A Half-Elf Boy, A Twilight Colt, and A Goddess Named Zandilar

Before we hit the actual chapters, the book opens with two documents from Candlekeep. The first is a history of the Simbul, Alassra Shentrantra. The second is study notes about a forgotten goddess named Zandilar. Both are important, so let me cover them quick.

The Prologue: Who Is The Simbul?

Alassra Shentrantra is the sixth of the Seven Chosen Sisters, daughters of Dornal and Elue Shundar, created by the goddess Mystra. She was orphaned before age two. Elminster dumped her with the Witches of Rashemen, told them she was an orphan with no siblings. Both lies.

She left Rashemen at sixteen. Spent decades roaming Faerun collecting spells. Discovered she couldn’t age. Visited outer planes no human had survived. Became a master of magic. And somewhere in all that, she lost most of her humanity.

Then she fell in love with a mage named Lailomun Zerad. He was an initiate in a magic school that forbade relationships with freelance wizards. His mentor, a woman who owned her students outright, found out. Alassra showed up to their meeting place and found a rose-thorn branch on his pillow. He was dead.

She nearly destroyed his entire homeland in revenge. But Mystra stepped in, and after a month-long confrontation in the planes, Alassra became one of the Chosen. She went to Aglarond, apprenticed herself to the king’s sister Ilione, and poured all that rage into defending the kingdom against Thay. When Ilione died, Alassra became queen. The Simbul. Respected, feared, rarely loved.

The Prologue Part 2: Who Is Zandilar?

This part is written as study notes by a Candlekeep apprentice named Mehgrin, who had a headache. (I love that detail.)

Zandilar was a goddess worshiped by the original humans of the Yuirwood, way back when they lived in lakeside huts and hunted with stone spears. Depictions showed her either naked and dancing, or running with horses while hunters threw spears.

When the Sy-Tel’Quessir (green elves) came to the Yuirwood, they absorbed Zandilar into their own worship. To them, she was the goddess of passion and romance, depicted with a cat instead of a horse. The original humans disappeared.

Then the elves got into wars with goblins and drow. Won the wars, but did terrible things to win. Started forgetting their own history. Started dying out. When humans came back to the Yuirwood, the Yuir elves were nearly gone. And Zandilar was gone with them. Nobody knows if she’s dead, sleeping, or just waiting.

Mehgrin thinks Zandilar could come back if the Cha’Tel’Quessir wanted her to. But she also wonders if a goddess who’s been gone that long would still be the same goddess.

That last line is quietly ominous. Keep it in mind.

Chapter 1: A Colt Is Born

We open in the village of Sulalk, on the edge of the Yuirwood. It’s the Year of the Staff, 1366 DR.

Bro is exhausted. He’s been up six nights in a row doing birthing duty in the farm shed, because that’s what farmer’s stepsons do. He’s seventeen, half-elf, and living in a fully human village with his mother Shali, his human stepfather Adentir (everyone calls him Dent), and his four-year-old half-sister Tay-Fay.

Here’s the thing about Bro’s family situation. His mother is Cha’Tel’Quessir. She left the Yuirwood after Bro’s father Rizcarn died falling from a tree. She couldn’t handle the memories and couldn’t die, because she had a son to raise. So she came to Sulalk and married Dent, a human farmer. A good man. A simple man. The kind of honest and decent that Bro can’t help resenting, because being around Dent makes him feel disloyal to his dead father.

Shali brings Bro cold porridge and calls him Ember, his boyhood name. Everyone else calls him Bro, a crude shortening of Ebroin, because humans are uncomfortable with Cha’Tel’Quessir names. She touches his hair, exposing his very elven ears. He shakes his hair back over them. She flinches. He feels shame.

This is all so well observed. The tiny gestures that carry years of tension. Bro has his father’s dark, forest-shadowed skin and pointed ears. His mother has human-fair skin and round ears. They’re both half-elf, but they look nothing alike. That’s just how it works for the Cha’Tel’Quessir. Family resemblance is random.

