The High Druid of Shannara Trilogy

They began to climb, working their way through the rubble-strewn foothills until they had reached the base of the mountains. There, the terrain turned steeper and more treacherous. There were no signs of passage, no marks on the rocks or wearing down of the earth. The pathway she knew to be there in her own world was not there in the Forbidding, and she was forced to blaze it on her own. Perhaps no one had ever come that way before. Weka Dart trailed her with less enthusiasm than he had displayed on the flats, grumbling and muttering the entire way. She ignored him. It had been his choice to come. She was no happier than he was to have to break the trail.

It was not long before they heard the wailing. The sound was unmistakable, a low moaning that might have been just the wind or something alive and in pain. It rose and fell in steady cadence, trailing off entirely at times, only to return seconds later. She tried to ignore it but found it impossible to do so. Changes in pitch and tone set her teeth on edge. The sound raked the rocks of the pass, tunneled deep into its crevices, and slithered down its gaps. Weka Dart hissed in dismay and frustration and covered his ears with his hands. When she looked back at him, his teeth were bared.

The shadows appeared soon after that, sliding out of splits in the walls and from behind rocks. They were not cast as shadows should be, but moved independently of the light, separating themselves from solid objects in ways that should not have been possible. They flowed across the pass, crooked black stains that tracked her progress like predators. When they touched her, their blackness trailed across her skin with icy fingers.

She knew instinctively what was happening. She was being told to turn back. She could feel the warning in the touch of the shadows and hear it in the sound of the wailing. But she ignored it, as she knew she must, and continued on.

By nightfall, they reached a break in the rocks that opened through a thick curtain of gloom and mist to a hole in the sky. Grianne Ohmsford stared in surprise, then realized that the sky was ink black and empty of stars or moon. There was simply nothing there. She walked forward, unable to believe she was seeing correctly.

Beyond the break in the rocks, where the mist and gloom fell away, she found herself standing on a rise that looked out over the Valley of Shale.

It was as she remembered it and yet not. The sharp-edged ebony stones were the same, strewn across the empty slopes like shards of polished glass. But a wall of mist enclosed the valley, a wall so deep and so high that she could see nothing save the black hole of the sky above. The mountains had vanished. The world had disappeared.

All that remained was the Hadeshorn, pooled at the bottom of the valley, its still waters shimmering dully in the deep gloom. Its flat, mirrored surface gave off a faintly greenish light that reflected from the pieces of stone. Mist rose off its surface like steam, but no warmth was to be found in those waters. Even from where she stood, Grianne could feel that the lake was as cold as winter and as lethal as death. Nothing lived there that hadn’t crossed over into the netherworld long ago.

Weka Dart scuttled up behind her and peered about. “This place is evil. Why are we here?”

“Because answers to my questions are to be found in the waters of that lake,” she replied.

“Well, ask your questions quickly then, and let’s be gone!”

The wailing began anew, low and insistent, seeping from the stones and filtering through the air. The shadows reappeared, taking form this time, some familiar, some not, swirling about them like phantoms come to haunt. There were no voices, no faces, no human presence, and yet it seemed as if life might be embodied in the shadows and in the wailing, bereft of substance and soul, trapped in the ether. The sounds and the shadows responded to each other, speeding and slowing, rising and falling, a symbiosis that reflected a terrible dependence.

“Straken, do what you must, but do it quickly!” Weka Dart urged, and there was fear in his voice.

She nodded without looking at him. There was no reason to wait, nothing to be gained by deliberation. She could not know what waited for her when she summoned the spirits of the dead. It might be different here than in the Four Lands. It might be lethal.

It might be her only hope.

Resolved, she started down.





TWENTY-ONE


She felt the presence of the dead almost IMMEDIATELy. They had assumed the forms of the shadows that flitted about her and taken on the voices that wailed from the rocks. They were a part of the air she breathed. As she descended the slopes, she found them all about her, pressing close, trying to recapture something of the corporeal existence they had left behind in crossing over into the netherworld. Shades felt that absence, she knew. Even dead, they remembered the substance of life.