Origins of the Demon

One is Nest Freemark, a fourteen year old girl who lives with her grandparents at the edge of Sinnissippi Park in Hopewell, Illinois, a steel town situated in the middle of farm country. Her family history is checkered. Her father disappeared just after she was born, a transient, and her mother may have committed suicide. Her grandfather was a widely respected union leader at MidCon Steel for thirty-five years and is now retired. Her grandmother (Gran) is an alcoholic who claims to see creatures called 'feeders' everywhere.

The trouble is, Nest sees the feeders, too. Like Gran, she accepts the feeders as a part of life, even though almost no one else can see them. But then Nest sees quite a bit that no one else sees. She sees creatures that live in our world, but do not reveal themselves willingly. She communicates with owls. Her best friend is a sylvan named Pick. Her less than human protector is a ferocious ghost wolf named Wraith.

Nest has always known she isn't like everyone else--maybe not like anyone else. She can do magic, albeit only a small amount -- the kind that causes people to speak gibberish and trip over their own feet. But Gran has forbidden her from using it, and Nest has learned from harsh experience what will happen if she disobeys.

Only Gran shares Nest's secret life (though Gran has a few secrets of her own that she keeps hidden even from Nest) until John Ross comes to Hopewell. Anointed as a Knight of the Word, Ross has been sent to do battle with a demon who is a creature of the Void. In the evolution of humankind there is an ongoing conflict between the Word and the Void, a conflict which constantly threatens to tip the delicate balance of magic that regulates human behavior. The sylvans and their allies seek to keep the balance intact. The demons seek to upset it. Both understand that the key to success lies with controlling the feeders, who respond to the dark emotions that humans too frequently manifest. The stronger those emotions become, the more quickly the feeders will multiply. If they become too many, they devour the humans who create them. That is what is happening in Hopewell, Illinois.

John Ross, the Knight of Elves & Fairies, has been sent to put things right. At first glance Ross seems an unlikely choice. Well into his thirties, soft-spoken and unimposing, he is partially crippled and walks with the aid of a staff. But his tenacity and determination are unmistakable, and the power he possesses as the Word's champion is immense. When it becomes necessary, he can summon magic sufficient to withstand any attack. Yet the price he pays to wield that power is terrifying. Each night he must travel in his dreams to the future that will come to pass if he fails to destroy the demons he hunts in the present, a future that is monstrously real, filled with feeders who have overrun the world. Here, in an existence so dark and hopeless that there can be no redemption, he is hunted more than hunter, and all about him the humans he tried and failed to help when it mattered are being subjugated and killed. He journeys through a ravaged, ruined landscape a warrior still--except that each time he uses his magic in the present he is deprived of it in the future where, if he is discovered by his enemies, he can be killed.

It is a terrifying double life that John Ross leads in his search for the demon, and there is no guarantee that he can prevent the future he encounters in his dreams from coming to pass. The balance is shifting in ways that even his magic cannot slow. Now knight and demon have come to Hopewell, and they have come for the same reason--to find Nest Freemark. Each shares a hidden tie to the Freemark family that goes back three generations and is rooted in a dark secret that Gran keeps hidden from everyone. There is a battle being waged by John Ross and the demon in which Nest has been designated the pivotal pawn.

On the Fourth of July on the hottest summer in seventy years in the town of Hopewell, Illinois, Nest Freemark will have more than one reason to wish she had learned to play a better game of chess.

--Terry Brooks, April 1997