Test of the Twins (Dragonlance: Legends, #3)

by Margaret Weis

“Evil cannot create,” Astinus remarked, “it can only destroy. It turns in upon itself, gnawing itself. Already, you feel it eating away at you. Already, you can feel your soul shrivel. Look into Paladine’s face, Raistlin. Look into it as you looked into it once, back on the Plains of Dergoth, when you lay dying of the dwarf’s sword wound and Lady Crysania laid healing hands upon you. You saw the grief and sorrow of the god then as you see it now, Raistlin. And you knew then, as you know now but refuse to admit, that Paladine grieves, not for himself, but for you. “Easy will it be for us to slip back into our dreamless sleep. For you, Raistlin, there will be no sleep. Only an endless waking, endless listening for sounds that will never come, endless staring into a void that holds neither light nor darkness, endless shrieking words that no one will hear, no one will answer, endless plotting and scheming that will bear no fruit as you turn round and round upon yourself. Finally, in your madness and desperation, you will grab the tail of your existence and, like a starving snake, devour yourself whole in an effort to find food for your soul. “But you will find nothing but emptiness. And you will continue to exist forever within this emptiness—a tiny spot of nothing, sucking in everything around itself to feed your endless hunger.…”

He saw in him a leader of men. Not one who merely waves a sword and leads a charge in battle, but a leader who leads quietly, by drawing the best out of people, by helping them achieve things they never knew were in them.

“Most of us walk in the light and the shadow, Tasslehoff,” she said, “but there are the chosen few who walk this world, carrying their own light to brighten both day and night.”