Author: Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
Published: May 1986

Onwards, friends, to the second book in the Legends trilogy! It was published a mere three months after Time of the Twins, which is more than a little worrying — but after the Chronicles trilogy, Weis and Hickman have racked up a lot of experience producing novels on short notice, and they left themselves a strong sequel hook at the end of the last book. Will they come up with something that works, or fall victim to the dreaded middle-book syndrome? Let’s dive in and find out.

Plot

This novel’s time-hopping plot takes us to a part of the setting’s history that we’ve heard hints about but never seen directly: about one hundred years after the Cataclysm, when Krynn is racked with famine, disease, and war in the wake of the divine judgement that wrecked the world. It’s quite the contrast against the splendour of Istar from the last book, but it also makes the setting feel very empty — we see almost nothing of any cities or towns, and most of it takes place in a series of army encampments in barren countrysides.

Unfortunately, this book doesn’t exactly start with a bang. Raistlin teleports the group forward in time one hundred years to the Tower of Palanthas, whisking them away from the impending doom of Istar. They find themselves in danger right off the bat, but Caramon is temporarily blind and Raistlin starts out unconscious, so the writing bogs down with the narrator telling us what Crysania sees and then Crysania explaining what the narrator just said to the others. It’s repetitive, awkward, and somewhat interminable. Basically, the opening of this book boils down to Raistlin being weak from a magical hangover and everyone else sitting around in a ruined building until he gets better. It’s a dull way to follow up a tense cliffhanger.

Fortunately, the tedium of the present is broken by a bit of action in a flashback scene. Fistandantilus finally shows up, after four books of being a mysterious off-screen presence! But only for this single scene, during which he gets his ass kicked. Still, it’s good for the reader to see the battle — it was too important a plot point to happen entirely off-screen, and we needed it to set up the “Raistlin takes Fistandantilus’ place in history” theme.

Anyhow, it turns out that the portal to the Abyss that Raistlin was hoping to enter isn’t in the Tower of Palanthas at this time. That’s a relief, because I wasn’t looking forward to seeing him just sit around for two weeks studying. I’ll welcome any plot twist that gets them out of the isolated shithole they’re stuck in so we can see more of the setting than just some filthy abandoned rooms. There’s a bit where Crysania plans to visit Astinus, which got my hopes up that we might see some of the city and meet some other characters, but then the story jumps past it and she just tells the others how her trip went. Sigh.

Meanwhile, Tasslehoff turns out to not be dead; the Queen of Darkness spirited the Kingpriest’s temple to the Abyss during the Cataclysm, and Tasslehoff was dragged along for the ride. The Abyss scenes are delightfully surreal. It’s no stereotypical Hell analogue with fire and brimstone; rather, it’s the most boring place in the world. Reality is mutable there, but only mutable in ways that are tragic, hopeless, or painful, but for the most part it’s just an empty void that drains the will to live. It’s a fun take on the concept of Hell, all psychological horror instead of body horror.

Takhisis actually has quite a sensible plan to defeat Raistlin — well, as sensible as a time-travel plan can be. With the knowledge she extracts from Tasslehoff, she’s now able to change the future so that Fistandantilus never possesses Raistlin, which will cause the forces of good to lose the War of the Lance in a couple hundred years. Simple and foolproof. Later, she torpedoes her own plan by letting Tasslehoff escape; she wanted to have Tasslehoff deliver a mocking message to Raistlin, but ends up allowing him to alter time in ways that make her foreknowledge obsolete. Come on, lady, just send Raistlin a postcard or something! You had the entire world in the bag there and then let it get away.

The plot starts picking up speed at this point, though not necessarily in the right direction. The portal Raistlin is looking for is in dwarven territory on the other side of the continent, so they… start travelling overland? Really? Look, Raistlin is supposed to be the most powerful wizard of all time — why is he slogging through the mud like a regular schmoe instead of teleporting the group to Zhaman and actually accomplishing his plan? Sometimes people are like “oh, he’s conserving his strength so he’s not exhausted for the battle ahead,” but you know what’s really exhausting? Schlepping across an entire continent.

