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The Druids' Keep* stands at the center of the Four Lands and at the center of most of my thoughts about it. But it's not where the story began...the story that I made up to play in the Shannara universe...the story that led to all the rest. Instead it began with a girl, left an orphan--supposedly--by the death of her mother, and taken in by the family of a certain Southland innkeeper. Convinced that her unknown father must be alive somewhere, and compelled by a sense that she trusted but didn't understand, she went on an unauthorized search for him, with no idea where it might lead. It lead into the Northland.... And so the tale became interwoven with the ending of Sword. Even as Shea ate after awakening from his ordeal in the Skull Kingdom, Andrea sat in the shadows listening. It was her food, her cooking equipment--where did Allanon get those things, after all? Already there had been revelations of hidden truth, and there yet remained choices to make. Was she willing to pay the prices involved to become a Druid? Would her father even permit her to fulfill that role, to stand in the place of the son he never had? From there the story grew, both into the future and into the past. Finally, it reached through nearly 3000 years of history: from the tale of the ancestors of the Druid leaders a thousand years before in the northern kingdom of Beryllia, through their exile in the Four Lands, and the First and Second Wars of the Races, and chronicling forward from Sword through Andrea's growth to adulthood, the formation of the Second Druid Council, and a confrontation with evil in a time when none of the characters from the original novel were left alive. Portions of this tale have found their way to paper, but for various reasons, I can't post those actual stories on the web. Some of the things you will find here are my (really dreadful) Shannara-inspired artwork, including Andrea's map of the Four Lands. You can also explore a bit of Shady Vale and the Druids' Keep, and get to know some of my characters. On my lyrics page you'll find songs that I connect with Shannara--even one I wrote myself. And as a bonus, you can check out my husband's parody version of Shannara (as well as other parodies), and see my list of links to other fun Shannara pages. (*Note my spelling of Druids' Keep. Since the Keep, in my version, typically has had more than one Druid around, it just made more sense.)

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...he thought that he would sit down on the rocks near the road, and wait, and see what the world of Men was about to be. -C. J. Cherryh (Fortress in the Eye of Time)

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