The Elves of Cintra (Book 2 of The Genesis of Shannara)

When the light disappeared, they were gone, too.”


She glanced over her shoulder and looked down at the rubble-strewn pavement as if to make certain. “I’ve never seen anything like it. No one knows what happened.” She turned back. “I heard one man say it was demon magic! Do you think?”

Logan didn’t know what he thought. “No,” he said. “Did the light seem to come from one of them—from the boy, maybe?”

She shook her head. Her long, sandy hair rippled in the dim light, and she brushed strands of it from her eyes. “No, it didn’t come from anywhere. It just flared up out of thin air and surrounded them. You couldn’t see them at all after that. Everyone just went crazy! It was wonderful!”

He took a moment to consider what this meant. The most logical explanation was that Hawk’s magic—the wild magic of the gypsy morph—had surfaced in an unexpected way. But if the girl was right, if it wasn’t Hawk’s own magic manifesting itself in some unknown way, then it had to have been an intervening magic. Yet where would such magic have come from? Had Hawk and Tessa been saved or tossed from the frying pan into the fire? He knew he wouldn’t find the answer here.

“Hey, mister, do I know you?” the girl asked him suddenly.

He shook his head. “No.”

“You look familiar.”

He peered down over the walls to the rubble below. Nothing, not even the feeders, was there now. Whatever had happened, it had disrupted their plans to absorb the combination of magic and life force expended by Hawk’s death.

All those feeders, he thought, gone in the blink of an eye.

The girl was leaning on the railing next to him, studying his face. She must have seen him when he’d come to the compound earlier in the day. She would remember soon enough. It was time to go.

Suddenly her gaze shifted. “Look at that. See all the lights out on the water? Like a million little fires or something.”

He looked to where she was pointing, but what he saw that she couldn’t were the feeders massed along the waterfront, a surging horde of smooth dark bodies writhing and twisting in an effort to get closer to whatever was approaching on the water. He looked beyond to the lights, hundreds of them, couldn’t make any sense of it at first, and then heard the drums and went cold.

At almost the same moment a horn blew from somewhere farther down the walls of the compound, high up in a watchtower, a mournful wail that signaled danger in any language. Someone else had spotted the lights and, like Logan, knew what they meant.

He turned away from the girl. “I have to go. Thanks for helping me.”

“Sure. Weren’t you here…?”

He wheeled back, cutting short the rest of what she was going to say. It was an impulsive act, one born of frustration and despair. He was tired of people dying. “Go find your parents and your brothers and sisters and anyone else you care about and get everyone out of here. Tell anyone you meet. Those lights come from boats carrying an army that will besiege this compound and eventually destroy it.”

She started to speak, but he grabbed her shoulders and held her. “No, just listen to me. I know what I am talking about. I know about this army. I have seen what it can do. Get out of here, right away, even if no one else will go with you. I know you don’t want to, but do it. Remember what I said. If you stay, you will die.”

He left her staring after him, her eyes wide, her face rigid with shock and disbelief. He had no further time for her, nothing more he could do for her. She would believe him or not. Probably not. They seldom did, any of them. They thought it was as safe as it could get inside the compounds.

They thought it was so much more dangerous out in the open. None of them understood. Not until it was too late. It was why they were being wiped out. It waste reason the human race was being annihilated.

To his surprise, she came after him, grabbed his arm, and pulled him around. “You’re not serious, are you? About what will happen? None of that’s true, is it?”

He studied her a moment. “What’s your name?”

“Meike,” she answered uncertainly.

“Well, listen closely to me, Meike. Everything I said is true. There are madmen on those boats. They were human once, men and women like those in this compound. But they’ve shed their humanity to serve demons that intend to destroy us all. They kill humans or put them in slave camps. They’ve done it everywhere, all across the country. They will do it here, too. The compound leaders think they can stand against them, think they are safe enough here behind their walls. But other compounds thought the same, and they all fell in the end. This one will fall, too.”