The Elves of Cintra (Book 2 of The Genesis of Shannara)

“Perhaps they would kill all of us off first,” Angel replied. She shook her head. “How is it that these things are created? What permits them life? I believe in the Word; I have seen its power and spoken with its servants. The Word created everything. But I keep asking myself. Why did it create things like this? Why does it permit demons to exist?”


Kirisin shrugged. “In the world of Faerie, the demons and their kind were always there. What difference does it make? They exist and they threaten us. Humans have done nothing about it. Humans don’t even work to protect the world they live in like the Elves do. They don’t seem to know how to stop the demons from claiming everything. That’s why we’re where we are now.”

His anger surfaced and carried him away for a moment, and he remembered too late to whom he was speaking.

“Little K,” his sister said softly. “Angel knows.”

He stopped talking abruptly as he felt the color of his embarrassment rise from his neck into his cheeks. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean it.”

“It’s nothing.” Angel gave him a quick smile. “You meant it, and you were right to mean it. Humans have failed themselves and their world, and they are going to lose everything because of it. That’s why we’re here. Because all we can do now is pick up enough pieces to begin putting everything back together again.”

“Seems that way,” he mumbled, still ashamed of his outburst.

“Tell me about the Loden, Kirisin.”

He shook his head. “There isn’t much to tell. No one knows exactly what it does. Not even old Culph knew. It is a powerful Elfstone, mined and formed in the early days of the Faerie world like the others. It operates alone—unlike most Elfstones, which work in sets. It disappeared a long time ago, and the histories don’t say anything about it.”

“That’s odd, isn’t it?” she asked. “That there’s no mention of it at all?”

Kirisin had thought that himself more than once. A talisman of magic as powerful and important as the Loden should have had a special place in the Elven histories. Why wasn’t there any mention of it?“I don’t know why there isn’t anything written,” he admitted. He thought about it some more. “The Ellcrys said, when she spoke to me that first time, that I was to use the seeking-Elfstones to find it, then to carry the Loden to her and place her within it.”

“Maybe the Loden acts as a sort of barrier in the same way as the Ellcrys,”

Angel suggested. “But what are you supposed to do with it once you find out how to put the Ellcrys inside?”

“And what about the Elves?” Simralin finished.

There were no ready answers for any of these questions, and in the end all they could do was speculate. But it helped them pass the time and gave them a chance to examine anew the nature of their undertaking and its importance to the Elven people. Kirisin was already invested in the effort and Simralin, too, if less so. But Angel was a different story. Her commitment was tenuous, at best. She was still trying to come to terms with what she had been given to do. The boy understood her reticence and accepted it. The Elves were not her people and the battle not hers to fight. She had her own struggle against her own enemies. As a Knight of the Word, she was fighting for the human race, not for the Elves. She hadn’t even known of the existence of the Elves before Ailie came to her. She had accepted what the tatterdemalion had told her she must do, a charge given directly by the Word. It was in the nature of her service that she must do so. But that didn’t mean she had embraced it emotionally. Her charge had been a different one until now.

It wasn’t as if she could simply walk away from it without looking back, without wondering if she had made a wrong choice, without asking herself if she had jumped from bad to worse.

Kirisin would have wondered the same thing if he had been in her shoes. He would have balked at helping the humans who had done so much to destroy his world and endanger his people. He might easily have refused. He gave her credit for not doing so. She was risking every bit as much as he had in believing that what she had been asked to do was important and necessary.

But her heart was not necessarily as committed as his sister’s and his own to their undertaking, and he worried that at some point her reticence would prove a dangerous failing.

He worried, but unlike so much of what troubled him, he kept this particular worry to himself.