The High Druid of Shannara Trilogy

It recovered and struggled up, still trying to get away from her. She grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and held it fast, holding it away from her as it tried to bite her, using teeth that were considerably sharper than her own. She shook it hard and hissed at it, and it quit trying to bite. It hung limply in her grasp for a moment, then began to chatter wildly. It spoke a language she didn’t recognize, but the cadence and tonal repetition suggested it might be a derivation of the tongues with which she was familiar. She shook her head to show she didn’t understand. The creature just kept talking, faster now, gesturing wildly. She answered, trying various Gnome dialects. It paused to listen, then shook its own head in reply and began to chatter again. It was so animated that it was bobbing up and down as it spoke, giving it the look of a disjointed puppet, its limbs manipulated by hidden strings.

She set it down and released it, pointing at it in warning to keep it from trying to flee again. It frowned at her and folded its arms over its chest, managing to look defiant and frightened at the same time. She tried a handful of Dwarf and Troll dialects, but it didn’t seem to understand those, either. Each time, it would stop and listen to her words, then start chattering away in its own language, as if through insistence and repetition she could be made to understand.

Finally, it plopped down in the grass, arms folded over its chest, eyes turned away, mouth set in a disapproving line. She saw the knife at its waist for the first time, an odd-shaped narrow blade that curved and was serrated at the tip. She saw a small pouch attached to a belt, both decorated with beads sewn into the leather. The pockets cut into the sides of its worn pants were sculpted with thread. Whatever species it was, it was advanced beyond the Spider Gnome level. By the same token, it wasn’t a member of any race she could put a name to.

She gave up on the Dwarf and Troll dialects and was about to give up on the creature, as well, thinking that it was hopeless, that she should leave it and move on, go hunt for something else. Then she decided, rather impulsively, to try speaking to it in the Elven language, even though the creature looked nothing like an Elf. But the Elves were the oldest species in the world and their language had been around the longest. The response was immediate. The creature shifted to a variation of what she was speaking at once, and she could understand him clearly.

“Stupid woman!” it snapped, the words strange-sounding in the odd dialect, but comprehensible. “Yelling at me like that. Look what you did to me! Look how far I fell! I could have broken every bone in my body!”

He rubbed his arms as if for emphasis, daring her to contradict him. She narrowed her gaze at him. “You should watch what you say to me. If I don’t like what I hear, I might break every bone anyway.”

He grimaced. “I could hurt you, if I wanted. You ought to be afraid of me.” His odd face scrunched up, and his tongue licked out like a cat’s, revealing the razor-sharp teeth. “Who are you? Are you a witch?”

She shook her head. “No, I am Ard Rhys of Paranor. I am a Druid. Where am I?”

He stared blankly at her. “What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you know where you are? Are you lost?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Tell me what you did to that Dracha. Magic, wasn’t it? I’ve never seen anything like that. If you aren’t a witch, you must be a sorceress or a Straken. Are you a Straken?”

There was another name she hadn’t encountered outside of the Druid Histories. Strakens were powerful magic wielders out of the world of Faerie, gone for thousands of years. Like the Dracha.

“Is this the Faerie world?” she asked, beginning to think it must be.

The spindly creature stared at her, head cocked. “This is the land of the Jarka Ruus. You’re inside the Dragon Line, above Pashanon. You must know that! Where is it you come from?”

“Paranor. Callahorn. The Four Lands.”

She paused with each name, searching his eyes for recognition and finding none. But the words Jarka Ruus meant something to her. She had heard them before, though she couldn’t remember where. “What are you?” she asked him. “What Race do you belong to? Are you a Troll?”

“Ulk Bog,” he announced proudly. He smiled, showing all his considerable teeth. “But I don’t have a home at present because I’m traveling. This country is too dangerous. Dragons everywhere, all sorts, and they like to eat my kind. Of course, I try to eat their eggs, so I guess it’s fair they should try to eat me. But they’re much bigger than I am, for the most part, so I have to be careful. Anyway, I don’t want to stay here anymore. Where are you going?”

She didn’t have the faintest idea, of course, since she didn’t even know where she was. She wasn’t at all sure she was going anywhere until she figured out what had happened to her. Nevertheless, she pointed west, if only to satisfy him, at the same time trying to figure out how to extract some useful information.

“Ah, Huka Flats. Good choice. Soft earth for burrows and tender rats to eat.” He hitched up his belt. “Maybe I should go with you, since you don’t seem to know the way. I know it. I’ve been everywhere.”

Ulk Bogs had disappeared with the world of Faerie, as well, she was thinking. Everything suggested she had gone back in time to the beginning of things, back before Men were created. The idea was so ridiculous that she kept searching for a better answer, but nothing else suggested itself.