know once and for all the worst of what there was, to be free
of the doubt and terror that not knowing brought. He had lived
with it too long to live with it longer. His magic had shielded
him from everything, but it could not do so when he no longer
wished it. He was backed to the wall of his sanity, and he
could not back away farther.
He reached for his brother’s voice with his own, anxious
and compelling. Tell me. Tell me everything.
The wishsong spit and hissed like a cornered cat, but it was,
after all, his to command still, his birthright and his heri-
tage, and nothing it might do could withstand both reason and
need. He had bent to its will when his fear and doubt had un-
dermined him, but he had never broken completely, and now
he would be free of his uncertainty forever.
Coil, he pleaded. His brother was there, steadying him. Coll.
Holding on to each other and to the Sword, they locked their
fingers tight and slipped down into the magic’s light. There Coil
soothed Par, reassuring him that the magic would heal and not
harm, that whatever happened, he would not abandon his
brother. The last of Par’s defenses gave way, the locks releasing,
the doors opening, and the darkness dispelling. Shedding the last
of the wishsong’s trappings, he gave himself over with a sigh.
And then the truth began, a trickle of memories that grew
quickly to a flood. All that was and had ever been in Par’s life,
the secrets he had kept hidden even from himself, the shames
412 The Talismans of Shannara
and embarrassments, the failures and losses he had locked
away, marched forth. They came parading into the light, and
while Par shrank from them at first, the pain harsh and unend-
ing, his strength grew with each remembering, and the task of
accepting what they meant and how they measured him as a
man became bearable.
The light shifted then, and he saw himself now, come in
search of the Sword of Shannara at Allanon’s urging, anxious
for the charge, eager to discover the truth about himself. But
how eager, in fact? For what he found was that he might be
the very thing he had committed against. What he found was
Rimmer Dall waiting, telling him he was not who he thought,
that he was someone else entirely, one of the dark things, one
of the Shadowen. Only a word, Rimmer Dall had whispered,
only a name. A Shadowen, with Shadowen magic to wield,
with power no different than that of the red-eyed wraiths, able
to be what they were, to do as they did.
What he saw now, in the cool white light of the Sword’s
truth, was that it was all true.
One of them.
He was one of them.
He lurched away from the recognition, from the inescap-
ability of what he was being shown, and he thought he might
have screamed in horror but could not tell within the light. A
Shadowen! He was a Shadowen! He felt Coil flinch from him.
He felt his brother jerk away. But Coil did not let go. He kept
holding him. It doesn’t matter what you are, you are my
brother, he heard. No matter what. You are my brother. It
kept Par from falling off the edge of sanity into madness. It
kept him grounded in the face of his own terror, of his fright-
ening discovery of self.
And it let him see the rest of what the truth would reveal.
He saw that his Elven blood and ancestry bound him to the
Shadowen. who were Elven, too. Come from the same lineage,
from the same history, they were bound as people are who share
a similar past. But the choice to be something different was
there as well. His ancestry was Shannara as well as Shadowen,
and need not be what his magic might make him. His belief that
he was predestined to be one of me dark things was the lie
Rimmer Dall had planted within him, there within the vault that
The Talismans of Shannara 413