Angel Fire East

Terry Brooks published Angel Fire East in 1999 through Del Rey. It closes the Word and Void series, a sequence of three books that stands as a prequel to his longer Shannara work.

The setting is the small town of Hopewell, Illinois, in the Christmas season of 2012. Nest Freemark and John Ross are back there, and the two of them are trying to reach a piece of magic that could alter the world they live in.

What they are looking for is a gypsy morph, which the book treats as a rare event: a convergence of magic that can serve either the Word or the Void, depending on who works out how to use it. If nobody unlocks its secret in time the morph will simply dissipate within a month and the chance will be gone. John Ross has already seen a vision of what may come of it, and the story of the novel is the race to get to the morph first and to decide what it is for.