Had he been able to do so, he might have acknowledged Infelice, not because he esteemed the self-absorbed surquedry of the Elohim, but because he understood the doom which Linden had wrought for them. Of the peoples of the Earth, the Elohim would be the first to suffer extermination. The havoc which would extinguish all of the world’s glories would begin with them.

The Harrow he perceived in glimpses like the flickering of a far signal-fire. But he had already forgotten the warning that those glimpses should have conveyed. His human vision was blurred as if he were weeping, shedding tears of knowledge and power. Terrible futures hinged upon the Insequent, as they did upon Anele: Covenant saw that. Yet their import had dripped into the fissures of his dwindling mind, or had seeped away like blood.

The losses which Linden had forced him to bear surpassed his strength. They could not be endured. And still they grew, depriving him by increments of everything that death and purified wild magic and the Arch of Time had enabled. With every lived moment, fractures spread deeper into his soul.

The Worm of the World’s End was coming. It was holocaust incarnate. He seemed to feel its hot breath on the nape of the Earth’s neck.

The Haruchai he knew, and the Ranyhyn, and the Ramen, although their names had fled from him. Of the people who had once been the Bloodguard, and once his friends, he remembered only sorrow. In the name of their ancient pride and humiliation, they had made commitments with no possible outcome except bereavement. Now three of them had been maimed so that their right hands resembled his: the fourth had lost his left eye. Recognizing them, Covenant wanted to cry out against their intransigence. They should have obeyed the summons of their Dead ancestors.

But he did not. Instead he found solace in the company of the Ranyhyn and the Ramen—although he could not have explained in any mortal language why they comforted him. He knew only that they had never striven to reject the boundaries of themselves. And that the Ranyhyn had warned Linden as clearly as they could.

Like the Ramen, the horses appeared to study the Haruchai warily, as if the halfhand warriors posed a threat which Covenant could not recall.

The Stonedownor he identified more by the orcrest in his hand and the fate on his forehead than by his features or devotion. The young man had chosen his doom when he had first closed his fingers on the Sunstone. He could not alter his path now without ceasing to be who he was.

Everyone who had remained near Linden in this place, this transcendent violation, watched Covenant with shock or consternation or bitterness. However, he was not yet fully present among them. He was only conscious of them dimly, like figures standing at the fringes of a dream. His first frail instants of concrete awareness were focused on Linden.

The anguish on her face, loved and broken, held him. It kept him from losing his way among the cracks of his mind.