High Druid of Shannara

         Written by Terry Brooks
         Published: September 6th, 2005

An excerpt from Chapter 11 read by Terry while on tour September 2004.

e did not know where he was. He was stretched out on the hard ground, his bones aching and his muscles sore. The world was dark and hazy. There was no sunshine no brightness of color, no welcoming warmth or bird-song to encourage his rising. The new day was cloaked in sullen stillness and a deep-gray wash that made him want to go back to sleep.
         He closed his eyes for a moment and opened them again as his head cleared and he remembered that he was inside the Forbidding. He glanced down, the long knife was still in his hand, his fingers stiff from gripping it. The Darkwand was clutched to his chest, its runes pulsating softly come alive with the day.
         He stared at the staff doubtfully. Why was it glowing? He couldn’t remember thinking about his aunt, about his search for her, about anything that would make it brighten like this.
          Then his attention was drawn to a huge cluster of model boulders settled squarely in front of him. He didn’t remember those boulders being there the night before and wasn’t sure how he could have missed seeing them even in the dark. It was like having a wall materialize out of nowhere, a great massive barrier that somehow didn’t seem to quite belong. He stared at them in confusion.
         Then a window-sized eye blinked once, a shutter slowly closing and then sliding open again and all at once, Pen realized what it was that he was looking at.
         “Shades!” he whispered.
          He had never seen a dragon of course. No one in his lifetime had ever seen a dragon. Most were extinct. Those that weren’t were consigned to the Forbidding like this one or so deeply and thoroughly entrenched in mountain caverns and wilderness forests that no human had ever ventured in far enough to encounter them. But he knew what dragons were and what they looked like, and this was clearly a dragon.
         The eye blinked again, a lazy lowering and lifting of a scaly lid. Pen caught his breath and held it. The cluster of rocks began to assume shape and take on definition. Limbs studded with spikes crooked awkwardly at the joints to ending claws that were each the size of his leg. Scales larger than blankets layered a body that would dwarf a small cottage. Bony ridges ran in parallel lines down a broad back and long reticulated tail. A triangular shaped head was tucked between its forelegs. Encrusted snout and brow thick with armor and blunt horns. It was easily the biggest living creature that Pen had ever seen. It was bigger than he had imagined anything could be.
         Fascinated in spite of himself, he stared at the dragon and wondered what it was doing here. He wondered why it hadn’t eaten him. He wondered if it still planned to. He became aware all at once that it was looking at him. It was watching through half-closed lids with a sleepy almost dreamy sort of gaze. It seemed mesmerized like a cat stretched out for a nap, lazy in content drifting in and out of private revelries.
          Then it occurred to him, almost as an afterthought, that the dragon wasn’t looking at him. It was looking at the Darkwand, or more particularly, at the glow of its runes. At first, he thought he must be mistaken, after all, why would the dragon be interested in the staff and its runes? Was the beast sentient? It certainly didn’t look it, but maybe it understood something of magic and of talismans and recognized the Darkwand for what it was. But he didn’t think that was right. The way the dragon was watching the staff suggested that it was all but hypnotized, that its interest was one of almost primordial distraction.
         Pen glanced down watching the way the light played across the runes—how it worked itself up and down the staff in ever-changing patterns. How it brightened and dimmed, pulsed and steadied, reinventing itself over and over. The dragon was watching too, fascinated by the movement of the light as it danced from rune to rune.

Where Magic Happens