The predictable outcome of this ill-advised journey is that they get ambushed and captured by bandits. It’s a good chance to show off how awful the world is, though, and how inured the inhabitants have become to the commonplace starvation, poverty, and violence. Crysania is menaced with rape by the bandits’ leader, which is not a great look — it feels like the authors are handing her some cheap “damsel in distress” stuff to build up Raistlin’s character, and really exemplifies how this novel treats her as more of a macguffin which motivates other characters rather than a real person. Instead, Caramon kills the bandit leader in single combat, assumes control of the group, and… starts a war? By accident? The scene basically goes like this, paraphrased:

“We’re going south,” said Caramon, flexing his mighty biceps.

“Are you going south to fight the mountain dwarves and besiege Thorbardin?”, asked a bandit. “Because we’d totally come with you and kill a bunch of dwarves if so.”

“Uhh… sure, why not? Let’s go.”

“Oops, I started a war!” Nice going, pal. You could have said just about anything else, but instead you chose to lead an army to attack a bunch of dwarves whom you have no beef with, directly leading to thousands of deaths on both sides. Smooth. Caramon’s small force snowballs into a large army over time, since everyone else in the world would rather be pillaging dead dwarves than dying of starvation in their barren fields.

Bizarre setup aside, though, it’s good to see Caramon getting a chance to shine as a leader. In Chronicles his role was mostly to be the party’s big strong guy, and he spent most of the previous book being manipulated, so it’s about time that he got to exercise some agency and self-direction. Showing how strangers see Caramon is a great way to demonstrate how much he’s grown. He dispenses inspiration and hard-won wisdom to the renegade Knights he recruits, manages the rank and file in his charge with the same solicitude with which he takes care of his brother, and unintentionally becomes a hero to the desperate people of this time period. His success as a diplomat with the various factions of his army — knights, dwarves, Plainsmen — is the direct result of lessons he learned from his friends in the Chronicles trilogy, so it doesn’t feel like it comes out of nowhere.

I really appreciate this book’s treatment of war. Unlike the War of the Lance from Chronicles, this war has no good side or bad side, nothing noble or worthwhile. We see both sides of the conflict thanks to the occasional cutaway scene to Duncan, king of the mountain dwarves, and his conscience-stricken friend Kharas. At its core, it’s simply a bunch of desperately poor people killing each other over mouthfuls of food:

Kharas stood pondering, then he lifted his head, his dark eyes flashing. “If [the harvest has failed], then so be it!” he said sternly. “Better we all starve to death, than die fighting each other!”

“Noble words, my friend,” Duncan answered. […] “You can’t eat noble words, though, Kharas. You can’t drink them or wrap them around your feet or burn them in your firepit or give them to children crying in hunger.”

“What about the children who will cry when their father leaves, never to return?” Kharas asked sternly.

Duncan raised an eyebrow. “They will cry for a month,” he said simply, “then they will eat his share of the food. And wouldn’t he want it that way?”

It’s presented as an unmitigated tragedy made inevitable by the scarcity of resources. None of the factions particularly want to fight, but they do so because it’s marginally better than dying of starvation and despair. It’s even sadder because to the protagonists, this is history; they grew up hearing stories of how this went down and we know they’re unable to change how history plays out when they’re back in time.

And speaking of “back in time,” the mechanics of the time travel stuff still make little sense:

The archmage even toyed with the idea of traveling forward to his own time to research, but abandoned the idea almost immediately. If consuming a village in flame had plunged him into exhaustion for two days, the time-travel spell would prove even more wearing. And, though only a day or two might pass in the present while he recuperated, eons would flit by in the past.

All the eons have already flitted by! That’s why they call it “the past”! Meanwhile, in the present, Dalamar is all like “My master went away to the past and he won’t be back for another few weeks” as if Raistlin had just gone on spring break. Sheesh. But by now I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the fact that all time-travel stories, no matter how carefully crafted, will be shot through with plot holes like a Swiss cheese. All you can do is try not to think about it too hard.

About half of the book’s running time is spent on watching Caramon, Raistlin, Crysania, and the army creep slowly across the continent towards Thorbardin. For the first time, the authors are paying attention to the logistics of armies. Caramon, in his new role as general, has to run himself ragged to coordinate feeding, organizing, and moving an entire army, all while holding its fractious factions together. It’s a refreshing change from the Chronicles books, where armies were usually treated as things that automatically showed up when it was time to have a battle scene.

