A/N: The Black Elfstone is a real artifact from the Shannara universe, with roughly similar properties to the ones in this story, although I've changed the lore a bit for my own purposes. Not much else to say about this chapter. Enjoy. :~)
Chapter 2: Men Meeting
Consciousness returned to Allanon with the sound of groaning and an easing of the weight across his chest, as if someone had rolled off.
Or something. Whatever had been drawn through the stone. Allanon scrambled backward and upright, trying to focus his eyes in spite of the pain that hammered behind them, fumbling for the hilt of his sword.
"Sammy?" said the groaning voice to his left. A man's voice, not the growl of a monster. Its owner was trying to rise to a seated position, and although he appeared to be a fit man in his middle years, he was having evident difficulty. "Sammy!"
The man's desperate thoughts cut deeper into Allanon's mind than the shout did into his ears. Brothers, and this was the elder of the two, who would not let anything happen to the younger.
A similar groaning to the Druid's right brought an even more stabbing surge of relief from the elder. It took all the control of his gift that Bremen had been able to instill to bring the volume of the thoughts down to a bearable level.
"Dean, I'm here," gasped the voice on the right—the younger brother, not even attempting yet to move from his prone position. "You okay?"
"Maybe. That was a hell of a ride." The older brother had finally succeeded in levering himself to a sitting position. He peered in the direction of the voice. "What about you?"
"Okay, I think. But yeah—hell of a ride. Where are we?"
The older brother brushed his hand across his eyes. It must have helped because he began looking around, baffled at the ruins. The man's confusion became tinged with fear as he noticed the stranger—a vague sense of oddly dressed was all Allanon could make of the thoughts, although they were more specific than that and involved a momentary flash of a red-haired woman and a battle with blunted weapons. Curiously, the man and his brother were not clothed significantly differently from most humans—and they did seem to be humans, though the younger brother's hair was long enough to put the matter in doubt.
"Not in Kansas anymore," said the older brother. He locked his eyes on Allanon's, trying to determine what this stranger might do. It was clear from his thoughts that he was accustomed to fighting things that did the unexpected and were not always what they seemed. He rose to his feet and assumed a fighting stance, still wobbling, but only slightly.
"Ha ha," answered the younger brother, sitting up with an ease that showed either the benefits of taking his time regrouping, or perhaps only his fewer years. He was sitting with his back to Allanon, but one look at his brother brought him to his feet, whipping around to face a common foe.
"Where are we?" the older brother demanded.
But Allanon had questions of his own. "Who are you?"
Their names almost jumped out of the elder's thoughts. Interestingly, the younger's were more guarded.
"Nah, you go first," said Dean.
Impatient now that his strength was coming back, Allanon triggered the magic of his sword. He lifted the satisfactory heft of it and pointed the tip in the direction of one brother and then the other. "Dean Winchester. Sam Winchester. But that does not answer the question of what manner of men you are or how you came to be here."
"How do you know our names?" Dean asked, angry as well as wary. And impressed—almost enviously so—with the Druid's sword.
Sam's eyes had been darting around. "What is this place? Did we get pulled into Faerie?"
"Faerie? No, that no longer exists." Another piece of the puzzle, though. "This is the Druids' Keep and you are in the Four Lands."
"Wow, and that doesn't sound like some fairy dimension thing," Dean said sarcastically.
"Those aren't any places we know about." Sam's tone was placating, as if to make up for Dean's sarcasm. He was still replaying the unfolding of the sword in his mind.
"What do you know of that?" Allanon redirected the sword's point toward the black stone that lay on the floor between them, next to its jumbled cloth. He realized with abrupt unease that he could feel none of the burns that were the usual price of his magic.
Sam furrowed his brow. "The Black Elfstone?"
"Yes."
"You think that's what brought us here?" Sam's voice sharpened. "Or do you know?"
"Considering that it—or someone working through it—tried to absorb my magic, and that you two appeared only when I succeeded in drawing it back, what other assumption can I make?"
"Wait, you think this is our fault?" Dean was a little quicker on the uptake than he had first seemed.
"That's what I'm—"
Sam cut him off. "Hold on. The stone—or whatever analogue of it we have, or had—did the same thing to us. At least, it felt that way. Although that makes no sense." Sam looked around, hoping for something that would give him an explanation.
"Analogue? What do you mean?"
"We were looking at a box of Elfstones...that box, in fact." Sam pointed to where the ancient container still lay balanced on the fallen stone. He would have walked over to it, but the sword pointed in his direction made him wary of doing anything its wielder might not like. "Something happened when Dean touched the Black Elfstone. Something that shouldn't have been possible."
"What happened?"
"The Black Elfstone absorbs magical power. That's what it's supposed to do, according to the lore we know. But there shouldn't have been any for it to absorb, not from us."
Dean's expression darkened, and his thoughts turned grim. Way to go letting this magic guy know we don't have any juice. Sam, however, did not hear the thought. That was something else useful to know.
"Look, it's all fine and dandy figuring out how we got here." Dean held up a deprecating hand. "But before we go any further, I think we need to know who, and what, you are." The hand sharpened to a pointing finger.
Dean was afraid; Sam less so. But these brothers, wherever they had come from—the jumble of unfamiliar place names was unhelpful—believed in magic. And most of their experiences with it had not ended well.
"I am Allanon. I am a Druid."
"Like, dancing around hugging trees Druid?" asked Dean, quirking his eyebrows.
"Do I look," Allanon raised his sword slightly, "as if I spend a lot of time hugging trees?"
