The giant inclined his head toward Eliot, slightly, gravely. Their kind played a deep game.
It was a funny feeling, coming back to real-time after having watched the world in slow motion. Everything looked wildly accelerated now: plants waving, clouds moving, people talking. It was a beautiful clear morning, the air an icy coolant washing over his brain, which was overheated by combat. He wasn’t angry at all, anymore. He decided he would just keep on walking—he would walk the whole half-mile back to the Fillorian encampment by himself. Why the hell not? A lot of people tried to fuss at him about his punctured shoulder, which was probably still leaking some blood, and now that the adrenaline was wearing off it had started to sting pretty furiously. It felt like the point was still stuck in him.
But he didn’t want to be fussed over. Not quite yet. Plenty of time for that. Like a lot of people, he’d had a pretty difficult childhood. But his adulthood was just getting better and better.
Well, what can I say about this?
I guess I could say that it was cut from the book in which it was originally intended to see the light of day. Too repetitious. Already covered. Unnecessary. I don’t tend to argue a lot with my editors, and especially with Lester del Rey, when I didn’t have a strong fortress of arguments in which to fling down my spears and arrows of objection.
I could say it represents the only face-to-face meeting between the two in which a conversation, of sorts, took place. The two most important figures of their respective eras, but the one was already dead and reduced to shade form, and the other was struggling with whether or not becoming a Druid was a good idea.
I could mention that this brief encounter was not uncovered by yours truly, who, in all honesty, had forgotten it even existed. Instead, it was dredged out of the mire of words written and discarded over the years by none other than Shawn Speakman, my faithful Web Druid, who thought it would be fun to include it in this otherwise fully realized anthology of stories.
Or I could admit I am uncertain about most of the above (well, not the Shawn part) and just ask you to read this short excerpt and accept it at face value. Think I’ll go with that.
— Terry Brooks
WALKER AND THE SHADE OF ALLANON
Terry Brooks
The shade of Allanon did not answer Walker at once, but remained silent and unresponsive, hovering like a dark cloud over the roiling waters of the Hadeshorn, all size and blackness against the starlit sky. Steam sprayed from the lake surface in sharp geysers, as if the dead trapped below were seeking to catch anew the breath of life. The moon was down, hidden behind the peaks that cupped the valley, a wary passerby on its way toward morning. Where he knelt at the water’s edge, solitary and motionless, silence cloaked the shattered landscape.
Walker blinked away the droplets that clung to his eyelids. In the midst of ghosts that found blind release in the legendary Valley of Shale, he must remember to see clearly. It occurred to him that coming here was a mistake, that asking for help from the dead was foolish. What help they offered was forever couched in obscure references and double meanings, words that fostered confusion rather than understanding. Better to know nothing than to be misled by false interpretation. Yet whom else could he turn to besides the shade? If even a tiny glimmering of understanding could come from their meeting this night, he must not pass it by.
Allanon stirred within his spectral trappings, cowled head inclining slightly toward the supplicant.
—Ask what you would of me—
Walker stared fixedly into the blackness of the cowl, into the void that opened through it. “I have been shown a way to return the Druids to the Four Lands, to rebuild the Council at Paranor, and to bring to pass all that Galaphile hoped to achieve in the rebirth of civilization so many years ago. A map of another land has disclosed magic born out of the Old World. The magic is the key. But the way to the magic is uncertain and marked with dangerous twists and turns. It requires a journey to an unknown land. It requires great risk of me and of those who will go with me. I would know more of what to expect.”
Wind brushed his face, hot and strangely dry, blown off the surface of the Hadeshorn in a sudden gust. It caught the robes of the shade and caused them to billow like smoke.
—If you would know the future, you would try to change it. If you would try to change it, you would damage your soul. Do you ask me to allow this—
“No. I ask you to better prepare me for the choices I will be asked to make.”
—You are a Druid. You cannot be better prepared than you already are—