Shali mentions the foal: Dent says it’s Bro’s if it’s a colt. She laughs a brittle laugh. A colt won’t keep Bro out of the Yuirwood. They both know he’s leaving. They both know she’s never going back. The knowledge aches between them.

Then Tay-Fay comes running down the path, stumbling, lunging for Bro’s knees, spilling porridge everywhere. She’s four. She’s spoiled. She’s a thorough pest. And she’s the reason Bro hasn’t left Sulalk yet.

I love that. Not loyalty to his mother. Not obligation to his stepfather. It’s his little half-sister, this human child with a Cha’Tel’Quessir name she pronounces as Tay-Fay, who doesn’t even know yet that she doesn’t look like her brother.

The mare foals. It’s a colt. Twilight-colored, which Dent has never seen before. Bro admits he once stole the mare and rode her to the Yuirwood. They met no one. If Old Erom’s stud horse didn’t sire this foal, he doesn’t know what did. The words aren’t lies, but they aren’t truth either.

Dent says: “No good comes from the lies a man tells or the secrets he keeps from his kin.”

Bro almost snaps back “You’re not my kin!” but doesn’t. Because he’s starting to see Dent the way his mother sees him: as different from Rizcarn as night from day, but not worse. Just different. And that realization, that reconciliation might be possible, is exactly why Bro can’t allow it. He maintains his arrogance because the alternative is accepting this life, and he can’t do that.

He walks away. Dent calls after him: “Will you be back?”

Bro hunches his shoulders and keeps walking.

Zandilar Appears

Bro goes to sit under a great tree near the path. He tries to listen for Relkath, Lord of Trees, the way his father taught him. Relkath is so deep in time and memory that listening for him is like listening for one raindrop in a storm. But Rizcarn always said, if enough Cha’Tel’Quessir listen, he’ll hear their faith.

Bro can remember the facts of his father. The copper-green skin, raven hair, dark eyes, ivory teeth. The mocking laughter. The moment he fell from the tree. But he can’t fit the living pieces together anymore. He’s lost the feeling of him.

Then he hears a woman’s laughter. The name “Zandilar” on the air. He feels breath on his neck. Fingers in his hair. He pulls his knife.

And he sees her. A slender apparition in silver and gold, hovering above the grass, riding a twilight horse whose black legs disappear in shadow.

“Come dance with Zandilar in the Yuirwood, fine young man. Come when you’re ready. I’ll wait for you in the Sunglade!”

She gallops south toward the forest and vanishes after three strides.

Bro whispers “Sunglade.” The oldest stone circle in the Yuirwood, older than the Cha’Tel’Quessir themselves. His pulse quiets. He’s not scared anymore. He’s fallen in love, just like his mother predicted. In two years, when the twilight colt can carry him, he’ll ride to the Sunglade. He names the colt: Zandilar’s Dancer.

Meanwhile, in Shadowdale

Hours later, the Simbul wakes up in Elminster’s bed. She mutters about Zandilar. She caught the dream from Aglarond, saw the foal, saw the half-elf youth her mirror calls Ember.

What follows is a conversation between two people who know everything, trying to figure out why this matters. Elminster fills in the history: Zandilar was a goddess of the primal forest humans, before the elves came. Horses ran in that old forest. The Cha’Tel’Quessir are looking beyond the elven Seldarine gods, back to those older powers, for gods they can make their own.

Then Elminster says the quiet part. Half-elves have no homeland anywhere in the world except the Yuirwood. Nowhere else can they look at their children and their parents and see people like themselves. The Cha’Tel’Quessir aren’t trying to start a war. They’re trying to not disappear.

Alassra goes quiet. Her mother, Elue Shundar, was a half-elf. She never saw herself in the ones she loved. Elminster accidentally hit a nerve he forgot was there.

Chapter 2: The Mirror

Two years later. The Year of the Banner, 1368 DR. The Simbul is in her tower in Velprintalar, doing her daily intelligence sweep with her quicksilver scrying mirror.

