Song of Huma - Readings | DragonLance Saga

Enjoy a reading of Song of Huma by Michael Williams, first published in Dragons of Autumn Twilight, November 1984.
The “Song of Huma” was the last, and many consider the greatest, work of the elven bard, Quivalen Soth. Only fragments of the work remained following the Cataclysm. It is said that those who study it diligently will find hints to the future of the turning world.
Buy Dragons of Autumn Twilight: https://amzn.to/3sKIouf

Like, Subscribe & Click The Bell
Become a Patron:   / dragonlancesaga  
Buy Dragonlance Books: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse.p...
#SongOfHuma #Readings #DragonLance #Krynn #HeroesOfTheLance

Song of Huma
Out of the village, out of the thatched and clutching shires,
Out of the grave and furrow, furrow and grave,
Where his sword first tried
The last cruel dances of childhood, and awoke to the shires
Forever retreating, his greatness a marshfire,
The banked flight of the Kingfisher always above him,
Now Huma walked upon Roses,
In the level Light of the Rose.
And troubled by Dragons, he turned to the end of the land,
To the fringe of all sense and senses,
To the Wilderness, where Paladine bade him to turn,
And there in the loud tunnel of knives
He grew in unblemished violence, in yearning,
Stunned into himself by a deafening gauntlet of voices.
It was there and then that the White Stag found him,
At the end of a journey planned from the shores of Creation,
And all time staggered at the forest edge
Where Huma, haunted and starving,
Drew his bow, thanking the gods for their bounty
and keeping,
Then saw, in the ranged wood,
In the first silence, the dazed heart’s symbol,
The rack of antlers resplendent.
He lowered the bow and the world resumed.
Then Huma followed the Stag, its tangle of antlers receding
As a memory of young light, as the talons of birds ascending.
The Mountains crouched before them. Nothing would
change now,
The three moons stopped in the sky,
And the long night tumbled in shadows.
It was morning when they reached the grove,
The lap of the mountain, where the Stag departed,
Nor did Huma follow, knowing the end of this journey
Was nothing but green and the promise of green
that endured
In the eyes of the woman before him. And holy the days he drew near her, holy the air
That carried his words of endearment, his forgotten songs,
And the rapt moons knelt on the Great Mountain. Still, she eluded him, bright and retreating as marshfire,
Nameless and lovely, more lovely because she was nameless,
As they learned that the world, the dazzling shelves
of the air,
The Wilderness itself
Were plain and diminished things to the heart’s thicket.
At the end of the days, she told him her secret.
For she was not of woman, nor was she mortal,
But the daughter and heiress from a line of Dragons. For Huma the sky turned indifferent, cluttered by moons,
The brief life of the grass mocked him, mocked his fathers,
And the thorned light bristled on the gliding Mountain.
But nameless she tendered a hope not in her keeping,
That Paladine only might answer, that through his
enduring wisdom
She might step from forever, and there in her silver arms
The promise of the grove might rise and flourish. For that wisdom Huma prayed, and the Stag returned,
And east, through the desolate fields, through ash,
Through cinders and blood, the harvest of dragons,
Traveled Huma, cradled by dreams of the Silver Dragon,
The Stag perpetual, a signal before him.
At last the eventual harbor, a temple so far to the east
That it lay where the east was ending. There Paladine appeared
In a pool of stars and glory, announcing That of all choices, one most terrible had fallen to Huma. For Paladine knew that the heart is a nest of yearnings,
That we can travel forever toward light, becoming
What we can never be. For the bride of Huma could step into the devouring sun,
Together they would return to the thatched shires
And leave behind the secret of the Lance, the world
Unpeopled in darkness, wed to the dragons. Or Huma could take on the Dragonlance, cleansing
all Krynn Of death and invasion, of the green paths of his love.
The hardest of choices, and Huma remembered
How the Wilderness cloistered and baptized his first
thoughts
Beneath the sheltering sun, and now
As the black moon wheeled and pivoted, drawing the air
And the substance from Krynn, from the things of Krynn,
From the grove, from the Mountain, from the abandoned
shires,
He would sleep, he would send it all away,
For the choosing was all of the pain, and the choices
Were heat on the hand when the arm has been severed. But she came to him, weeping and luminous,
In a landscape of dreams, where he saw
The world collapse and renew on the glint of the Lance. In her farewell lay collapse and renewal. Through his doomed veins the horizon burst.
He took up the Dragonlance, he took up the story,
The pale heat rushed through his rising arm...