions to assert his dominance, like when he praises Laurana’s brother for something she did, and repeatedly demonstrates that he’d let the world burn as long as it meant that people would respect and fear him. He gradually deteriorates under the intense stress of the war, becoming increasingly megalomaniacal and unmoored from reality, and it’s all Sturm can do to keep him from destroying everything in his mad quest for glory. They make a great contrast against each other throughout the entire novel, culminating with Sturm discovering himself and Derek losing himself when under the pressure of imminent death. By the end, we’ve seen their defenses stripped away and gotten a good look at what lies underneath — which, in Derek’s case, is a worthless sociopathic shithead.

Kitiara, whose appearance has been foreshadowed since the very beginning of the first book, also makes a great villain. Her backstory is tied into the other characters (Caramon and Raistlin’s sister, Tanis’ ex, Laurana’s romantic rival), so she comes with lots of ready-made conflicts, and her villainy is the pragmatic evil of someone who’s determined to be on the winning side no matter what. Unlike Verminaard, she demonstrates human qualities — seemingly genuine affection for Tanis and regret at killing Sturm — which makes you wonder if there’s a chance that she might be redeemable. My only qualm is that it feels like a stereotypical bit of moralizing on the authors’ part that Kitiara is assertive, sensual, and worldly, and is evil, while Laurana is chaste, modest, and naive, and she’s good. Still, I can’t complain about having more women in major roles.

Tanis takes much more of a backseat in this book compared to the last one. He’s still the nominal leader of the party, at least before they split up, but he’s lost his moral compass and sense of purpose and doesn’t have much agency. It all culminates in him abandoning his friends to shack up with Kitiara near the end of the book, which is less a decision he makes than the natural endpoint of him gradually rolling downhill. There are too many characters around for his “loss of faith” subplot to get the time and attention it needs, though, so it feels a little anemic.

The real main character for the first half of the book is the sickly mage Raistlin, whose character arc sees him fall to full-fledged evil to satiate his hunger for power. Throughout the first book and the beginning of this book, the other characters have been talking about how there are shadows hovering around him and whatnot, and we see him be rude to his brother, but he’s never actually done anything evil. When he offers to secretly poison Laurana to prevent her capture in Tarsis, that’s the first crack in the façade. He finally crosses the moral event horizon during the dream sequence in Silvanesti, where he saves the party from the nightmare purely out of self-interest and allows his brother to “die” in the dream to fulfill his own ends. From there on out, it’s clear that Raistlin is solely on Raistlin’s side, and to hell with the forces of good and evil except inasmuch as they can serve his purposes.

Again, the authors are doing a good job with the villainy here. His fall is something the reader is prepared for, rather than something which comes out of nowhere, because they’ve been laying the groundwork for it for a while. And he gets several little humanizing moments, like revealing his tragic backstory to Laurana or finding joy in using his magic to entertain people, that make him seem like an actual human rather than a sociopathic robot. It’s a tough line for an author to walk; you want to provide just enough humanity for a character to be believable, but not so much that their evil doesn’t make sense or it feels like you’re trying to excuse their actions.

Most of the good characterization happens in the Sturm-Laurana-Tasslehoff plotline, though. Sturm’s arc is well done, as I mentioned earlier. He’s set up from the beginning to be a tragic figure, and his death is the natural consequence of who he is and the situation he’s in rather than something which just happens to him.

Alhana looked up into Sturm’s grieved face and saw etched there pride, nobility, strict inflexible discipline, constant striving for perfection—perfection unattainable. And thus the deep sorrow in his eyes.

This book sees Laurana get an upgrade from tag-along character to full-fledged hero. Her disastrous homecoming engenders sympathy for her plight, shows how much she’s grown, and demonstrates what a Herculean task lies ahead of the heroes, since all the folks who should be their allies are stiff-necked, fractious assholes. She’s got both talents and flaws: she’s kind-hearted, good in a fight and has an adamant resolve, but she hates being thrust into a position of leadership and doesn’t know how to handle responsibility for others. In the end, she learns self-reliance and leadership the hard way. All things considered, it’s a good mix of vulnerable and badass that doesn’t lean too hard into either.