This chapter is basically the Simbul doing her job, and it’s fascinating. The mirror shows her abstract blotches for each enemy. She’s learned to read them over five years. Szass Tam, the lich, is still licking his wounds from a failed ritual. Mythrell’aa, Zulkir of Illusion, is the one who killed Lailomun. Alassra’s hatred for her has no limit. She keeps a rose-thorn branch sealed in glass on a shelf, the death token Mythrell’aa left on Lailomun’s pillow.

Then there’s Aznar Thrul (marked by a black spider web) and the conjuror Nevron (a “weeping smear” who blames himself for everything because he’s too scared to blame anyone else). Each zulkir has their own abstract signature on the quicksilver.

The Simbul ends every session with the same ritual question: “Show me Enchantment.”

And there he is. Lauzoril. The only Thayan face the mirror ever reveals. She’s never met him in person. He’s young for a zulkir. Handsome. Frost-streaked blond hair. Green eyes that seem to stare right at her through the quicksilver, smiling like he knows she’s watching.

There’s a line here that got me: “Time was, before Lailomun and Aglarond, when those eyes would have drawn Alassra Shentrantra like a magnet.” If this were two hundred years ago, they might not be enemies. At least, they wouldn’t have started as enemies.

But it’s 1368, not 1168. And the Simbul banishes his face and moves on.

It’s also her birthday. She’s 602. Elminster sent her ancient scrolls as a gift instead of coming in person. She wants him there because she wants a child, and he’s the only candidate she’d consider. Mystra’s Chosen don’t age, and they don’t have children easily. Only thirteen grandchildren in six centuries, and twelve of those are her sister Alustriel’s sons. But her sister Dove recently had a baby, so there’s hope.

One of Alustriel’s sons, Boesild, shows up for a birthday dinner. But he’s really there because he killed two Red Wizards in the port city of Nethra. One killed the other with a cobblestone (no magic), then attacked Boesild the same way. The dead woman carried a token so well-cloaked that even the Simbul’s mirror couldn’t have detected her.

This is a big deal. Red Wizards who don’t use magic, who peel off their tattoos, who can’t be detected. The Simbul can’t track what she can’t sense.

The dead man’s token traces back to Lauzoril. Someone is hunting his spies.

The chapter ends with the Simbul checking on Zandilar’s Dancer and Ember through her mirror. Two years have passed. Bro and Dent finally broke the colt this summer. The Simbul’s been watching, growing impatient. She planned to send Rashemaar horsemen if they took much longer. Now she’s going to Sulalk herself to buy the colt, because if a horse trader gets there first, she’ll lose it. And she wants the colt as bait. Get it in her stables, and Elminster’s curiosity will bring him to Aglarond. And once he’s there…

She plans to reach the village in late morning. The four traders she spotted in the mirror have been drinking heavily. She’ll arrive with time to spare.

My Thoughts

Two chapters in and I’m already sold on the character work. Bro is such a specific kind of lonely. Not the dramatic kind. The quiet kind where you’re surrounded by people who care about you and you still feel like a stranger. The detail about Tay-Fay being the reason he stays is perfect. It’s not duty. It’s not guilt. It’s love for this little kid who doesn’t even understand yet that the world will eventually sort her away from her brother.

The Simbul is wild. She’s a 600-year-old shapeshifter queen who talks to herself, burns her own clothes with mercury, can’t remember which of her twelve nephews is which, and wants a baby so badly she’s scheming to lure Elminster to Aglarond with a horse. She’s simultaneously the most powerful person in this story and the most emotionally messy. Lynn Abbey clearly loves writing her.

And Lauzoril hasn’t even gotten a POV chapter yet, but his presence is already everywhere. The face the mirror always shows. The green-eyed smile. The spy whose agents are being hunted. This is setup.

The Zandilar stuff is also quietly brilliant. A forgotten goddess from a people who forgot her. Trying to come back through a half-elf boy and a twilight horse. But the Candlekeep apprentice’s question lingers: what if she’s been gone too long? What if she comes back as something different?

Good start. Things are about to get complicated.

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Book Details

• Title: The Simbul’s Gift
• Author: Lynn Abbey
• Series: The Nobles, Book 6
• Setting: Forgotten Realms (D&D)
• ISBN: 0-7869-0763-0