Life & Wisdom Quote by Peter S. Beagle

The line arrives like a fanfare you can see. Beagle takes an ordinary, even martial sound - horns - and refuses to leave it in the realm of noise. Instead, he yokes it to an image that’s both impossible and eerily precise: “rainbow masts” and “silver ships.” The effect is synesthetic on purpose. You don’t just hear the horns; you watch them crest the horizon, tall and gleaming, bringing a whole fleet of emotion with them.

What makes it work is the way the metaphor smuggles in narrative stakes. Horns “came riding in” suggests a sudden entrance, the cavalry of story arriving to change the weather of a scene. But Beagle doesn’t choose war banners or smoke; he chooses rainbows and silver. That’s a deliberate tonal alchemy: even when the moment might signal danger or pursuit, the language insists on wonder. It’s an announcement that this world runs on enchantment, not realism, and that awe will coexist with fear.

The subtext is about heralding - not just an event, but a threshold. “Masts” imply voyage and distance, “ships” imply arrival from elsewhere, and the rainbow-silver palette carries the sheen of myth, like something half-remembered from a child’s book that still knows how to cut. In Beagle’s fantasy register, beauty isn’t decorative; it’s the delivery system for inevitability. When the horns enter like that, you sense the story’s larger machinery turning, luminous and unstoppable.