This section of the book could have been terminally dull, but instead the authors use the lack of action to give the characters lots of time to grow. Crysania tries and fails to convert people back to the worship of Paladine, Caramon and Raistlin spend time together and bond, Raistlin rages against fate, and Caramon gets to demonstrate his leadership skills. It all sets up themes that will crash together at the end of the book: is Raistlin doomed? Does he still have any humanity left? Will Caramon be able to redeem him? [1] It all culminates in Raistlin galloping past the moral event horizon by murdering Tasslehoff’s friend Gnimsh, sending the army to their certain doom, and offering Caramon’s head to the Dewar in exchange for their support. My only main complaint is how little we see of the setting during this period — instead, it’s basically a long series of conversations in tents.

In our occasional cutaways to the dwarves, we see that gully dwarves get a slightly more serious treatment here than in previous Dragonlance material. It’s made clear that the hill dwarves and mountain dwarves alike use them as slave labour for their mines, and the few gully dwarves who appear on screen tend to be more pathetic than humorous. But instead they’ve added a new problematic dwarven race: the Dewar, a clan of dark dwarves who are inherently evil and often insane. In other words, basically the dwarven version of drow, with all of the issues that implies:

Though his face was stamped with the half-mad, half-calculating cruelty that marked most of his race, there was a glimmer of rational intelligence in his dark eyes that made him particularly dangerous.

You could get away with that sort of thing forty years ago, but by modern standards it feels dated and uncomfortable. The only upside is that these dwarves don’t have any physical traits, like the drow’s black skin, that call real-world racial issues to mind.

When the war finally happens it’s handled well, with Caramon’s army in as much danger from supply issues as from the enemy while they trek through the empty plains between Pax Tharkas and Thorbardin. There’s plenty of intrigue, with Raistlin undermining Caramon’s authority and the Dewar playing double agents for both sides, and the battle scenes focus on the individual experience of war instead of taking a high-level chess-game approach. The eventual outcome — the destruction of both armies — is never really in doubt, but the tension comes from whether Raistlin and Caramon can avoid the grisly fates of their historical predecessors in the process.

Tasslehoff returns near the end, injecting a much-needed fresh perspective into the story and keeping the tone from getting too grim. His arrival precipitates the final act of the story, since his presence is capable of changing history, and he ends up altering events just enough to ensure that both Caramon and Raistlin survive but neither of them end up getting what they want. Matters end on a cliffhanger, with Raistlin having possibly failed to enter the Abyss and Caramon and Tasslehoff spirited elsewhere in time.

Characters

The core of the book is the twisted love/hate relationship between the twins. Despite becoming polar opposites to the point where Caramon even tried to kill Raistlin at the end of the last book, they still have a bond that reasserts itself in quiet moments and shows how their lives could have been happier if Raistlin weren’t such a ruthlessly ambitious prick. The authors go out of their way to show traces of humanity and humour in Raistlin, echoes of the person he might have otherwise been, and they make his inevitable doom feel all the more tragic.

“The dark crimes that stain my soul, brother, you cannot begin to imagine. If you knew, you would turn from me in horror and in loathing.” He sighed, shivering slightly. “And, you are right. Sometimes, in the night, even I turn from myself.”

Opening his eyes, Raistlin stared fixedly into his brother’s. “But, know this, Caramon—I committed those crimes intentionally, willingly. Know this, too—there are darker crimes before me, and I will commit them, intentionally, willingly…”

He demonstrates compassion for plague victims and gully dwarves, shares moments of laughter and camaraderie with his brother, and demonstrates some emotional vulnerability, among other pet the dog moments (including a literal “pet the bunny” moment). It isn’t a matter of being simply “good” or “evil” — Raistlin clearly has elements of both, but it’s never really in doubt which side of him will win when they clash.

His power seems to vary according to the needs of each scene. At one point, he burns down a tiny village and it renders him helplessly exhausted for the next two days. Later, people are saying things like “The magical battle between Raistlin and the Queen of Darkness could tear the world apart!” Uhh, sure… if she gives him plenty of time for nap breaks, I guess? The authors want him to be a potential threat to the entire world, but they also want to create drama by having him be physically ill and in need of constant attention, and those two ideas just do not mesh.

