While the Arch endured, her name would always be agony. And even then—Ah, then! Voices like her own wailed of torments that could never end. When all of creation had been unmade, She Who Must Not Be Named would remain. Her anguish would remain. She was an eternal being: a concept as essential and illimitable as Creation or Despite. Tortures would expand beyond the swallowed stars, beyond the salvific definitions of Time, beyond comprehension, until they filled the reaches of infinity. They could not die, and so they could not stop. The treachery which had formed the bane could not be healed.

Linden knew those women, those victims, in their damnation. They were one with She Who Must Not Be Named; but they were also themselves, as distinct as their spiritual wounds. Helplessly Linden participated in their goaded horror, their compelled craving for food and slaughter. But she knew Elena best because Linden, too, had betrayed Covenant’s daughter. With the example of Berek and Damelon and Loric to guide her, she had nevertheless denied Elena Law-Breaker, child of Lena and rape. Linden had withheld compassion where it was most desperately wanted. A Law-Breaker herself, she was intimately familiar with the exigencies and passions which had driven Elena. And yet Linden had refused or failed—

Now she deserved her fate. She could not pretend otherwise. Nevertheless she screamed like all the others, multitudes of them: screamed with her whole being, and raged to cause more pain, and was lost.

On Gallows Howe, she had become the woman who had resurrected Thomas Covenant. But she had also become a woman who had no pity to give Elena.

Soon she would be Emereau Vrai as well: the woman forcibly bereft of her Elohim lover; the woman who had conceived the merewives in fury and mourning. She would be the Auriference, whose greed had made her as daring as the Harrow, and as foolish. Eventually she would be Diassomer Mininderain and know the truth.

It was that Covenant had not betrayed her. Never. That was Roger’s doing. But since then, she had betrayed herself. And her friends. And the Land.

And her son.

She had brought her doom upon herself.

When her body first began to strive for breath, she did not understand. She had been consumed. How was it possible, then, that she could starve for any sustenance except ruin and release? Yet her need gripped her: an autonomic struggle which recognized no relief except air. Spasms clenched her muscles; fought against constraint, blockage, weight. The tissues of her lungs seemed to burst and bleed. Instinctively she tugged at the arm that hugged her chest, the hand that sealed her mouth and nose. Failing to break free, she dragged her nails across skin that must not have been hers because she felt nothing.