The First King of Shannara

After leaving Bremen, Tay Trefenwyd proceeded west along the Mermidon through the mountains that formed the southern arm of the Dragon’s Teeth. Sunset arrived, and he camped for the night still within their shelter, then set out again at daybreak. The new day was clear and mild, last night’s winds having swept the land clean, the sun dazzling. The Elf worked his way down out of the foothills to the grasslands below the Streleheim and prepared to cross. Ahead, he could see the forests of the Westland, and beyond, their tips coated in white, the peaks of the Rock Spur. Arborion was another day’s walk, so he traveled at a leisurely pace, his thoughts occupied by all that had happened since Bremen’s arrival at Paranor.

Tay Trefenwyd had known Bremen for almost fifteen years, longer even than Risca. He had met him at Paranor, before his banishment, Tay newly arrived from Arborion, a Druid in training. Bremen had been old even then, but with a harder edge to his personality and a sharper tongue as well. Bremen in those days had been a firebrand burning with truths self-evident to him but incomprehensible to everyone else. The Druids at Paranor had dismissed him as being just this side of mad. Kahle Rese and one or two others valued his friendship and listened patiently to what he had to say, but the rest mostly looked for ways to avoid him.

Not Tay. From the first moment they met, Tay had been mesmerized. Here was someone who believed it was important — even necessary — to do more than talk about the problems of the Four Lands. It wasn’t sufficient simply to study and converse on issues; it was necessary to act on them as well. Bremen believed that the old ways were better, that the Druids of the First Council had been right in involving themselves in the progress of the Races. Noninvolvement was a mistake that would end up costing everyone dearly. Tay understood and believed. Like Bremen, he studied the old lore, the ways of the faerie creatures, and the uses of magic in the world before the Great Wars. Like Bremen, he accepted that power once subverted was twice as deadly, and that the rebel Druid Brona lived on in another form and would return again to subvert the Four Lands. It was an unpopular and dangerous view, and in the end it cost Bremen his place among the Druids.

But before that happened, he made an ally of Tay. The two formed an immediate bond, and the older man took the younger for his pupil, a teacher with a store of knowledge so vast that it defied cataloging. Tay did the tasks and completed the studies that were assigned him by the Council and his elders, but his spare time and enthusiasm were reserved almost exclusively for Bremen. Though exposed from an early age to the peculiar history and lore of their race, few of the Elves at Paranor who had taken up the Druid pledge were as open as Tay to the possibilities that Bremen suggested. But then, few were as talented. Tay had begun to master his magic skills even before he arrived at Paranor, but under Bremen’s tutelage he progressed so rapidly that soon no one, save his mentor, was his equal. Even Risca, after his arrival, never reached the level that Tay attained, too wedded, perhaps, to his martial skills to embrace fully the concept that magic was an even more potent weapon.

Those first five years were exciting ones for the young Elf, and his thinking was shaped irrevocably by what he learned. Most of the skills he mastered and the knowledge he gained he kept secret, forced to do so by the Druid ban against personal involvement in the use of magic except as an abstract study. Bremen thought the ban foolish and misguided, but he was in the minority always, and at Paranor the Council’s decisions governed all. So Tay studied privately the lore that Bremen was willing to share, keeping it close to his heart and concealed from other eyes. When Bremen was exiled and chose to travel west to the Elves to pursue his studies there, Tay asked to go, too. But Bremen said no, not forbidding, but requesting that he reconsider. Risca was of a like mind, but for both there were more important tasks, the old man argued. Stay at Paranor and be my eyes and ears. Work to master your skills and to persuade others that the danger of which I have warned is real. When it is time for you to leave, I will come back for you.