Legends of Shannara

About the Legends of Shannara series

Terry Brooks's Legends of Shannara duology jumps roughly five hundred years past The Gypsy Morph, to the valley refuge that Hawk's magic sealed off from the nuclear devastation outside. Bearers of the Black Staff opens as the ancient protective seals begin to fail and the valley's descendants of humans, Elves, and mutated Freaks -- long isolated from the wider, healing world beyond -- discover both the outside dangers they'd forgotten and new threats massing from within, including an invading army of trolls. Sider Ament, a direct descendant of the Knights of the Word and bearer of a Black Staff passed down through generations, uncovers a string of killings that forces him to rally a valley grown complacent behind its failing walls. The Measure of the Magic continues the fight as the seals fail further and the valley's survivors must finally reckon with a world their ancestors sealed themselves away from centuries before.

Chronologically, the duology sits between Genesis of Shannara and First King of Shannara, tracking the slow re-emergence of magic and civilization into the post-apocalyptic world as it edges closer to becoming the Four Lands of the Original Shannara Trilogy -- one more step in Brooks's decades-long project of connecting his real-world-adjacent Word and Void and Genesis books to the high fantasy of Shannara proper.

How to read this series

Read in publication order -- Bearers of the Black Staff (2010), The Measure of the Magic (2011) -- a single continuous story split across two books. Read the Genesis of Shannara trilogy first: this duology is set roughly five hundred years after The Gypsy Morph and assumes you know how and why the valley was sealed off from the outside world. It isn't necessary to have read the Original Shannara Trilogy or First King of Shannara first, even though this duology sits chronologically between Genesis of Shannara and First King of Shannara -- each was written to work as a discrete step in the larger timeline rather than requiring the later books' context.