UNDER THE AUTUMN TWILIGHT:
By this time, there should be no doubt in the reader's mind why this stanza was excluded from the CHRONICLES. It was the best stanza of the poem, to boot, for it was hard for a gnome of Armavir's natural humility to write about himself. The best stanza: no matter what the others say, I shall not compromise, shall not grovel!
Lines 82–86: THE LAST… THE BENIGHTED. Raistlin. Another odd fish whom the poet had little to do with at the time, having started the acquaintance on the wrong foot by making a mild joke about the eyes of this particularly humorless individual: the suggestion that if Raistlin stood on his head he could reverse the flow of Time and make us all young again was greeted with such a withering stare that for a while Armavir feared that the mage might transform him into something terribly ungnomelike — a roll-top desk or a chicken, perhaps, sent scuttling back amid the tunnels and chambers beneath Mount Nevermind, where doubtless lay many snares that had slipped from a memory damaged by both dwarf spirits and electricity. Surely Raistlin had something to do with my being here in this cistern of a cubicle, with what is now inevitably my fate as the water keeps rising, bearing the writing table higher and higher in the drowned room until I shall be crushed among table and water and stone…
But again to abandon self-pity, for the truth must be championed (and shall make me free?). Raistlin DID write the farewell to his brother that concludes Volume III of the CHRONICLES,31 and if he did not, I should be a fool to say otherwise. (Could it be that as I say this the water ceases to rise? An old pulley on the north wall of the cell, in danger of being submerged only a minute ago, remains dry and untouched above the surface of the pool — the water is still and unruffled as onyx — and for the first time I can see my reflection on the surface!) Raistlin was… by far the best of them, a man of uncommon genius, whose break with the Companions stemmed mostly from his great quest for knowledge, but also, I trust, from his sense of outrage when he saw the others begin to cover Armavir's role in the story (and now the water stands motionless — calm, dark, and limpid, thanks be to Reorx!).
As a tribute to Raistlin — a genuine tribute, knowing his understanding and merciful nature — Armavir includes within this stanza another clue as to the cruel exclusion of the poet from the CHRONICLES. Line 83,