Since her translation to the Land in Jeremiah’s wake, she had learned to think of his last voluntary creations as guides or instructions—or as warnings. Certainly she would not have traveled to Andelain to resurrect Covenant if she had not first found the Staff of Law and been taken to Revelstone, where she had fallen victim to Roger’s insidious glamour.

She believed now that she knew where the Harrow would take her, for good or ill.

Unfortunately she could not close her mind to an alternative interpretation of her son’s constructs. If Lord Foul had indeed claimed Jeremiah years ago, those images of Revelstone and Mount Thunder may not have been voluntary. They may have been manipulations; ploys designed to make her serve the Despiser.

Yet in the Hall of Gifts, Stave had spoken of children among his people.—it is their birthright to remain who they are. And he had asked, Are you certain that the same may not be said of your son?

Linden wanted to say the same of Jeremiah so badly that she feared to do so. I refuse to believe he made choices then that can’t be undone. Nevertheless the nature of the intent which had inspired his constructs in her living room did not affect her answer to Liand’s question.

“I don’t think that we need to worry about Anele. If I’m right, we’re going underground. It’ll all be stone. Old stone. The kind that he understands.

“You were there,” she said, remembering. “In Salva Gildenbourne. Before that first skurj attacked us, and we met the Giants. He read or heard something in the sand,” the residue of rocks which must have been old long before Covenant’s first appearance in the Land.

There Anele had spoken of the necessary forbidding of evils—a forbidding like the repulsion which the Colossus of the Fall had once wielded. But that strength was long gone. It had failed with the passing of the One Forest and the Forestals.

Without forbidding, there is too little time.

“Aye,” Liand acknowledged. “At that time, he instructed you to ‘Seek deep rock. The oldest stone. Only there the memory remains.’ But how do you conclude that your son is imprisoned beneath the earth?”

Anele had also said, Forget understanding. Forget purpose. Forget the Elohim. They, too, are imperiled.

Like so many of the old man’s utterances, that one had been as urgent as prophecy, and as cryptic. Now, too late, Linden knew what it meant.

And she knew something else as well. When he stood on rock—or on the remnants of rocks—Anele’s pronouncements held truth. Whether or not she grasped their significance, she needed to hear and heed them.

Become as trees, the roots of trees. Seek deep rock.

She shrugged. “I can’t be sure. But Lord Foul likes to hide his secrets in stone. Nothing else is strong enough to hold them.”