The High Druid of Shannara Trilogy

In the air above them, the aeriads hummed and sang and danced on the breeze, invisible and soundless. Heedless of time’s passage, they played in the soft glow of the sunset’s red and gold and the evening’s deep indigo. They were spirits unfettered by the restrictions of the human body and the limitations of the human existence. They were sisters and friends, and the whole of the world was their playground.

One strayed momentarily, the newest of them, looking down on the young couple that stood at the edge of the ravine and spoke in soft, comforting tones, their heads bent close. The girl was telling the boy about her, and the boy was trying to understand. She knew it would be hard, that he might never come to terms with what she had done for the girl. But she had done it for herself, too—to give herself a new life, to set herself on a different path, to be reborn. She had known what she would do almost from the time the boy had spoken of the girl’s transformation and of her joy at what she had experienced. She had wanted that for herself. That the boy and the girl would make a better life together than apart was incentive to take the chance. Offer herself for the girl, a woman not so young, but deeply talented and magically enhanced, a creature Mother Tanequil could not help but covet.

The trade was simple; the change of places was done in a heartbeat and a small balance to things was set in place.

Come, sister, the others called to her.

She lingered a moment longer, thinking of what she had given up and finding she had no regrets. There was nothing of her old life that was so precious to her, nothing so compelling as even the first few moments of this new one. Too many years of struggle and travail, of heartbreaking loss and backbreaking responsibility, of failure, ruin, and death had marked the path of her life. She would never escape from it in human form. She knew that; she accepted it. But as a creature of the air she had left it all behind, a part of another life.

She watched the boy and the girl turn away and start back through the woods toward the stone bridge. Maybe they would find in their lives something of what she had failed to find in hers. She had already found something precious in her new form, something she had not known since she was six years old and living still in the house of her parents with her baby brother.

She had found freedom.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR


TERRY BROOKS is the New York Times bestselling author of more than thirty books, including the Legends of Shannara novels Bearers of the Black Staff and The Measure of the Magic; the Genesis of Shannara novels Armageddon’s Children, The Elves of Cintra, and The Gypsy Morph; The Sword of Shannara; the Voyage of the Jerle Shannara trilogy: Ilse Witch, Antrax, and Morgawr; the High Druid of Shannara trilogy: Jarka Ruus, Tanequil, and Straken; the nonfiction book Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life; and the novel based upon the screenplay and story by George Lucas, Star Wars?: Episode I The Phantom Menace?. His novels Running with the Demon and A Knight of the Word were selected by the Rocky Mountain News as two of the best science fiction/fantasy novels of the twentieth century. The author was a practicing attorney for many years but now writes full-time. He lives with his wife, Judine, in the Pacific Northwest.