Her brother Gilthanas gets a similar protagonist upgrade during everything that happens on Ergoth in Book II. In Dragons of Autumn Twilight he was just sort of an unlikable jerk who served as a stand-in for traditional elven culture, but now he’s forced to make difficult decisions and, despite his prejudices, falls in love with someone unsuitable for a prince. He eventually defies his father and his people to do what he knows is right. It’s somewhat spoiled by the last time we see him, though, where he’s heartbroken and destroyed because he’s learned that his girlfriend is actually a silver dragon instead of an elf. It didn’t make sense to me when I first read this as a kid and it still doesn’t make sense to me now, because my reaction would be more along the lines of “That is so awesome! Can you take me flying?” Just get over it and start being supportive, buddy.

Tasslehoff is still a surprisingly great character. The kender seem practically tailor-made to be irritating — their lack of common sense, their carefree indifference to life-threatening situations, their rampant kleptomania — so the fact that I consistently enjoy this character still amazes me. He moves the plot forward not by being a hero, but by simply being a good person in the right place at the right time, which makes him the living embodiment of the trilogy’s theme: small acts of goodness can save the world. His performance at the Council meeting is one of the high points of the novel, and his distress at the dying dragons’ suffering during the final battle is the most touchingly human part of the book. It’s making me look forward to the next trilogy, where I remember that he played a major role.

Theros Ironfeld is an extra from the first book whose only role was to lie on a floor and be injured. He gets some lines in this book, but he’s still not much of a character; I couldn’t tell you anything about who he is, what he likes, what his backstory is, or anything like that. He’s just a shortcut to getting the dragonlances into the story. Still, I appreciate that we see several plot-relevant Black people with speaking lines — Theros, Maquesta, and the Ergothians at the Council — even if they’re not major characters. In just two books, Weis and Hickman have already included more Black people than the Forgotten Realms included in the first… let’s see… thirty-four books. Jesus.

The old dwarf Flint is much less aggravating in this book than he was in the last. He gets less screen time and less of it is pratfalls, which is great — that kind of comedy would have killed the dramatic tension the authors are trying to build during the tense action in the Sturm-Laurana-Tasslehoff group’s plotline. Still, he serves no purpose to the plot and adds only minimally to the other characters’ development, so he could easily have been cut without losing anything.

And then there’s… all the rest. There’s not enough time to give everyone attention, so some characters end up fading into the background. Once again Caramon’s role is mostly just “get pushed around by Raistlin,” with a side order of a burgeoning relationship with Tika. Tika herself gets practically no time at all. Elistan remains basically an extra with a few speaking parts. Goldmoon and Riverwind… honestly, I forgot that they were in this novel at all. They have no relevance to the plot and very few lines, so I wouldn’t have even noticed if they were missing. It feels like the authors just have too many characters and not enough time.

Themes

The main theme of this book is the danger of isolationism. The real world teaches you important lessons, so walling yourself off from it causes you to become stupid. Only people who go out into the world and see how other people live can understand what’s important and have genuine compassion for others.

This comes up again and again. The people of the isolated city of Tarsis are small-minded and mean, the mountain dwarves lock themselves away in their mountain and ignore the outside world, the stubborn Silvanesti and Qualinesti elves are still vainly trying to hide from the outside world even after the destruction of their homelands, and then there’s Palanthas:

It was a soft city—a city of wealth and beauty, a city that had turned its back upon the world to gaze with admiring eyes into its own mirror.

Most of the conflicts in the book are either caused or exacerbated by people who should be on each others’ sides, but aren’t willing to understand anyone else’s point of view or stick their necks out. Sturm even straight-up says it out loud near the end:

Why was I different [from the rest of the Knights]? Sturm wondered. But he knew the answer, even as he listened to the dwarf grumble. It was because of the dwarf, the kender, the mage, the half-elf… They had taught him to see the world through other eyes. […] Knights like Derek saw the world in stark black and white… Sturm had seen the world in all its radiant colors, in all its bleak grayness.

In short, diversity makes you stronger.

There’s another theme running through all of the Knights’ scenes about tradition versus the meaning of tradition. Over millennia, the lesson the Knighthood was supposed to impart to its members — be a good person and help others — has been replaced by adherence to a strict and complicated code that they blindly follow without understanding the meaning behind the rules. But you can’t legislate goodness, and Sturm eventually has to abandon the rules in order to do what’s right.

