Indomitable: The Epilogue to The Wishsong of Shannara

Jair had no idea what he was talking about, but perked up on hearing the Druid’s name. “You knew Allanon?”


“Not when he was alive. Know him now that he’s dead, though. Your sister, she was a gift to him. She was the answer to what he needed when he saw the end coming. It’s like that for some, the gift. Maybe for you, too, one day.”

“What gift?”

“You know, I was a boy once. I was a Druid once, too.”

Jair stared at him, not quite knowing whether to accept this or not. It was hard to think of him as a boy, but thinking of him as a Druid was harder still. If the old man really was a Druid—not that Jair thought for a moment that he was—what was he doing here, out in the wilderness, living with Kimber? “I thought Allanon was the last of the Druids,” he said.

The old man snorted. “You thought a lot of things that weren’t so.” He shoved back his plate of stew, having hardly touched it. “Do you want to know what you’re doing here?”

Jair stopped eating in mid-bite. Kimber, sitting across from him, blinked once and said, “Maybe you should wait until he’s finished dinner, Grandfather.”

The old man ignored her. “Your sister thought the Ildatch destroyed,” he said. “She was wrong. Wasn’t her fault, but she was wrong. She burned it to ash, turned it to a charred ruin and that should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t. You want to sit outside while we have this discussion? The open air and the night sky make it easier to think things through sometimes.”

They went outside onto the front porch, where the sky west was turning a brilliant mix of purple and rose above the treetops and the sky east already boasted a partial moon and a scattering of stars. The old man took possession of the only rocker, and Jair and Kimber sat together on a high-backed wooden bench. It occurred to the Valeman that he needed to rub down and feed his horse, a task he would have completed by now if he had been thinking straight.

The old man rocked in silence for a time, then gestured abruptly at Jair. “Last month, on a night when the moon was full and the sky a sea of stars, beautiful night, I woke and walked down to the little pond that lies just south. I don’t know why, I just did. Something made me. I lay in the grass and slept, and while I slept, I had a dream. Only it was more a vision than a dream. I used to have such visions often. I was closer to the shades of the dead then, and they would come to me because I was receptive to their needs. But that was long ago, and I had thought such things at an end.”

He seemed to reflect on the idea for a moment, lost in thought. “I was a Druid then.”

“Grandfather,” Kimber prodded softly.

The old man looked back at Jair. “In my dream, Allanon’s shade came to me out of the netherworld. It spoke to me. It told me that the Ildatch was not yet destroyed, that a piece of it still survived. One page only, seared at the edges, shaken loose and blown beneath the stones of the keep in the fiery destruction of the rest. Perhaps the book found a way to save that one page in its death throes. I don’t know. The shade didn’t tell me. Only that it had survived your sister’s efforts and been found in the rubble by Mwellrets who sought artifacts that would lend them the power that had belonged to the Mord Wraiths. Those rets knew what they had because the page told them, a whisper that promised great things! It had life, even as a fragment, so powerful was its magic!”

Jair glanced at Kimber, who blinked at him uncertainly. Clearly, this was news to her as well. “One page,” he said to the old man, “Isn’t enough to be dangerous, is it? Unless there is a spell the Mwellrets can make use of?”

Cogline ran his hand through his wiry thatch of white hair. “Not enough? Yes, that was my thought, too. One page, out of so many. What harm? I dismissed the vision on waking, convinced it was a malignant intrusion on a peaceful life, a groundless fear given a momentary foothold by an old man’s frailness. But it came again, a second time, this time while I slept in my own bed. It was stronger than before, more insistent. The shade chided me for my indecision, for my failings past and present. It told me to find you and bring you here. It gave me no peace, not that night or after.”

He looked genuinely distressed now, as if the memory of the shade’s visit was a haunting of the sort he wished he had never encountered. Jair understood better now why Kimber felt it so important to summon him. Cogline was an old man teetering on the brink of emotional collapse. He might be hallucinating or he might have connected with the shades of the dead, Allanon or not, but whatever he had experienced, it had left him badly shaken.

“Now that I am here, what am I expected to do?” he asked.

The old man looked at him. There was a profound sadness mirrored in his ancient eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. “I wasn’t told.”

Then he looked off into the darkness and didn’t speak again.