Time after time it circled the mountains that cradled the valley, infusing itself within the guardian mists, bleeding out of the boy who slept, and becoming what it must. The wild magic would endure until its time was finished, and then it would go back into the ether and wait until one day it would be born again into the world. The mists thickened and strengthened, and the madness and destruction of civilization’s collapse were locked outside the valley in which the survivors of the caravan were beginning their new lives.
When it was all used up, drained away entirely, and all that remained of the boy was flesh and blood and bone, the boy awoke. No longer a gypsy morph, the wild magic no longer a part of him, he stood within the mists and remembered that his life was something more than what the wild magic had demanded of him. There was a residue, a leaving. That part of him that was human had loved a girl and fathered a child. That part of him had lived among other children, who had been his friends and been left behind when he had come into the mountains and created the wall of mist.
He wanted to go back to them. He wanted to go home.
So the boy Hawk, who was a man now, a man whose mortal coil was no different from that of any other, walked out of the mists into the valley, alive and well and whole, and went in search of his life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TERRY BROOKS is the New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty-five books, including the Genesis of Shannara novels Armageddon’s Children and The Elves of Cintra; The Sword of Shannara; the Voyage of the Jerle Shannara trilogy: Ilse Witch, Antrax, and Morgawr; the High Druid of Shannara trilogy: Jarka Ruus, Tanequil, and Straken; the nonfiction book Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life; and the novel based upon the screenplay and story by George Lucas, Star Wars?: Episode I The Phantom Menace.? His novels Running with the Demon and A Knight of the Word were selected by the Rocky Mountain News as two of the best science fiction/fantasy novels of the twentieth century. The author was a practicing attorney for many years but now writes full-time. He lives with his wife, Judine, in the Pacific Northwest.