Straken

High Druid of Shannara

Straken

By Terry Brooks

The transition happened quickly. The runes began to glow more intensely, gaining strength for her touch. Grianne blinked against the sudden brightness, and the felt a kind of shifting in the space she occupied. The grayness of the Forbidding grew slowly darker, as if the storm had caught up to them and they were about be engulfed. All that took place in seconds, barely giving her time enough to register what was transpiring. She glanced over at Pen, who held on to the darkwand from the other side, his eyes closed.

But she did not close hers. She wanted to see what was going to happen to her.

Even so, she did not. The runes suddenly burst into fiery brightness, and it appeared as if the staff itself was aflame. It was all she could do to keep holding on to it, to persuade herself that the fire was an illusion. The glow grew steadily cocooning her away, shutting off her surroundings, from the world of the Jarka Ruus, from everything but the staff and herself and Pen.

Then everything was gone, and she was fighting for air as a massive fist closed about her body, crushing her squeezing the air from her lungs with relentless pressure. She fought back against it, struggling to breathe, to stay alive. Something has gone wrong, she thought in desperation. Something isn't right.

Then the light dimmed, the runes darkened, and she was standing once more in the familiar surroundings of her sleeping chamber, returned safe and whole to Paranor. She still had a death grip on the staff, but the runes had gone dark.

But the glow was not uniform. Picture by Elena.

She exhaled sharply in relief.

In the next instant, the tiagenel collapsed about her.

She know what it was immediately. She had caught a glimpse of the magic's glow in the few seconds it took for her passage out of the Forbidding to become complete, but had failed to recognize its significance until was too late. The glow disappeared as the triagenel dropped into place, becoming an invisible presence that hemmed her in on all sides, an unbreakable cage.

“Don't move, Penderrin,” she said to him.

He stood across from her, still smiling happily at having escaped the Forbidding. The smile faded slowly, and he looked around in surprise.

“We're caught in a triangenel,” she informed him. A quick sweep of her hand illuminated the strands of their prison. “I told you they would be waiting. But I didn't foresee this.”

“What is it?”

“A very powerful form of magic. It takes three magic users to create it, a combination of their skills to bring it to life.”

But the glow was not uniform, she saw. In some place it was very nearly dark. In a properly constructed triangenel, the magic should be equally distributed. “There's something wrong here,” she murmured. “See.”

She pointed at a couple of the weaker spots, at the obvious darkness, and she did so the door to the concealed passageway on the far side of the chamber swung inward and her brother's face appeared in the opening. “Grianne.”

“Bek!” she exclaimed in shock. “How in the world...?”

“Listen to me,” he interrupted, cutting her short. “I've used the wishsong to weaken several of the triangenel's strands. I think you can break free, if you try.”