In one, he saw everything that happened around him. He recognized every event from the moment when Esmer touched his forehead until he stood near Linden’s collapse above a rabid lake of fire, gazing at She Who Must Not Be Named. He felt everything, feared everything. But he had no volition, no power to act. He could do nothing to help his companions. He could only care and grieve and groan and dread. In that dimension, the part of him that made choices was out of reach.

It wandered elsewhere, among his memories, where nothing was required of him because everything had already happened. Perhaps he needed to recall those people and places and deeds: perhaps he did not. But they did not need him. He was merely a spectator, as oneiric as a figment, amid the fragments and rubble of things past; shattered stretches of time. And because his memories were broken, he did not know how to find his way through them. They were out of sequence; could not lead him back to himself.

Esmer had cast him into a realm of contradictory knowledge and bewilderment where every impulse of his heart was thwarted. Instead of responding to the company’s plight, or to the killing deluge which Linden had unleashed in the cavern, or to her final failure in the face of the bane’s emergence, Covenant remembered.

Earlier, while the company fled from the Lost Deep, he had observed ur-viles reconsidering their Weird millennia ago. The Demondim had not been fools: they had not made the ur-viles to be fools. Even the Waynhim—the accidents or miscalculations of breeding—had been discerning and lorewise, capable of recondite insights. Their black cousins had been far too intelligent for the contemptuous use which Lord Foul had made of them.

Their Weird as they had first understood it expressed their self-loathing: better to die promoting the end of all things than to live flawed and hateful in a world meant for beauty. Perishing by the thousands in the Despiser’s wars, however, the ur-viles had recognized that the logic of their servitude could reach only one conclusion. And in battle at the gates of Lord’s Keep, the Waynhim had demonstrated by valor and commitment that other choices were possible. Thus the Waynhim had prodded the ur-viles to question themselves.

When the Despiser had been defeated, therefore, the black Demondim-spawn had withdrawn to the Lost Deep to search their lore and their oldest legacies for a reply to the challenge posed by the Waynhim. Among the ineffable achievements of the Viles, the ur-viles had probed the history of their makers, and of their makers’ makers, until they reached an era before the Viles had ventured across the Hazard and been swayed by the Ravers.