The High Druid of Shannara Trilogy

“What’s wrong with you?” Weka Dart asked, leaning forward for a closer look, his ferret face wrinkling with something that could have been either suspicion or distaste. “Are you going to be sick? You look as if you might be thinking about it.”

She barely heard him. She was stunned to the point of being unable to speak. Inside the Forbidding! The words roared in her ears like the howl of a high wind, blotting out every other sound and leaving her wrapped in confusion and disbelief. It was such an impossible idea that she could not bring herself to quit looking for a way to dismiss it. No one had ever been inside the Forbidding. There was no way to get inside, for that matter. The barrier was made strong enough to keep the demons and their kind inside, but it had a similar effect on those without. There was no congress between them, not even the smallest contact.

Once, five hundred years ago, the barrier had ruptured with the failing of the Ellcrys. Grianne’s ancestor Wil Ohmsford had been instrumental in helping an Elven girl named Amberle, the Chosen of the tree, find the Bloodfire to create a new Ellcrys and restore the barrier. But other than that one time, there was no instance in recorded history of demons or humans crossing over from one realm into the other. There was simply no way for it to happen.

Yet happen it had, because she was inside the Forbidding, and she could argue against it all she wanted, but it was so. If there were Furies here, there could be no mistaking it. Weka Dart was an Ulk Bog, and all the Ulk Bogs of ancient times, of Faerie, had been sent into the Forbidding along with the other creatures who were indiscriminately predatory. The things that lived inside the Forbidding were savage and raw, unable to function in a climate of civilized behavior, unable to overcome their instincts for killing. She understood the darkness that drove such creatures, for as the Ilse Witch it had driven her, as well. When the darkness took hold, becoming the hard edge of emotions best kept buried and unexamined, there was no act a creature could not justify.

“Do you want some water? I can run for some, not far. I don’t like the way you look. Did that Dracha bite you? Are you poisoned?”

Weka Dart was pressed so close to her now that his sharp features were only inches from her own. She saw the warts and blemishes on his dark skin, where the hair failed to cover them. She saw the sharpness of his teeth and heard the hissing of his breath. It was like looking closely at a weasel.

“Back away from me,” she said, and he did so instantly, cowering slightly at the harsh sound of her voice. “There’s nothing wrong with me, Ulk Bog. I was thinking.”

Thinking of how desperate her circumstances had become. No situation she could imagine was worse. Being inside the Forbidding was a death sentence. She did not know who had found the means to place her there or how she would ever get out again, but she was the Ard Rhys, even there, and she held herself together with an iron will forged in countless struggles she had survived and her enemies had not.

She took another deep breath and looked around to reassure herself that the geography of the land about her was what she remembered it to be. It hadn’t changed. The Dragon’s Teeth formed a barrier on three sides, allowing small glimpses of grasslands and rivers beyond, all of it familiar, while north the Streleheim stretched away in bleak, misty emptiness.

She tried to reason it through. If she was inside the Forbidding, then the Forbidding was not another place entirely; it was the same place on a different plane of existence, an alternate world and history, one that had progressed little since the time of Faerie. Her world had seen an entire civilization rise and fall in a holocaust of power gone mad. This one had failed to progress beyond the time of its creation out of Elven magic, thousands of years ago. One had seen Races created out of myth, out of a time when they were real, made new again by the changes wrought in the survivors of the Great Wars. The other had seen its denizens frozen in time, until the myth was reality born of nightmare.

No wonder Weka Dart and probably most of those who lived here spoke a variation of the Elven tongue she knew from her studies. Once, all creatures had spoken the same tongue, born of the Word’s magic, given life and a chance at unity that they had tossed away.

“Have you always been the banished people?” she asked Weka Dart. “Do you keep histories of this? Does anyone?”