Walker was appalled. How could this be happening? How could the Crimpond be both this thing he had come to subdue and the avatar imprisoned in Darklin Reach? How could it be in two places at once? It didn’t make sense! The Druids hadn’t created the Grimpond. Their magics were diverse and opposed. Yet the voice, the movement, and the feel of the thing...
The shadow before him was growing larger, approaching.
I am your death. Walker Boh Are you prepared to embrace me?
And abruptly the vision was back in Walker’s mind, as clear as the moment it had first appeared to him—the shade of Allanon behind him, holding him fast, the dark shadow before him, the promise of his death, and the castle of the Druids all about.
Why don’t you flee? Flee from me!
It was all he could do to keep from screaming. He groped away from it, beseeching help from any quarter. Cogline’s voice was gone, buried in black fear. Resolve and purpose were scattered in pieces about him. Walker Boh was disintegrating while still alive.
Yet some small part of him did not give way, held fast by memory of what had brought him, by the promise he had made himself that he would not die willingly or in ignorance. Cogline’s face was still there, the eyes frantic, the lips moving, trying to speak. Walker reached down inside for the one thing that had sustained him over the years, for that core of anger that burned at the thought of what the Druids had done to him. He fanned it until it blazed. He cupped it to his face and let it sear him.
He breathed it in until the fear was forced to give way, until there was only rage.
Then an odd thing happened. The voice of the thing before him changed. The voice became his own, frantic, desperate.
Flee, Walker Boh!
The voice was no longer coming from the mist; it was coming from himself! He was calling his own name, urging himself to flee!
What was happening?
And suddenly he understood. He wasn’t listening to the thing before him; he was listening to himself. It was his own voice he had been hearing all along, a trick of his subconscious—a trick, he realized in fury, of the Crimpond. The wraith had implanted in Walker’s mind, along with that third vision, a suggestion of his death, a voice to convince him of it, and a certainty that it was the Grimpond itself who came forth in another form to deliver it. Revenge on the descendants of Brin Ohmsford—it was what the Grimpond had been after from the first. If Walker listened to that voice, faltered in his resolve, and turned away from the purpose that had brought him...
No!
His fingers opened and the Black Elfstone flared to life.
The nonlight streaked forth, spreading like ink across the shadowed well of the Keep to embrace the mist. No more games! Walker’s shout was a euphoric, silent cry within his mind. The Grimpond—so insidious, so devious—had almost undone him. Never again. Never...
Then everything began to happen at once.
Nonlight and mist meshed and joined. Back through the tunnel of the magic’s dark flooded the mist, a greenish, pulsing fury. Walker had only an instant to catch his breath, to question what had gone wrong, and to wonder if perhaps he had failed to outsmart the Grimpond after all—and then the Druid magic was on him. It exploded within, and he screamed in helpless dismay. The pain was indescribable, a fiery incandescence. It felt as if another being had entered him, carried within by the magic, drawn out of the concealment of the mist. A physical presence, it burrowed into bone and muscle and flesh and blood until it was all that Walker could bear. It expanded and raged until he thought he would be torn apart. Then the sense of it changed, igniting a different kind of pain. Memories flooded through him, vast and seemingly endless. With the memories came the feelings that accompanied them, emotions charged with horror and fear and doubt and regret and a dozen other sensations that rolled through Walker Boh in an unstoppable torrent. He staggered back, trying to resist, to fling them away. His hand fought to close over the Black Elfstone in an effort to shut this attack off, but his body would no longer obey him. He was gripped by the magics—those of both Elfstone and mist—and they held him fast.
Like Allanon and the specter of death in the third version!
Shades! Had the Grimpond been right after all?
He was seeing other places and times, viewing the faces of men and women and children he did not know, witnessing events transpire and fade, and above all feeling a wrenching series of emotions emanate from the being inside. Walker’s sense of where he was disappeared. He was transported into the mind of his invader. A man? Yes, a man, he realized, a man who had lived countless lifetimes, centuries, far longer than any normal human, someone so different...
The images abruptly changed. He saw a gathering of black robes, dark figures concealed behind castle walls, closeted in chambers where the light barely reached, hunched over ancient books of learning, writing, reading, studying, discussing...
Druids!
And then he realized the truth—a jarring, shocking recognition that cut through the madness with a razor’s edge.
The being that the mist had carried within him was Allanon—his memories, his experiences, his feelings, and his thoughts, everything but the flesh and blood he had lost in death.
How had Allanon managed this? Walker asked himself in disbelief, fighting to breathe against the rush of memories, against the suffocating blanket of the other’s thoughts. But he already knew the answer to that. A Druid’s magic allowed almost anything. The seeds had been planted three hundred years ago. Why, then? And that answer, too, came swiftly, a red flare of certainty. This was how the Druid lore was to be passed on to him. All that Allanon had known and felt was stored within the mist, his knowledge kept safe for three hundred years, waiting for his successor.
But there was more, Walker sensed. This was how he was to be tested as well. This was how it was to be determined if he should become a Druid.
His speculation ended as the images continued to rush through him, recognizable now for what they were, the whole of the Druid experience, all that Allanon had gleaned from his predecessors, from his studies, from the living of his own life. Like footprints in soft earth, they embedded in Walker’s mind, their touch fiery and harsh, each a coal laid against his skin. The words and impressions and feelings descended in an avalanche. It was too much, too fast. I don’t want this! he screamed in terror, but still the feeding continued, relentless, purposeful—Allanon’s self transferring into Walker. He fought back against it, groping through the maze of images for something solid. But the black light of the Elfstone was a funnel that refused to be stoppered, drawing in the greenish mist, absorbing it, and channeling it into his body. Voices spoke words, faces turned to look, scenes changed, and time rushed away—a composite of all the years Allanon had been alive, struggling to protect the Races, to assure that the Druid lore wasn’t lost, that the hopes and aspirations the First Council had envisioned centuries ago were carried forth and preserved. Walker Boh became privy to it all, learned what it had meant to Allanon and those whose lives he had touched, and experienced for himself the impact of life through almost ten centuries.
Then abruptly the images ceased, the voices, the faces, the scenes out of time—everything that had assailed him. They vanished in a rush, and he was standing alone again within the Keep, a solitary figure slumped against the stone-block wall.
Still alive.
He lifted away unsteadily, looking down at himself, making certain he was whole. Within, there was a rawness, like skin reddened from too much sun, the implant of all that Druid knowledge, of all that Allanon had intended to bequeath. His spirit felt leavened and his mind filled. Yet his command over the knowledge was disjointed, as if it could not be brought to bear, not called upon. Something was wrong. Walker could not seem to focus.