The High Druid of Shannara Trilogy

Something had happened.

Still wrapped in cotton that filled her head and mouth, that bound up her thoughts and clogged her reason, she tried to move her arms and legs. She could do so, but only with great effort. She was terribly weak and her body was responding as if she had slept not for one night but for a hundred. She brought one hand to her breast and found she was still wearing her nightclothes, but no blankets covered her. The air smelled stale and dead, and she could not feel even the smallest trace of a breeze. Yet where she slept within the towers of Paranor, there was always a breeze and the air smelled of the trees, fresh and green.

Where was she?

The softness of her sleeping pad and comforter were gone. She felt hard ground beneath her bare arms; she smelled the earth. Her panic returned, threatening to overwhelm her, but she forced it down. She had no patience for it and no intention of giving it power over her. She was not harmed; she was still whole. Deep breaths, one after the other, calmed and steadied her.

She opened her eyes, peeling back the layers of deep sleep into which she had sunk, squinting into hazy gray light. It was night still. She was staring at a darkened sky that domed overhead in a vast leaden canopy. Yet something was wrong. The sky was cloudless, but empty of moon and stars. Nor was the sun in evidence. The world was cast in the sullen tones of a storm’s approach, shrouded in layers of silence, in hushed tones of expectation.

It must be twilight, she decided. She had slept longer than she thought. The sun was down, the moon not yet up, and the stars not yet out—that would explain the strange sky.

The weasel voices were gone, a figment of her imagination. She listened for them and heard nothing, either in her mind or in the real world. But there was no birdsong either, or buzzing of insects, or rustle of wind in the trees, or ripple of water in a stream, or any sound at all save the pounding of her heart.

It took her a while, but she finally forced herself to move, rolling to her side and then into a sitting position, wrapping her arms about her drawn-up knees to keep herself in place. Slowly, her vision sharpened from a watery haze to clarity, and the spinning that had begun when she levered herself upright faded.

She looked around. She sat in a ragged, blasted landscape, surrounded by trees that were wintry and thick with withered leaves. The trees had the look of blight about them, sickened so that they could no longer thrive. Because she was sitting on a high piece of ground overlooking several valleys and, further out, a river, she could see that the forest extended for miles in all directions, bleak and unchanging. Farther out still, at the edges of her vision, mountains loomed stark and barren against the skyline.

Paranor was nowhere in evidence. Nor was there any sign of anything else man-made—no buildings, no bridges, no traffic on the river, not even a road. No people. No life. Seemingly, she was alone in this empty, alien world.

And yet …

She took a second look around, a more careful look, seeing her surroundings with a fresh eye and, to her surprise, recognizing what she saw. At first, she couldn’t believe it. She was still struggling with the idea that somehow she had been transported in her sleep—drug induced, she was certain—to a strange and terrible place, all for reasons that were not yet apparent. Disoriented and confused, she had misread what was now patently clear. The land she was looking at, although now turned lifeless and empty, was the land she had gone to sleep in last night.

She was still in Callahorn, in the Four Lands.

Yet it was not the Callahorn she knew and, from what she could see of it, only a ruined shell of the Four Lands.

She sat staring off into the distance, her gaze shifting from feature to feature to make certain. She took note of the Dragon’s Teeth, their jagged outline unmistakable, as familiar to her by then as her own face. And there, a glimpse of the Mermidon, south and west where the mountains broke apart. The plateau on which she sat was where the Druid’s Keep had stood. North, south, east, and west, the geography was just as it had been for thousands of years.

But blasted and leeched of life, a corpse of the sort she had thought herself to be on waking.

And where was Paranor?

She could reach only one conclusion. Either she had awakened in the aftermath of the Great Wars or gone into a future in which a similar catastrophe had occurred. But that was impossible.