neling 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.
Before him, the Black Elfstone pulsed, the nonlight a bridge
that arced into the shadows, still joined with what remained
of the mist-a roiling, churning mass of wicked green light
that hissed and sparked and gathered itself like a cat about to
spring.
Walker straightened, weak and unsteady, frightened anew,
sensing that something more was about to happen and that the
worst was still to come. His mind raced. What could he do to
prepare himself? There wasn’t time enough left .
The mist launched itself into the nonlight. It came at Walker
and enveloped him in the blink of an eye. He could see its anger,
hear its rage, and feel its fury. It exploded through the new skin
of his knowledge, a geyser of pain. Walker shrieked and doubled
over. His body convulsed, changing within the covering of his
robes. He could feel the wrenching of his bones. He closed his
eyes and went rigid. The mist was within, curling, settling, feed-
ing.
He experienced a rush of horror.
All of his life, Walker Boh had struggled to escape what the
Druids had foreordained for him, resolved to chart his own
course. In the end, he had failed. Thus he had gone in search
of the Black Elfstone and then Paranor with the knowledge that
if he should find them it would require that he become the next
Druid, accepting his destiny yet promising himself that he would
be his own person whatever was ordained. Now, in an instant’s
time, as he was wracked by the fury of what had hidden within
the mist, all that remained of his hopes for some small measure
of self-determination was stripped away, and Walker Boh was
left instead with the darkest part of Allanon’s soul. It was the
Druid’s cruelest self, a composite of all those times he had been
forced by reason and circumstance to do what he abhorred, all
those situations when he had been required to expend lives and
faith and hope and trust, and all those years of hardening and
tempering of spirit and heart until both were as carefully forged
• and as indestructible as the hardest metal. It was a rendering of
the limits of Allanon’s being, the limits to which he had been
forced to journey. It revealed the weight of responsibility that
came with power. It delineated the understanding that experi-
ence bestowed. It was harsh and ragged and terrible, an accu-
mulation of ten normal lifetimes, and it inundated Walker like
floodwaters over the wall of a dam.
Down into blackness the Dark Uncle spiraled, hearing
himself cry out, hearing as well the Grimpond’s laughter-
imagined or real, he could not tell. His thoughts scattered before
the flaying of his spirit, of his hopes, and of his beliefs. There
was nothing he could do; the force of the magic was too pow-
erful. He gave way before it, a monstrous strength. He waited
to die.
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