purpose to keep the land whole and instill in others the wisdom
of doing so. What had happened to that commitment? How had
the Elves become so misdirected?
She ate without tasting her food and she spoke little, con-
sumed by her thoughts. Eowen sat across from her, eyes low-
ered. Garth and the other men moved past them unseeing,
focused on the trek before them. Stresa was already gone, scout-
ing ahead to make certain of his path. Faun was a ball of fur in
her lap.
What am I to do? she asked herself in despair. What choice am
I to make’
The climb up the Blackledge resumed, and still she could
not settle on an answer. The day was dark and hazy like all the
ones before, the sun screened away by the vog, the air thick
with heat and ash and the faint stench of sulfur. Swamp sounds
rose behind them out of Eden’s Murk, a jumbled collection of
screams and cries, fragmented and distant for the most part,
scattered in the mist. Below, things hunted and foraged and
struggled to stay alive for another day. Above, there was only
silence, as if nothing more than clouds awaited. The trail was
steep and winding, and it cut back upon itself frequently, a lab-
yrinthine maze of ledges, drops, and defiles. Sporadic showers
swept across them, quick and furious, the rain dampening the
earth and rock to slickness and then fading back into the heat.
Time passed, and Wren’s thoughts drifted. She found herself
missing things she had never even considered before. She was
young still, barely a woman, and she was struck by the possi-
bility that she might never have a husband or children and that
she would always be alone. She found herself envisioning faces
and voices and small scenes out of an imagined life where these
things were present, and without reason and to no particular
purpose she mourned their loss. It was the discovery of who
and what she was that triggered these feelings, she decided fi-
nally. It was the trust she carried, the responsibilities she bore
that induced this sense of solitude, of aloneness. There was noth-
ing for her beyond fleeing Morrowindl, beyond determining the
fate of the Elven people, beyond coming to terms with the hor-
ror of what she had discovered. Nothing of her life seemed
simple anymore, and the ordinary prospects of things like a hus
band and children were as remote as the home she had left
behind.
She made herself consider the possibility then, a tentative
conjecture brought on by a need to establish some sense of
purpose for all that had come about, that what she might really
have been given to do-by Allanon’s shade, by Ellenroh, and by
choice and chance alike-was to be for her people both mother
and wife, to accept them as her family, to shepherd them, to
guide and protect them, and to oversee their lives for the du-
ration of her own. Her mind was light and her sense of things
turned liquid, for she had barely slept at all now in three days
and her physical and emotional strength had been exhausted.
She was not herself, she might argue, and yet in truth she had
perhaps found herself. There was purpose in everything, and
there must be a purpose in this as well. She had been returned
to her people, given responsibility over whether they lived or
died, and made their queen. She had discovered the magic of
the Elfstones and assumed control of their power. She had been
told what no one else knew-the truth of the origin of the Sha-
dowen. Why? She gave a mental shrug. Why not, if not to make
some difference? Not so much where the Shadowen were con-
cerned, although there could be no complete separation of prob-
lems and solutions, as Allanon had indicated in making his
charges to the children of Shannara. Not so much in the future
of the Races, for that was too broad an undertaking for one
person and must inevitably be decided by the efforts of many
and the vagaries of fortune. But for the Elves, for their future