As he ran, she caught a glimpse of his forearms. They were scaly and mottled. They were reptilian.
Her mind spun with sudden recognition. No!
She was carried deep into the woods to a quiet place, and the dark-cloaked figure set her down. She watched him reveal himself, and he was not the Druid, as she now knew he would not be, could not be, but the Morgawr. Betrayer! The word shrieked at her. Liar! But he was much worse, of course. He was beyond anything words could describe, anything recognizably human. He was a monster.
She knew it was the truth she was seeing. She knew it instinctively, even doubting that it could be so. The images drawn on the magic of the Sword of Shannara could not lie. She could feel it in her bones, and it made perfect sense to her. How had she not known it before? How had she let herself become deceived so easily?
Yet she was only six years old then, she reminded herself. She was still nothing but a child.
Besieged by emotions that tore through her like hungry wolves, she would have screamed in rage and despair had she been able to do so. But she could not give voice to what she was feeling. She could only watch. The magic of the sword would allow nothing more.
She heard the Morgawr speak to her, his words soft and cajoling and treacherous. She watched herself slowly come to terms with his lies, to accept them, to believe that he was what he claimed and that she was the victim of a Druid’s machinations. She watched him spirit her away aboard his Shrike, deep into his underground lair in the Wilderun. She watched herself close the door on her own prison, a willing fool, a pawn in a scheme she was beginning to understand for the first time. She watched herself begin another life—a small, misguided child driven by hatred and determination. She watched herself, knowing she would never be the same, helpless to prevent it, to do anything more than despair at her fate.
Still the images continued, spinning themselves out, revealing to her the truth that had been concealed from her all these years. She watched a shape-shifter burrow through the smoking ruins of her home to retrieve her still-living baby brother. She watched him carry her brother away to a solitary fortress that she quickly recognized as Paranor. She saw him give her brother over to the Druid Walker, who in turn took him into the Highlands of Leah to entrust to a kind-faced man and his wife, who had children of their own and a debt to repay. She watched her brother grow in that family, his tiny baby’s face changing with the passing of the years, his features slowly becoming recognizable.
She might have gasped or even cried out as she realized she was looking at the boy who had come to this distant land with Walker, who had confronted her and told her he was Bek. There was no mistaking him. He was the boy she had disbelieved, the boy she had hunted with the caull and almost killed. Bek, the brother she was so certain had died in the fire . . .
She could not finish these thoughts, any of them. She could barely force herself to confront them. Nor was there any time for a balanced consideration, for a coming to terms with what she was absorbing. Other images swiftly appeared, a wave of them, inundating her so thoroughly that her chest constricted and her breathing tightened under their crushing weight.
Now the images were ones of her training under the Morgawr, of her long, harsh schooling, of her mastery of self-discipline and her hardening of purpose as she set about learning how to destroy Walker. She saw herself grow from a girl into a young woman, but not with the same freedom of life and spirit that had invested Bek. Instead, she saw herself change from something human into something so like the Morgawr that when all was said and done she was different from him on the outside only, where her skin set her apart from his scales. She had become dark and hate-filled and ruthless in the same way he was. She had embraced her magic’s poisonous possibilities with his eagerness and savage determination.