He entered cautiously. Shadows enfolded him. He stood in a well of darkness, and there was a whisper of death all about.
Then something moved within the gloom, detached, and took shape—a four-legged apparition, hulking and ominous. It was a moor cat, black as pitch with luminous gold eyes, there and not there, like Walker himself.
Walker froze. The moor cat looked exactly like...
Behind the cat, a man appeared, old and stooped, a translucent ghost, shimmering. As the man drew near, his features became recognizable.
“At last you’ve come, Walker,” he whispered in an anxious, hollow voice.
The Dark Uncle felt the last vestiges of his resolve fade away.
The man was Cogline.
Chapter Thirty-Three
The King of the Silver River sat in the Gardens that were his sanctuary and watched the sun melt into the western horizon. A stream of clear water trickled across the rocks at his feet and emptied into a pond from which a unicorn drank, and a breeze blew softly through the maidenhair, carrying the scent of lilacs and jonquils. The trees rustled, their leaves a shimmer of green, and birds sang contented day-end songs as they settled into place in preparation for the coming of night.
Beyond, in the world of Men, the heat was sullen and unyielding against the fall of darkness, and a pall of weariness draped the lives of the people of the Four Lands.
So must it be for now.
The eyes that could see everything had seen the death of his child and the transformation of the land of the Stone King. The Maw Grim was no more. The city of Eldwist had gone back into the earth, returned to the elements that had created it, and the land was green and fertile again. The magic of his child was rooted deep, a river that flowed invisibly about the solitary dome in which Uhl Belk was imprisoned. It would be long before his brother could emerge into the light again.
Iridescent dragonflies buzzed past him without slowing and disappeared into the twilight’s glow.
Elsewhere, the battle against the Shadowen went on. Walker Boh had invoked the magic of the Black Elfstone, as Allanon had charged him, and the Druid’s Keep had been summoned out of the mists that had hidden it for three centuries. What would the Dark Uncle make, the King of the Silver River wondered, of what he found there? West, where the Elves had once lived, Wren Ohmsford continued her search to discover what had become of them—and, more important, though she did not yet realize it, what would become of herself. North, the brothers Par and Coll Ohmsford struggled toward each other and the secrets of the Sword of Shannara and the Shadowen magic. There were those who would help and those who would betray, and all of the wheels of chance that Allanon had set in motion could yet be stopped.
The King of the Silver River rose and slipped into the waters of the pond momentarily, reveling in the cool wetness, letting himself become one with the flow. Then he emerged and passed down the Garden pathways, through stands of juniper and hemlock onto a hillock of centauries and bluebells that reflected gold about the edges of their petals with the day’s fading light. He paused there, staring out again into the world beyond.
His daughter had done well, he reflected.
But the thought was strangely bleak and empty. He had created an elemental out of the life of his Gardens and sent that elemental forth to serve his needs. She had been nothing to him—a daughter in name only, a child merely by designation. She had been only a momentary reality, and he had never intended that she be anything more.
Yet he missed her. Shaping her as he did, breathing his life into her, he had brought himself too close. The human feelings they had shared would not dissolve as easily as their human forms. She should have meant nothing to him, now that she was gone. Instead, her absence formed a void he could not seem to fill.
Quickening.
A child of the elements and his magic, he repeated. He would do the same again—yet perhaps not so readily. There was something in the ways of the creatures of the mortal Races that endured beyond the leaving of the flesh. There was a residue of their emotions that lingered. He could still hear her voice, see her face, and feel the touch of her fingers against him. She was gone from him, yet remained.
Why should it be so?
He sat there as darkness cloaked the land and wondered at himself.
Here ends Book Two of The Heritage of Shannara. Book Three, The Elf Queen of Shannara, will reveal more of the mystery of Cogline and Paranor and chronicle the efforts of Wren Ohmsford to discover what has become of the missing Westland Elves.