“Doomed romance” is another theme in this book. Sturm and Alhana, Caramon and Tika, Gilthanas and Silvara, Tanis and Kitiara and Laurana — just about everyone who has a relationship ends up miserable about it for one reason or another. I like it; it adds to the general feeling of gloom that pervades the story.

Writing

The writing here is a little better than the first book now that the authors have had a chance to practice. There aren’t as many comma splices or random exclamation marks, and the point of view doesn’t jump around quite as often within scenes. Looking back, I find that I don’t have that much to say about the craft here.

The authors repeatedly mix up the word “hauberk” with “halberd,” however, and it really gets on my nerves. Apparently this has been broken in every published edition of the novels — how can it be that no editor has tried to correct this in the past forty years? Looking online, it’s clear that I’m far from the first person to notice this.

The sight of the woman making a gallant effort to rise proved too much for the knight. He took a step forward, and found a hauberk thrust in front of him.

That’s, uhh… not nearly as threatening as you think it is.

There’s a lot of poetry in this book, even more than in the last, and the quality is still generally quite high compared to the usual dismal standard of poetry in fantasy novels. Sometimes it goes way too overboard and disappears up its own ass (“Ascended through hierarchies of space into light”? You have got to be fucking kidding me), but mostly it’s evocative and sells the mythic feel of the subject. Twice it’s used to summarize the events of long dungeon crawls by having another culture recite an epic poem about the heroes’ quest, and seeing how our protagonists look from the outside to other people is a great way to sell their heroic qualities.

Conclusion

Grade: A–

It starts slow and has plenty of nonsense in the middle. Around the halfway point I was beginning to wonder if my positive memories of this book were complete fabrications, because it hadn’t done much to wow me thus far. But once I got to the last third or so of the book, where the authors finally got their act together and brought their A game, I couldn’t put it down. From that point on, it’s remarkably good and it leaves a powerful impression that lingers well after you’ve finished it. I’d say it beats the last book by a fair margin.

I think the major reason why the early parts of the book don’t work as well as the later parts is the sheer size of the party. There are thirteen characters who set out from Thorbardin at the beginning, and that’s a massive boat anchor that drags down the book because the authors spend lots of time on characterization at the expense of giving the heroes agency or fleshing out the world. The seven-person group led by Tanis makes basically no impact on the overall plot, so it’s only once they get sidelined and we start spending time with the Sturm-Laurana-Tasslehoff group that the book really kicks off. That’s a smaller set of characters, so there’s more time to spend with each one, and they’re doing things that actually matter: preventing war between humans and elves, rediscovering dragonlances, fighting off a siege, et cetera. Meanwhile, Tanis and Co. are setting up a travelling circus and wandering the countryside, and nothing they do becomes relevant until the next book.

I know that Weis and Hickman didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter, shackled as they were to the D&D module material, but the lesson here for future authors is simply this: kill your darlings. Centre what matters and ruthlessly trim the things that don’t. I’m not saying that every single scene needs to further the plot — it’s important to have low-tension breaks for fleshing out the characters, setting, and themes — but ultimately everything needs to serve the story’s throughline, the sense that events are progressing towards something rather than just being a random series of happenings.

Soon I’ll tackle Dragons of Spring Dawning, the final book of the trilogy. I remember that it felt a bit mid coming on the heels of this book’s strong conclusion, but we’ll see if a thirty-year gap will change my opinion. Stay fresh and be kind to each other, y’all.

Footnotes

[1] One thing that’s always bothered me about Krynn is how obvious it is, when you look at a map, that it was created on hex paper. Mountain ranges, rivers, shorelines, everything — all of it tends to be oriented in one of the six cardinal directions of a horizontal hex layout. Doesn’t do the world’s verisimilitude any favours.

[2] I know I’m belabouring the “Sturm goes to the moon” jokes, but it’s really the perfect exemplar for how the Dragonlance series lost its way once Weis and Hickman were no longer around. I don’t remember Darkness and Light being a bad novel, per se, but the change in theme from “finding hope in a dark, war-torn world” to “let’s go have Jules Verne-style steampunk adventures on the moon” will never stop being hilarious to me.