Late last year I wrote at length about my experiences trying to read a book for the first time in ages. In typical Furtive fashion I laid bare all my worries and neuroses and then just did a bunch of word-vomit about a thing that interests me.
This time, I've decided there's going to be a 'this time', and it's going to have less of the former but just as much of the latter. Because I'm invested in Jean Rabe's Stonetellers trilogy now, and I feel compelled to see it through to the end. Plus this year has been unnerving in the extreme, and I could use another distraction from my slowly growing age and shrinking bank balance.
At the time of publication we've just finished our two weeks of real autumn before all the leaves die and a long, damp pre-winter settles in. Something about the wind and the leaves reminds me of the schoolyear, which invariably leads to a series of panic attacks as I think back to that period of my life.
Can homework legitimately trigger PTSD? Asking for a me.
Another thing that this time of year fills me with is brief moments of swelling inspiration to do... something? Anything? Oftentimes the urge takes the form of something vaguely scholastic, like reading or writing or discussing a topic with passionate others. It echoes back to the feeling of walking my high school or college campuses in the rare moments when I wasn't quite so rushed or scared and I could imagine what a better being in my shoes would have accomplished by now.
I don't know why I get these moments, but I've experienced them for a long time. I think it comes down to some deep subconscious association from my youth. When the light hits the trees just right and I look out over the admittedly beautiful land that the Hudson River School romanticized and propagandized so effectively from a place just across the creek from me, I feel it. I get it. I am consumed by that licentious poison of the soul that we call the sublime, and I am moved to propagate or harness the feeling in some way. It's like somebody's beaming one of those silly academia aesthetic playlists directly into my lizard brain.
Invariably, the feeling deflates a second later as I remember why I can't do anything smart or academic or vaguely gesturing toward the notion of personal growth or learning because of reasons X, Y, and Z.
But this time I remembered my incredibly low-stakes struggle with these books, and where I left off.
... I said there would be less neurosis this time, didn't I?
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To simplify greatly, the first book in the series, The Rebellion, is about a group of enslaved goblin miners on the Dragonlance world of Krynn who rise up against their Dark Knight masters during a massive earthquake. They then endure the volcanic brutality of the Khalkist Mountains of Neraka, the world capital of Evil. They are led through much fiery death and bloody dismemberment by the begrudging hobgoblin foreman Direfang and the auguries of the self-interested geomantic shaman Mudwort. Along the way they team up with (and enslave) some of the knights who enslaved them, most notably the half-elf wizard Grallik N'sera.
The ragtag bunch survives long enough to stumble into the ruins of Godshome, where most of the gods of Krynn once schmoozed together with their followers before they punished the many for the sins of the few and nuked the planet from orbit. Here, Mudwort and the other Stonetellers of the goblin refugee army scried the entirety of the continent of Ansalon and glimpsed a prospective home for a new goblin nation far away in the forests of Qualinesti. They then set off on the long road south, unwittingly leaving behind them the still-warm corpse of Moon-eye, the first of many goblins about to get shanked in the back as power-hungry clan leaders throughout the army plot Direfang's overthrow.
Simple, right?
The sequel, Death March, focuses on that grueling journey southwest to Qualinesti, and all the challenges and intrigues the goblins are sure to face along the way.
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| It's also pretty metal as far as DL covers go. |
Speaking of Qualinesti, I want to touch on something that I don't think I gave enough attention to at the end of my first post.
The Rebellion began somewhere in Neraka, close to the city of Jelek that actually gets placed on maps on occasion. The exact location of Godshome changes from map to map over the years, but we can confidently say it's within the same neck of the woods. So let's say they ended the book somewhere within this area, using an excerpt from the map that appears in the 1992 Tales of the Lance boxed set that happens to be pretty detailed and accessible.
At the beginning of the book the goblin refugee column is over 1,000 strong. By the end, through a combination of attrition and smaller bands splitting off from the main body, that number is reduced to less than 500. Let's zoom out a little, and see how much farther they have to go with those numbers.
As you can see here, the refugees have quite a ways to go before they reach the-
Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't zoom out far enough. Silly me.
There we go.
They've lost over half their number traveling less than 50 miles of what is conservatively a 400+ mile journey, and that's if you measure in a straight line as the crow flies, through some of the most hostile territories on the planet. If things keep going at this rate, these folks are screwed!
I mean, obviously not entirely screwed since there is a third book in the series and I'm pretty sure I saw trees on the cover when I downloaded an image of it. But I still don't have high hopes for anyone besides the named protagonists reaching their destination- heck, not even that will save them, considering how quickly the list of named goblins got chewed through in the first book.
I guess we shall see. Let's get this show on the road.
