"Brooks, Terry - First King of Shannara" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brooks Terry)

care. He has fallen under the sway of the ndatch and cannot free
himself in any case."

"The book of magic he stole out of Paranor?"

"Pour hundred years ago. When he was simply Brona, a Druid,
one of us, and not yet the Warlock Lord."

Kinson Ravenlock knew the story. Bremen himself had told it
to him, though the history was familiar enough among the Races
that he had already heard it a hundred rimes. Galaphile, an Elf, had
called together the First Council of Druids five hundred years ear-
lier, a thousand years following the devastation of the Great Wars.
The Council had met at Paranor, a gathering of the wisest men and
women of all the Races, those who had memories of the old world,
those who retained a few tattered, crumbling books, those whose
learning had survived the barbarism of a thousand years. The
Council had gathered in a last, desperate effort to bring the Races
out of the savagery that had consumed them and into a new and
better civilization. Working together, the Druids had begun the
laborious task of assembling their combined knowledge, of
piecing together all that remained so that it might be employed for
a common good. The goal of the Druids was to work for the bet-
terment of all people, regardless of anything that had gone before.
They were Men, Gnomes, Dwarves, Elves, Trolls, and a smat-
tering of others, the best and wisest of the new Races risen from
the ashes of the old. If some small wisdom could be gleaned
from the knowledge they carried, there was a chance for everyone.

But the task proved a long and difficult one, and some among
the Druids grew restless. One was called Brona. Brilliant, ambi-
tious, but careless of his own safety, he began to experiment with
magic. There had been little in the old world, almost none since
the decline of faerie and the rise of Man. But Brona believed that
it must be recovered and brought back. The old sciences had
failed, the destruction of the old world was the direct result of that
failure, and the Great Wars were a lesson that the Druids seemed
determined to ignore. Magic offered a new approach, and the
books that taught it were older and more tried than those of sci-
ence. Chief among those books was the Ildatch, a monstrous,
deadly tome that had survived every cataclysm since the dawn of
civilization, protected by dark spells, driven by secret needs.
Brona saw within its ancient pages the answers he had been

8 First King ofShannara

seeking, the solutions to the problems the Druids sought to solve.
He resolved to have them. His course of action was set.

Others among the Druids warned him of the dangers, others not