Thomas Covenant knelt on the rich grass of Andelain as though he had fallen there from the distance of eons. He was full of the heavens and time. He had spent uncounted millennia among the essential strictures of creation, participating in every manifestation of the Arch: he had been as inhuman as the stars, and as alone. He had seen everything, known everything—and had labored to preserve it. From the first dawn of the Earth to the ripening of Earthpower in the Land—from the deepest roots of mountains to the farthest constellations—he had witnessed and understood and served. Across the ages, he had wielded his singular self in defense of Law and life.

But now he could not contain such illimitable vistas. Linden had made him mortal again. His mere flesh and bone refused to hold his power and knowledge, his span of comprehension. With every beat of his forgotten heart, intimations of eternity were expelled. They oozed from his new skin like sweat, and were lost.

Still he held more than he could endure. The burden of too much time was as profound as orogeny: it subjected his ordinary mind to pressures akin to those which caused earthquakes; tectonic shifts. His compelled transubstantiation left him frangible. As the structure of what he had known and understood and thought and desired failed, moment after unaccustomed moment, the sentience that had sustained him across uncounted ages became riddled with fault-lines and potential slippage.

In some fashion which was not yet awareness or true sensation, he recognized that he was surrounded by needs; by people and spectres who had gathered to witness Linden’s choices. Dark against the benighted heavens, broad-boughed trees defined the hollow where he knelt among Andelain’s hills. But their shadows paled in the fervid gleaming of Loric’s krill, bright with wild magic—and in the ghostly luminescence of the four High Lords whose presence formed the boundaries of Covenant’s crisis, and of Linden Avery’s.

Towering and majestic, the Dead Lords stood timeless as sentinels at the points of the compass to observe, and perhaps to judge, the long consequences of their own lives. Berek and Damelon, Loric and Kevin: Covenant knew them—or had known them—as intimately as they knew themselves. He felt Berek’s empathy, Damelon’s concern, Loric’s chagrin, Kevin’s vehement repudiation. He comprehended their presence. They had been summoned by the same urgency which had brought him to this night, drawn and escorted by the Law-Breakers.

But when he regarded the spirits of the Lords—briefly, briefly, between one wrenching heartbeat and the next—he found that he was no longer one of them; one with them. Their thoughts had become as alien and immemorial as the speech of mountains.

Each throb of blood in his veins bereft him of himself.

Caer-Caveral and Elena he comprehended as well. They remained behind him on the slope of the hollow, Caer-Caveral wreathed in the austere self-sacrifice of his centuries as Andelain’s Forestal, Elena heart-rent and grieving at the cost of the misplaced faith which had led her, unwilling, into the Despiser’s service. The Law-Breakers might have had the stature of the High Lords—the grandeur and might of Berek and Damelon, the severe valor of Loric, the anguish of Kevin—but they had been diminished by their chosen deaths; their deliberate participation in the severances which had made possible Covenant’s return to mortality. Now they had completed their purpose. They stood back, leaving Covenant to lose himself among his flaws.