The Sword of Shannara - Terry Brooks [71]
“There is something I don’t understand.” Balinor spoke up suddenly. “If Bremen was a master of the mystic arts, why could he not himself challenge the power of the Warlock Lord?”
Allanon’s response was somehow evasive. “He did confront Brona in the end on the Plains of Streleheim, though it was not a battle that was visible to mortal eyes, and both disappeared. It was presumed that Bremen had defeated the Spirit King, but time has proven otherwise, and now...” He hesitated only an instant before quickly returning to his narrative, but the emphasis on the pause was not lost on any of his listeners.
“In any event, Bremen realized that what was needed was a talisman to serve as a shield against the possible return of one such as Brona at another time when there was no one familiar with the mystic arts to offer assistance to the peoples of the four lands. So he conceived the idea of the Sword, a weapon which would contain the power to defeat the Warlock Lord. Bremen forged the Sword of Shannara with the aid of his own mystic prowess, shaping it with more than the mere metal of our own world, giving it that special protective characteristic of all talismans against the unknown. The Sword was to draw its strength from the minds of the mortals for whom it acted as a shield — the power of the Sword was their own desire to remain free, to give up even their lives to preserve that freedom. This was the power which enabled Jerle Shannara to destroy the spirit-dominated Northland army then; it is the same power that must now be used to send the Warlock Lord back into the limbo world to which he belongs, to imprison him there for all eternity, to cut off entirely his passage back to this world. But as long as he has the Sword, then he has a chance to prevent its power from being used to destroy him — forever, and that, my friends, is the one thing that must not be.”
“But then why is it that only a son of the House of Shannara...?” The question formed on Shea’s fumbling lips, his own mind reeling confusedly.
“That is the greatest irony of all!” exclaimed Allanon before the question was even completed. “If you have followed all that I have related about the change of life following the Great Wars, the giving way of the old materialistic sciences to the science of the present age, the science of the mystic, then you will understand what I am about to explain — the strangest phenomenon of all. While the sciences of old operated on practical theories built around things that could be seen and touched and felt, the sorcery of our own time operates on an entirely different principle. Its power is potent only when it is believed, for it is power over the mind which can neither be touched nor seen through human senses. If the mind does not truly find some basis for belief in its existence, then it can have no real effect. The Warlock Lord realizes this, and the mind’s fear of and belief in the unknown — the worlds, the creatures, all the occurrences that cannot be understood by men’s limited senses — offer him more than enough basis upon which to practice the mystic arts. He has been relying on this premise for over five hundred years. In the same way, the Sword of Shannara cannot be an effective weapon unless the one holding it believes in his power to use it. When Bremen gave the sword to Jerle Shannara, he made the mistake of giving it directly to a king and to the house of a king — he did not give it to the people of the lands.
As a result, through human misunderstanding