A trilogy in Terry Brooks's long-running Shannara series, these stories link The Word and the Void books to the main series.
Sometime in the near future, the once-human demons are winning their war against humanity. Civilization is collapsing with scattered havens of order surrounded by wastelands full of dangerous mutants, paranoid survivors, and lawless scoundrels, but there are a handful of heroes standing against the tide. The Knights of the Word fight the Void and its demon servants, but only two remain: Logan Tom and Angel Perez. While Logan searches for Nest Freemark's son Hawk to help him fulfill his destined savior role, Angel's quest is to find the last remaining Elves and ensure their survival into the new world.
The three books are:
- Armageddon's Children
- The Elves of Cintra
- The Gypsy Morph
The series provides examples of:
- After the End: About a generation or so after the Great War.
- Artifact Title: Nobody from the Shannara bloodline is even present.
- Bad Future: The Knights in this trilogy are living the Bad Future that John Ross dreamed about in The Word and the Void.
- Canon Welding: Establishes The Word and the Void as the backstory of Shannara with the Elves of Aborlon, the Elfstones, and the King of The Silver River showing up.
- Fantasy Gun Control: Averted at this point in the Shannara timeline. Guns (especially flechettes), motorized vehicles and armed robots are still in relative abundance. Many of these break down over time, with fewer and fewer people having any knowledge of how to make them.
- Last of Their Kind: Aside from the Elves, there are also the last remnants of the pre-Great War civilization. Such as a soldier hiding in an old ICBM facility who's hinted as being the last American.
- Memetic Badass: John Ross of The Word and the Void is this in-universe, decades after his death.
- Prequel in the Lost Age: Set in a time that the inhabitants of the Four Lands in the main sequence barely remember in legend.
- Retcon: The Loden Elfstone was originally implied to have been created between the even of Heritage of Shannara and the original trilogy. Here it's established to have been created with the rest of the Elfstones in the time of Faerie.
- Ruins of the Modern Age
- Scavenger World: The survivors are rummaging on what's left of civilization.
- Shrouded in Myth: John Ross, to an extent. His heroics in The Word and the Void are apparently well known among the Knights.
- Urban Fantasy