"So, a human sacrifices to make the crops grow kind of Druid?" If the man's mind had not been so easy to read, Allanon would have thought Dean was being deliberately provocative. And, in truth, he was—a kind of bravado that was probably habitual. But he was also deadly serious. The idea that Druids had such a reputation anywhere was unsettling.
"No," he said tautly, but letting the sword drop again. "Druids have always been the caretakers of the Four Lands. We use our magic to protect the world from evil."
He wasn't prepared to tell them, if they couldn't figure it out for themselves by looking around them, that he was the only Druid left.
"Magic," Sam said, again rushing to repair his brother's tone. "You said before that you have magic. How did you get it?" The whisper of possibilities leaking from Sam's mind, were equally unsettling. Ritual witchcraft...bargains with demons...non-human origins...
"I was born with it. In this world," Allanon added, because it was now clearly apparent that these two had come from some otherwhere, "that is the only way to get magic."
Sam gestured toward the box of Elfstones. "Could I take a closer look at that?"
It was unlikely that he could do any harm with it. Then again, the results of the last investigation had not been as expected. Still... The Druid gave a sharp nod, then collapsed the sword altogether as a sign of his good faith.
Sam moved quickly to the box. The first thing he did, however, was to close the lid and peer closely at the sigil. "It is the same box. Look, Dean."
The older brother spared the Druid a wary look before sidling over to join Sam in examining the box. "Damned if it isn't," he murmured.
"Does this symbol mean anything to you?" Sam asked, looking up at Allanon.
"It's the sign of artifacts from before the Great Wars." Allanon noted the sense of dread that was triggered by his last words. "I take it that it means something more to you?"
"Have you ever heard of the Men of Letters?" Dean asked, more somberly than he yet spoken.
"No." An astonishing suspicion was forming in his mind. He spoke slowly, "But the knowledge of many things was lost."
Sam ran his finger over the sigil. "This is the symbol of the Men of Letters. It was a group that collected knowledge and artifacts and stored them in a protected bunker." His eyes darted around the wrecked hall again, then met Allanon's. "In our time, we were the last remaining Men of Letters."
Allanon was torn between admiring the younger man's quick perception and subtle manipulative abilities, and distrusting them.
"Whoa, whoa, wait a minute!" said Dean. "Sam, are you saying that you think we lose, and then Amara just ups and decides to turn the world into some kind of LARP heaven for no reason?" The unfamiliar word was connected to the same red-haired woman as before—Charlie—this time wearing a crown and carrying a sword.
"That's not what I'm saying," Sam said, with a tinge of exasperation. "But I do think that we're dealing with time travel again."
Dean buried his face in his hands. "I am so sick of that. Okay," he looked to Allanon, "when exactly was this Great Wars thing?"
"Nearly three thousand years ago."
"No. No way. That's not even possible." Dean's disbelief was verging on panic. "We cannot have traveled three thousand years into the future."
"It could be more than that, for all we know," Sam said, more intrigued than panicked, although not happy. "And that's assuming we're even in the same dimension. You said Faerie no longer exists?" he asked Allanon.
"It merged with our world after the Great Wars. That was what saved the Four Lands from complete annihilation. All of their magic was infused into the earth to preserve and protect it."
"Wow, those do not sound like the fairies I know," said Dean. This time his thoughts went to miniature women with wings, bad-tempered and disturbingly well-endowed.
"There were many different kinds of Faerie races," Allanon acknowledged. "Almost all of them perished except for the Elves."
"And Elves created these," Sam tapped on the box, "even before our time."
"You said that your 'Men of Letters' had collected lore about the Elfstones?" Knowledge from three thousand years closer to their origin might be more useful than anything to be found in the royal archives.
"Well, yes," said Sam. "But clearly it's not fully accurate. If the Black Elfstone absorbs magical energy, what was it trying to pull out of us?"
"You have no magic at all?" Allanon asked. He couldn't sense any now, but there had been something pulling from the other end.
"Maybe we have, or had," Dean interrupted. He had been pacing a tight circle, but now he stopped. "Sam, you had those...powers."
Allanon felt a mental shudder from both men, and images from Dean of his brother drinking...demon blood? The Druid felt a frisson of horror himself, though he could sense no darkness overshadowing Sam's mind.
"And I had the Mark." Aside from a three-stroke sigil that Allanon didn't recognize, Dean's thoughts were a jumble of rage and blood.
"But all that's gone," Sam protested.
"Maybe not," Allanon said. "If you ever had the ability to use magic, it might go dormant, but a trace of that power would always be there."
"And that's what this Black Elfstone took," Dean said, sounding inordinately pleased.
"Even so, that doesn't explain how it brought us here," said Sam.
Their eyes all went to the dark lump of glass, winking balefully in the torchlight.
After a long moment, Allanon said, "If the Elfstone captured your remaining magic three thousand years ago and has been hidden in that box ever since, it's possible that I am the only person since that time to have touched it. I was able to resist the stone's attempt to steal my magic, but it became entangled in something inside...something I now have reason to believe was the power it stole from you." He looked at the brothers queryingly, waiting for either of them to supply information that would contradict this theory.
Sam's brow furrowed. "But if it stole the power from us, how could it still have been connected to us three thousand years later?"
"That I do not know. And if there are no answers in your lore, I know of only one other place to look."
"Where's that?" asked Dean, worried.
"Arborlon." Allanon found himself smiling.
A/N: The chapters in this story have turned out to be a bit shorter than my usual chapters. I think that's an artifact of doing most of the writing on my tablet. On the plus side, I may be able to post a chapter every week.