Caramon, his opposite, manages to be good without being idealistic or obnoxious. He’s not blind to his brother’s faults and evil deeds, but he’s spent a lifetime with his brother and he can’t reconcile the fragile, thoughtful kid Raistlin used to be with the monster he’s become. He continues to nurture positive, optimistic thoughts about Raistlin having a good side after all, and Raistlin continues to disappoint him at just about every turn. It’s a great source of tension — Raistlin is always showing traces of redeeming human qualities, hinting that he might be dissuaded from the path he’s chosen, and then he’ll do or say something shitty and evil to dash that hope. Eventually Caramon is forced to admit that his brother is a hopeless case, but not until he’s been repeatedly disabused of his faith by a series of increasingly painful betrayals. The way their relationship evolves from antagonism to wary companionship and then back to antagonism is the best character work in the book, a slow buildup and then erosion of trust rather than a sudden heartbreak. By the end, when he finally severs the last of the bonds that tie him to Raistlin, it feels like the satisfying culmination of five books worth of character development.

All of this time and effort spent on the brothers comes at the expense of Crysania, who flunks the sexy lamp test in this novel. She’s still playing the role of Raistlin’s unwitting dupe, and she won’t get any agency or self-awareness until the next book. Here she mostly serves as a love interest and source of conflict for the brothers — both of them care for her, in very different ways — but the story is ultimately not about her at all. The only time she tries to do something on her own, it’s doomed from the outset; she fails so hard that she gives up on having agency entirely. You could replace her with some sort of magical portal-opening macguffin and the plot would barely change.

The fundamental idiocy of her ambitions is never addressed. The plan, as she understands it, is to kill the goddess of evil and destroy evil forever — as explained to her by an obviously super-evil dude who dresses all in black and lives in a dark tower full of murderous ghosts. I’m sure his motivations for removing the Queen of Darkness are totally legit! What could possibly go wrong? She even gets a speech where she’s like “The Kingpriest was a proud fool. What an idiot! But Raistlin and I are totally going to destroy evil forever, no problem” without seeing the irony at all. Meanwhile, Crysania’s original goal from the previous book — her quest to redeem Raistlin from evil — is dropped entirely, which contributes to her lack of agency. I don’t think she mentions it once, and Caramon gets all the morality pet moments with Raistlin instead.

The only well-handled part of her characterization is the true-to-life depiction of an abusive relationship between her and Raistlin. He’s kind to her when he needs something from her, but resorts to emotional manipulation or what little physical violence he’s capable of when he’s thwarted. For her part, she makes excuses for his behaviour and blames herself for all of their conflicts. This mistreatment is a very effective way to show how evil Raistlin is without resorting to cackling and moustache-twirling — the more realistic his sins feel, the scarier they are. That said, I think the authors overplay the manipulation angle here because Crysania feels like way more of a dope in this book. She believes Raistlin uncritically, even when he’s acting fishy as hell, and every time he plays her like a fiddle it erodes our belief in her as a well-rounded character.

It’s a shame that Tasslehoff spends most of this book off-screen, but at least he returns at just the right time to interject some moments of levity and a fresh point of view into a plot that was getting increasingly grim and straightforward. As in the Chronicles trilogy, his role is to be the optimist who’s left forever scarred by experiencing tragedy but never loses hope. Like Caramon, he gets a moment where he realizes that Raistlin is really irredeemably evil and not just morally grey, and that emotional beat hits much harder coming from a soft-hearted person who always tries to see the best in everyone.

What fascinates me about Tasslehoff is that he easily could have been the most depressing character in the entire setting. All of the worst things happen to him: left to die in Istar, trapped in the Abyss, coming face-to-face with the Queen of Darkness, contracting the plague, seeing his friend killed — and that’s just in this one book! If he’d been broken by the enormity of everything that happens to him, he would have felt like the authors’ chew toy, the butt monkey who’s just there to suffer for dramatic effect. Instead, he’s changed by his experiences — a little sadder, a little wiser — but never broken, never losing the bright core of his personality that makes even the most terrifying things seem merely fascinating through his eyes. These would be very different books — and probably much worse — if he weren’t in them.

