The Scions of Shannara

The lake was the home of the Grimpond.

Walker did not pause long, starting down into the valley almost immediately. The mist closed quickly about him as he went, filling his mouth with its metallic taste, clouding his vision of what lay ahead. He ignored the sensations that attacked him—the pressing closeness, the imagined whispers, the discomfiting deadness—and kept his concentration focused on putting one foot in front of the other. The air grew quickly cool, a damp layer against his skin that smelled of things decayed. The pines rose up about him, their numbers increasing until there was nowhere they did not stand watch. Silence cloaked the valley and there was only the soft scrape of his boots against the stone.

He could feel the eyes of the Grimpond watching.

It had been a long time.

Cogline had warned him early about the Grimpond. The Grimpond was the shade that lived in the lake below, a shade older than the world of the Four Lands itself. It claimed to predate the Great Wars. It boasted that it had been alive in the age of faerie. As with all shades, it had the ability to divine secrets hidden from the living. There was magic at its command. But it was a bitter and spiteful creature, trapped in this world for all eternity for reasons no one knew. It could not die and it hated the substanceless, empty existence it was forced to endure. It vented itself on the humans who came to speak with it, teasing them with riddles of the truths they sought to uncover, taunting them with their mortality, showing them more of what they would keep hidden than what they would reveal.

Brin Ohmsford had come to the Grimpond three hundred years earlier to find a way into the Maelmord so that she might confront the Ildatch. The shade toyed with her until she used the wishsong to ensnare it by trickery, forcing it to reveal what she wished to discover. The shade had never forgotten that; it was the only time a human had bested it. Walker had heard the story any number of times while growing up. It was only after he came north to Hearthstone to live, forsaking the Ohmsford name and legacy, that he discovered that the Grimpond was waiting for him. Brin Ohmsford might be dead and gone, but the Grimpond was alive forever and it had determined that someone must be made to pay for its humiliation. If not the one directly responsible, why, then another of that one’s bloodline would do nicely.

Cogline advised him to stay clear. The Grimpond would see him destroyed if it was given the opportunity. His parents had been given the same advice and had heeded it. But Walker Boh had reached a point in his life when he was through making excuses for who and what he was. He had come to the Wilderun to escape his legacy; he did not intend to spend the rest of his life wondering if there was something out there that could undo him. Best to deal with the shade at once. He went looking for the Grimpond. Because the shade never appeared to more than one person at a time, Cogline was forced to remain behind. When the confrontation came, it was memorable. It lasted for almost six hours. During that time, the Grimpond assailed Walker Boh with every imaginable trick and ploy at its disposal, divulging real and imagined secrets of his present and his future, showering him with rhetoric designed to drive him into madness, revealing to him visions of himself and those he loved that were venomous and destructive. Walker Boh withstood it all. When the shade exhausted itself, it cursed Walker and disappeared back into the mist.

Walker returned to Hearthstone, feeling that the matter of the past was settled. He let the Grimpond alone and the Grimpond—though it could be argued that he had no choice since he was bound to the waters of the lake—did the same to him.

Until today, Walker Boh had not been back.

He sighed. It would be more difficult this time, since this time he wanted something from the shade. He could pretend otherwise. He could keep to himself the truth of why he had come—to learn from the Grimpond the whereabouts of the mysterious Black Elfstone. He could talk about this and that, or assume some role that would confuse the creature, since it loved games and the playing of them. But it was unlikely to make any difference. Somehow the Grimpond always divined the reason you were there.

Walker Boh felt the mist brush against him with the softness of tiny fingers, clinging insistently. This was not going to be pleasant.