The High Druid of Shannara Trilogy

“Sacrifices of some sort,” Kermadec observed, glancing around uneasily, his big shoulders swinging left and right, as if he were caged. He did not like being there, she knew, even with her. The place held bad memories for Trolls, even after so long. The Warlock Lord might be dead and gone, but the feel of him lingered. In the history of the Trolls, no one had done more damage to the nation’s psyche. Trolls were not superstitious in the manner of Gnomes, but they believed in the transference of evil from the dead to the living. They believed because they had experienced it, and they were wary of it happening again.

She closed her eyes and cast about with her other senses for a moment, trying to read in the air what had happened here. She tracked the leavings of a powerful magic, the workings of a sorcery that was not meant to heal or succor. A summoning of some sort, she read in the bits and pieces that remained. To what end, though? She could not determine, though the smells told of something dying, and not quickly. She looked down at the fire pit and read in the greasy smears dark purpose in the sacrifices clearly made.

“This isn’t good,” she said softly.

He stepped close. “What do you find, mistress?”

“Nothing yet. Nothing certain.” She looked up at him, into his flat, expressionless features. “Perhaps tonight, when darkness cloaks the thing that finds this dead place so attractive, we shall find out.”


She tethered Chaser some distance away, back in the rocks where he couldn’t be seen, giving him food and water and speaking soothing words to steady him against what might happen later. Afterward, she ate a cold dinner with Kermadec, watching the light fade from the sky and the twilight descend in a flat, colorless wash that enveloped like smoke. There was no sunset, no change in the look of the land and sky save an almost rushed transition from light to dark. The sensation it generated in Grianne was one of possibility draining into despair.

She pushed such dark thoughts away but could not change her feelings for the place. It was wretched ground for living things, a wasteland in which she did not belong. The pervasive feelings of hopelessness and isolation gave notice that for some transgressions there could be no redemption. If she lived another thousand years, she did not think to see a rebirth of life in the Skull Kingdom. Perhaps, given the types of life that might find purchase in such a land, it was for the best.

“Sleep,” she told Kermadec. “I will keep watch the first half of the night.”

He grunted agreement and was asleep in seconds. She envied him a rest that came so easily. She watched him for a time, his rough skin looking smooth in the darkness, his hairless body and nearly featureless face giving him the appearance of a smoothly faceted shape hewn from stone. Sleek—that was the way he struck her. Like a moor cat, big and powerful and smooth. She liked him better than almost anyone. Not so much for the way he looked as for the way he was. Direct and uncomplicated. That wasn’t to say he was slow-witted or combative; he was neither. But Kermadec didn’t complicate matters by overanalyzing and debating. When something needed doing, he spent as little time and effort as was possible in getting it done. He had a code of conduct that served him well, and she did not think he had ever varied from it. She wished her own life could be as straightforward.

Time slipped away, and Grianne watched the moon rise and the stars paint the sky in a wash of white pinpricks. The rocks around her remained silent. The fire pit, its rings of rocks looking like hunched Gnomes in the gloom, sat cold and untended. Perhaps nothing would happen this night, the one night she was here to see it happen. Perhaps whoever built the fires and created the flashes had sensed her presence and would stay away. She wondered if she could force herself to keep watch another night if nothing happened on this one. She had no good reason to do so; her presence now was generated mostly by her instinctive reaction to the possibilities of what she feared might happen, not to what actually had.

Then, as midnight approached, the fire pit abruptly flared to life. It did so without warning or reason. No one had appeared to tend it; no fuel had been laid or tinder struck. It burned sharp and fierce on nothing more than air, and Grianne was on her feet at once.

“Kermadec!”

The Rock Troll awoke and rose to stand beside her, staring at the phenomenon without speaking. The intensity of the fire increased and diminished as if the flames were breathing, as if the air were changing in some indefinable way, first lending strength to the invisible fuel, then leeching it away. All around, illuminated by tendrils of light, the jumbled rocks became ghostly spectators. Grianne eased forward cautiously, just a step or two at a time, eyes shifting back and forth among the shadows in an effort to find what was out there. Something had to be; something had to have initiated the blaze. But she could detect no life, no sign of anything living save Kermadec and herself. Someone had lit the flames from another place, someone or something that did not need to be present to work whatever magic was intended.

“Mistress!” Kermadec hissed.