Tasslehoff briefly meets a new side character, a tinker gnome named Gnimsh, who’s introduced in a scene where he gets beaten up by a badly designed chair. His backstory is that he’s a gnome whose inventions always work, for which he’s been exiled from Mount Nevermind for being a threat to scientific progress. Pretty threadbare stuff, and the chapters set in the Abyss are probably the most inappropriate time and place for a physical comedy sequence. He doesn’t get much screen time, fortunately, since his main role in the plot is to repair the time-travelling device and then get murdered to further Raistlin’s and Tasslehoff’s characterization.

The dwarven hero Kharas is a great tragic figure, the unheeded voice of reason in an unreasonable world. He sees the tragic war coming but all of his efforts to prevent it are for naught, and he’s forced to fight in it whether he wants to or not by the oaths he’s sworn to his king, so his scenes really emphasize the pointlessness and waste of the conflict. Knowing that history has doomed his efforts makes his failure even more bitter. He doesn’t get much screen time, but all of his scenes are good ones.

Themes

This book wears its theme right on its sleeve: can you thwart fate? Raistlin, having taken over the role of Fistandantilus in history, is now doomed to repeat his predecessor’s mistakes and die in the same way. He’s desperate for a way to change his fate, but humans aren’t able to alter the flow of time and change the future. It’s a poignant theme with lots of inherent tension, but the setup doesn’t make much sense. Why didn’t Raistlin just return to the present to go through the portal? Why does he go only one hundred years forward, instead of all the way back home where he’s secure and has all his stuff? Then he wouldn’t have to worry about being forced to re-enact Fistandantilus’ mistakes. Furthermore, since he knows that humans can’t change history when they’re in the past, why did he think this plan could ever succeed in the first place?

Still, it’s a good theme. We see Raistlin’s despair at the probable failure of his plan and Caramon’s discomfort with leading soldiers to their certain doom. Neither of them want history to play out this way, but it’s the only course of action that gets them what they need.

But now he understood, and his soul ached. Truly, no greater punishment could be inflicted upon any mortal. For, by seeing into the future and knowing what the outcome will be, man’s greatest gift — hope — is taken away.

It doesn’t become a foreordained outcome that drains all tension, though, because the reader knows what they don’t: that Tasslehoff is still alive and able to change the course of history.

Writing

The writing bears the scars of this novel’s rushed production. There are typos that you’d expect they’d have fixed in one of the various reprintings over the years, like mixing up “insure” and “ensure.” The omniscient narrator is sometimes intrusive, explaining things that were already obvious in a tedious manner. Sometimes the writing gets so poetic that it stops making sense:

Lady Crysania’s soft leather boots made no sound as she walked, Caramon’s heavy booted footsteps echoed through the empty chambers, Raistlin’s rustling robes whispered through the corridors, the Staff of Magius upon which he leaned thumping softly on the floor. As quiet as they were, they could almost have been the ghosts of themselves, moving through the hallways.

So I guess Caramon’s moving like a silent ghost with heavy, booted footsteps. Sure. But in general, the quality is fairly high — vivid descriptions, good pacing (after the first quarter or so, anyhow), and dramatic moments that don’t veer into melodrama. My complaints are fairly minor things that could have been cleaned up in editing if they’d had time, but the bones are solid.

As with Time of the Twins, I still love the illustrated initial capitals that begin each chapter. I wish TSR had done that with more of their books.

Conclusion

Grade: B

The plot is a mess; there were so many places in this novel where I said to myself “Why don’t they just…” or “Why are they doing this?” that eventually I got numb to all the strange decisions. There’s some awkward writing, the setting feels roughly sketched in, and one of the main characters is a useless caricature. But the relationship between Caramon and Raistlin is the beating heart of this book, and it’s done so well that I’m willing to overlook all sorts of flaws. Both characters are complex and vividly defined, without resort to cheap “good vs. evil” tropes, and the ending is a satisfying payoff to their five-book pas de deux.

The ending of this novel feels odd for the second book in the series. Almost everything that needs to happen in the trilogy’s plot has already happened — Raistlin opening the portal to the Abyss, Caramon and Raistlin’s complete estrangement, Tas and Caramon being reunited — so it’s hard to see how they’re going to fill an entire final book with Raistlin’s failure. I expect the authors are going to have to come up with some extra storylines to pad out the final book so that it’s more than just Raistlin’s final showdown, but it feels like they haven’t left themselves enough to work with. We’ll find out soon, I suppose…

Footnotes

[1] Respectively: not quite, kinda, no.