The Scions of Shannara

Allanon’s visage shimmered and faded in the half-light, replaced by Walker’s own. The Grimpond emitted a hollow laugh. “I am you, Walker Boh. Nothing more and nothing less. Do you recognize yourself?”


His face went through a flurry of transformations—Walker as a child, as a boy, as a youth, as a man. The images came and went so quickly that Walker could barely register them. It was somehow terrifying to watch the phases of his life pass by so quickly. He forced himself to remain calm.

“Will you speak with me, Grimpond?” he asked.

“Will you speak with yourself?” came the reply.

Walker took a deep breath. “I will. But for what purpose should I do so? There is nothing to talk about with myself. I already know all that I have to say.”

“As do I, Walker. As do I.”

The Grimpond shrank until it was the same size as Walker. It kept his face, taunting him with it, letting it reveal flashes of the age that would one day claim it, giving it a beaten cast as if to demonstrate the futility of his life.

“I know why you have come to me,” the Grimpond said suddenly. “I know the private-most thoughts of your mind, the little secrets you would keep even from yourself. There need be, no games between us, Walker Boh. You are surely my equal in the playing of them, and I have no wish to do battle with you again. You have come to ask where you must go to find the Black Elfstone. Fair enough. I will tell you.”

Immediately, Walker mistrusted the shade. The Grimpond never volunteered anything without twisting it. He nodded in response, but said nothing.

“How sad you seem, Walker,” soothed the shade. “No jubilation at my submission, no elation that you will have what you want? Is it so difficult then to admit that you have dispensed with pride and self-resolution, that you have forsaken your lofty principles, that you have been won over after all to the Druid cause?”

Walker stiffened in spite of himself. “You misread matters, Grimpond. Nothing has been decided.”

“Oh, yes, Dark Uncle! Everything has been decided! Make no mistake. Your life weaves out before my eyes as a thread straight and undeviating, the years a finite number, their course determined. You are caught in the snare of the Druid’s words. His legacy to Brin Ohmsford becomes your own, whether you would have it so or not. You have been shaped!”

“Tell me, then, of the Black Elfstone,” Walker tried.

“All in good time. Patience, now.”

The words died away into stillness, the Grimpond shifting within its covering of mist. Daylight had faded into darkness, the gray turned black, the moon and stars shut away by the valley’s thick haze. Yet there was light where Walker stood, a phosphorescence given off by the waters beneath the air on which the Grimpond floated, a dull and shallow glow that played wickedly through the night.

“So much effort given over to escaping the Druids,” the Grimpond said softly. “What foolishness.” Walker’s face dissipated and was replaced by his father’s. His father spoke. “Remember, Walker, that we are the bearers of Allanon’s trust. He gave it to Brin Ohmsford as he lay dying, to be passed from one generation to the next, to be handed down until it was needed, sometime far, far in the distant future . . .”

His father’s visage leered at him. “Perhaps now?”

Images flared to life above him, borne on the air as if tapestries threaded on a frame, woven in the fabric of the mist. One after another they appeared, brilliant with color, filled with the texture and depth of real life.

Walker took a step back, startled. He saw himself in the images, anger and defiance in his face, his feet positioned on clouds above the cringing forms of Par and Wren and the others of the little company who had gathered at the Hadeshorn to meet with the shade of Allanon. Thunder rolled out of a darkness that welled away into the skies overhead, and lightning flared in jagged streaks. Walker’s voice was a hiss amid the rumble and the flash, the words his own, spoken as if out of his memory. I would sooner cut off my hand than see the Druids come again! And then he lifted his arm to reveal that his hand, indeed, was gone.