So this week I am, you guessed it, still reading The Original Shannara Trilogy. At this point, I’m well into the third book, in which the band has to track down a shady who has absconded with all their cigarettes … no, wait, that’s not right. In this book, the druid Allanon and his current band of reluctant followers have to stop the Mord Wraiths (humans corrupted by the use of malign magic) from poisoning the Silver River and overrunning all the civilized lands, and some other lands too while they’re at it.
This book is a little different from the first two in that it’s been following two groups, a pair of separated siblings, each of whom is on a separate quest to save the world. Sort of. Whether either of them actually will is pretty up in the air at the moment, especially when there are so many Procks in the way.
Closing his ears to the sounds of the Procks as they grated stone on stone, closing his mind to everything but the light and the vision of his sister’s face as it hung suspended before him, he gave himself over to the wishsong’s magic and passed on through the darkness.
What is a Prock, you ask? Get your mind out of the gutter! It’s a creature (apparently magical) that lives in the floors of an unpleasant place called the Caves of Night, with a mouth that blends in with the rock, and which sits there waiting for someone to walk over it, at which point the mouth opens, the victim falls in, and the Prock has lunch. Gosh, I wish I had known about these things when I was running my AD&D campaign. They would have made a nice change of pace from the trappers …
Meanwhile, the (hopefully) last round of editing continues on Father’s Books! If you thought I had spent a lot of time reading the Shannara trilogy, that’s nowhere near as long as I’ve been reading and editing and re-reading and re-editing this one …
“Sorry for hiding. I thought you might be them.”
“Them?”
“When I got here, there were people inside. I had to wait for them to leave before I could come in.”
“People? The police?”
She shook her head. “Not the police.”
Not the police. So who were they? Sorry, can’t tell. Because …
Viscosity 