The First King of Shannara

They left the company and began a slow, cautious exploration of the garden’s perimeter. The walkway was broad and unobstructed, so they were able to keep a wary eye in all directions as they proceeded. The garden ran for several hundred feet down one side, another hundred across, then several hundred back again. On each side, it looked the same — flowers along its border, trees and vines within. There were no paths. There were no indications of other life. There was no sign of the Black Elfstone.

When they were back where they started, Tay walked over to Vree Erreden once more. The locat was conscious again and crouched next to Preia. His eyes were open, and he was staring fixedly at the garden, although it seemed to Tay that he was looking at something else entirely.

Tay knelt beside him. “Are you certain the Black Elfstone is here?” he asked quietly.

The locat nodded. “Somewhere in that maze,” he whispered, his voice rough and thick with fear. His eyes shifted suddenly to Tay. “But you must not go in there! You will not come out again, Tay Trefenwyd! What wards the Elfstone, what lives in this place, waits for you!”

One hand came up to knot before his pain-etched face. “Listen to me! You cannot stand against it!”

Tay rose and walked over to Jerle Shannara. “I want you to do something,” he said. He was careful to make certain Vree Erreden could not hear. “Call the other Hunters over. Leave Preia with the locat.”

Jerle studied him a moment, then beckoned the remaining Elven Hunters to his side. When they were gathered about, he looked questioningly at Tay.

“I want you to take hold of my arms,” he told them. “Two on each side. Take hold, and no matter what I say or do, you are to keep hold. Do not release me. Do not react to anything I say. Do not even look at me if you can help it. Can you do that?”

The Elven Hunters looked at one another and nodded. “What are you going to do?” Jerle demanded.

“Use Druid magic to find what lies within the garden,” Tay answered. “I will be all right if you remember to do as I said.”

“I’ll remember,” his friend answered. “We all will. But I don’t like this much.”

Tay smiled, his heart pounding. “I don’t like it much either.”

He closed his eyes then and washed the others of the company from his consciousness. Gathering his magic to him, he went down inside himself. There, deep within the core of his being, he formed of the magic an image of himself, a thing of spirit and not substance, and dispatched it forth in a long, slow exhale of his breath.

He emerged from his corporeal body an invisible wraith, a bit of ether against the pale gray light of the ancient fortress. He slipped past Jerle Shannara and the Elven Hunters, past Preia Starle and Vree Erreden, toward the thick, green tangle of the silent garden. As he went, he came to sense more clearly the magic buried there. Old, wily, and established, it rooted deeper than the trees and vines that concealed it. It was the entity to which the lines of power that warded this fortress were attached. They grew from it as gossamer threads, entwining stone and iron, reaching from outer walls to tallest spires, from deepest cellars to highest battlements. They stretched across the chasm of the mountains where they breached against the sky, a vast concentration of thought and feeling and strength. He came up against their webbing and eased his way carefully past, sliding by without touching to continue on.

Then he was within the garden, wending his way through its maze, into the lush mustiness of earth and the sweet tang of leaves and vines. Everywhere, the garden was the same, deep and secret and enveloping. He sailed weightless and substanceless on a current of air, avoiding the lines of power that stretched everywhere, doing nothing to trigger a disturbance that might alert whatever watched to his presence.

He had penetrated so far into the garden that he thought he must be close to passing all the way through when he encountered an unexpected tightening of the lines of power at a place where the light seemed to diminish and the shadows to encroach once more.

Here, the slender trees and vines disappeared. Here, darkness held sway. Bare earth lay revealed in a space where nothing grew and the diffuse light was absorbed as if water soaked into a sponge.

Something unseen throbbed with the vibrancy and consistency of a beating heart, layered in protective magic, wrapped in blanketing power.

Tay Trefenwyd eased close, peering into the suffocating shadows, stealing past the warding lines. Within his guise, he stilled himself, and even the beating of his pulse, the whisper of his breath, and the shudder of his heart slowed to silence. He withdrew all but the smallest part of himself and became one with the darkness.

Then he saw it. Resting on an ancient metal frame into which runes had been scrolled and strange creatures wrought was a gem as black as ink, so impenetrable that no light reflected from its smooth surface. Opaque, depthless, radiating power that was beyond anything Tay Trefenwyd had imagined possible, the Black Elfstone waited.

For him.