The Elf Queen of Shannara

The hands tightened, hard and unyielding. “Finally, all other choices stripped from Ellenroh by the magic’s intractability and the demons’ savagery, she called the last of the Elves into the city. That was ten years ago. It marked the end of any contact with the outside world.”


“But why couldn’t the same magic that made these creatures be used to eliminate them?” Wren demanded.

“Oh, Wren, it was far too late for that.” Eowen rocked as if comforting a child. “The magic was gone!” Her eyes had a distant, ravaged look. “All magic has a source. It is no different with Elven magic. Most of it comes from the earth, a weaving together of the life that resides there. The island was the source of the magic used to create the demons and the others before them—its earth, air, and water, the elements of its life. But magic is precious and not without its limits. Time replenishes what is used, but slowly. What the Elves did not realize was that the demons, as they changed, began to have need of the magic themselves. Created from it, they now discovered they required it in order to survive. They began to systematically siphon it from the earth and the things that lived upon it, killing whatever they fed upon. They devoured it faster than it could regenerate. The island began to change, to wither, to sicken and die. It was as if it could no longer protect itself from the creatures that ravaged it, demon and Elf alike. By the time the Elves recognized the truth, not enough magic remained to make a difference. The demons had grown too numerous to be destroyed. Everything beyond the city was abandoned to them. Morrowindl survived, if barely, but it had been subverted, changed so that it was either wasteland or carnivorous jungle, so that almost everything that lived upon it killed as swiftly and surely as the demons. Nature was no longer in balance. Killeshan came awake and boiled within its cauldron. And finally the island’s magic began to dry up altogether, and that compelled the demons to lay siege to Arborlon. The scent of the Keel’s magic was irresistible. It drew them as a magnet would iron, and they became determined to feed on it.”

Wren paled. “And now they will come for us as well, won’t they? We have the Keel’s magic, all of the magic of Arborlon and the Elves, stored within the Loden, and they will seek it out.”

“Yes, Wren. They must.” Eowen’s voice was a hiss. “But that is not the worst of what I have to tell you. There is more. Listen to me. It is bad enough that the Elves made the monsters that would destroy them, that they subverted Morrowindl beyond any possible salvation, that perhaps they have destroyed themselves as a people. Ellenroh could scarcely bear to think of it, of the part she played in stealing away the island’s magic, or of her own failure to set things right again. But what devastated her was knowing why the Elves had come to Morrowindl in the first place. Yes, it was to escape the Federation and the Shadowen and all that they represented, to isolate themselves from the madness, to begin again in a new world. But, Wren, it was the Elves who ruined the old!”

Wren stared, disbelieving. “The Elves? How could that be? What are you saying, Eowen?”

The hands released her own and clasped together with white-knuckled determination, as if nothing less could persuade the red-haired seer to continue. “After the demons had claimed virtually all of Morrowindl, after it was clear that the island was lost and the Elven people had been made prisoners of their own folly, the queen had ferreted out and brought before her those who still sought to play with the power, foolish men and women who could not seem to learn from their mistakes, who persisted in thinking the magic could be mastered. Among them were those who had created the demons. She had them thrown from the walls of the city. She did so not because of what they had done but because of what they were attempting to do. They were attempting to use the magic in another way, a way that had been employed almost three hundred years earlier in the days following the death of Allanon and the disappearance of the Druids from the Four Lands.”

She took a deep breath. “Not all of those who sought to reclaim the old ways went with us to Morrowindl. Not all of those who were Elves came out of the Four Lands. A handful of the magic-wielders remained behind, disowned by their people, cast out by the Elessedil rulers.” Her voice lowered until it was almost inaudible. “That handful, Wren, created monsters of another sort.”

There was a long, terrible silence as the seer and the Rover girl faced each other in the gloom. The cold in Wren’s stomach began to snake into her limbs. “Shades!” she whispered in horror, realizing the truth now, a truth that had been hidden all this time from those summoned to the Hadeshorn by the shade of Allanon. “You’re saying that the Elves made the Shadowen!”