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

You can do this, it insisted.

Helen Rice called back those she had been talking to when the guard had brought Hawk to her and told them what she intended. There was grumbling and more than a few objections, but she overrode them all. She told one of the men, a big fellow with a shock of red hair whom she called Riff, to gather two dozen of their best to take to the bridge. He nodded without argument and left to do as she asked.

Fifteen minutes later, they were marching down the riverbank toward the bridge. The day had turned darker still, the clouds thickening and the air dampening as the promise of a fresh storm grew stronger. The wind had picked up and was blowing dust and debris everywhere, and it forced the company to walk with their heads bowed and their eyes all but shut. Hawk walked with Tessa and Cheney in the forefront of the company next to Helen Rice. His thoughts were of other times and places, of how he had walked the streets of Pioneer Square with the Ghosts not so long ago, carrying prods and viper-pricks, living in the ruins of their elders, street kids trying to stay alive.

How fast it had all changed. Everyone from that time save Tessa and Cheney was either dead or lost. He couldn’t even be sure he would see the other Ghosts again, although he believed in his heart that he would. But he knew that if he did, he would see them and they him as a different person—as this new creature, this mix of boy and gypsy morph, of flesh and blood and magic, and it would not be the same.

It would not ever be the same.

“What are you going to do?” Tessa whispered to him.

He shook his head. How could he respond when he didn’t know the answer? And yet, he almost did. He could feel the tingle of the finger bones against his body where they nestled in his pocket, a clear indication that something was happening. He could sense the transformation even as it happened, a shift from what was familiar to something entirely new and different, something that lacked any recognizable frame of reference. It was an awakening of a force that had lain dormant inside him—for how long, he couldn’t say. Perhaps only since his visit to the gardens of the King of the Silver River. Perhaps all his life. But it was there, and it was real, and it was growing by the second.

He tried to identify what it was. At first, he couldn’t.

Then all at once he understood. It was in the way his senses were responding to his surroundings. He could smell the earth, dark and green and mysterious, a well of living things forming a chain of life that stretched as far as his mind could conceive. The smell was of each of them, and he could sort them through and identify them in a way he had never been able to do before. He could put names to them; he could visualize their shapes and uses.

But that was only the beginning. He could taste the wind.

He could savor it as if it were food placed in his mouth. He could taste the elements of the storm as they roiled and surged through the clouds overhead, metallic and rough. Thunder and lightning, distant to the point of being barely discernible, were sharp and raw against his palate. Electricity jumped off his skin in invisible sparks, small jolts that he could feel connecting to the tingling of his mother’s finger bones, as if they shared a commonality, an origin. He could hear things, too. Things that no one made of flesh and blood should have been able to hear. The whine of limbs caught in the rush of the wind, straining to keep from breaking. The whisper of grasses complaining of the same. The rattle of bark. None of it close enough to be seen, all of it so distant that the sounds should have been undetectable. Yet he could hear.

More baffling, he could hear the groan of the earth herself from deep inside where none of what was happening on the surface had any bearing. Plates shifted and a molten core bubbled and spit, and the heat rose to mix with the cool, causing expansion and contraction, forming and re-forming, the birth of new life and the death of old. He could almost reach out and touch what he could smell and hear and taste and feel, as if his arms extended to the lines of power that ringed the earth and were joined with them.

He knew all this without having been schooled even in the possibilities. He knew from his own transformation, from the way he recognized how he was different, how he had been remade in his visit to the gardens of the old man.