It’s another late-night post for this Quest of Fire Friday, and I have to admit that the past couple weeks it’s been rough getting things posted because of busyness in life. In fact, I had all but decided not to post at all last week, but I felt like the Lord was leading me to it so I pressed on. Last week ended up being the best received post I’ve had in a while. That doesn’t necessarily mean the Lord was rewarding my doing something I feel He led me to with post engagements, but I’d like to believe it’s a sign that what He laid on my heart impacted others. So, I’m going to try my best to not fall slack on these.
This week I’d like to start talking about a place of particular importance to Quest of Fire: Tislatna. For those steeped in the series already, you’ll recognize that name pretty quickly because it comes up quite a bit. The first mention came in Succession, but it is the source of shadows from Shadows at Nightfall and mentioned many times in that book. Like many other things in the series, Tislatna is a motif for the influence of the past and how events can send out ripples into the waters of time far into the future.
Tislatna in the series so far has been by intentions a mysterious place. Not much is given away except that both bad and good things came from it and that it was pretty tragically destroyed for the depths of evil it had descended into. Among them being the dark sorceries which created the Sombra—the arcane assassins who can merge in and out of shadows and make both Anargen and Jason’s lives difficult. As well as the incantations and black magic of goblins/dark elves.
In Quest of Fire, wyverns are beasts, not inherently evil though they do have a bit of a cruel streak and are vicious when provoked. But on Tislatna they used rituals involving human sacrifice to infuse wild wyverns with goblins and through it create dragons, which are terrifying and malevolent and wickedly crafty. Which is worse than it may sound on the surface, because goblins in Quest of Fire are far more insidious than what appears in Tolkien’s Middle Earth and definitely not like the miserly sort from Harry Potter. Goblins are a rebellious group of the High King of All Realm’s first servants, the elves—which is why they’re also known as dark elves. Created to be creatures of light, they instead rose up against the High King and were banished into darkness. Potent and malignant, their aim is to shatter the High King’s control of the Lowlands and erase his light from it forever. By engaging with such creatures and even revering them, Tislatna stepped into a dark it could not recover from and was obliterated.
I can’t give away too much yet of what happened there and what it all means, but the lost island and the civilization that once thrived on it are repeatedly mentioned in Shadows at Nightfall and in subsequent entries to be released—like the upcoming book Desperation—as being the originator of many familiar societies in the Lowlands, like Ecthelowall and Zilnen. Part of the positivity towards Tislatna results from the group of survivors who were noble hearted and escaped its destruction, among them Cinaed, whose heroism was long remembered and celebrated. I alluded to the mythic status to which the name Cinaed had reached in my previous post, “What’s In a Name?” The heritage of Tislatna then becomes a source of both evil and good for the Lowlands. Those influences and how the mystery of Tislatna is unraveled will only continue to increase as the series progresses. So, there’s still a lot more to be said and revealed about this island that was inspired in part by the Biblical stories of the world prior to Noah’s flood and the Tower of Babel.
UP NEXT WEEK: AT REALM MAKERS
Brett Armstrong 
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