He was naked. And he was whole; untouched by the ruin of bullets. Standing at last, swaying unsteadily with his calves and feet still buried, he flung his gaze toward her like a wail.

His eyes retained the color of old mud. But they were clear. And conscious. He seemed to see her as vividly as she saw him.

For a moment, his jaw worked as though he had forgotten speech. Then he said, “Mom,” in a voice like the drift and settle of dust. “Help me.”

Linden knew then that he had never belonged to the Despiser. No servant of Lord Foul would beseech—

But before she could summon an answer, he began to fray and fade. Impalpable breezes tugged through him as if he had as little substance as mist; as little meaning. While she fought herself, floundering to call out or rush forward, Jeremiah slowly dissipated like a banished ghost.

Soon he had dissolved completely; become as crepuscular and eternally lightless as the air that absorbed him.

As the last residue of his plea evaporated, the earth of his grave re-formed to cover him again. Soon there was no sign that he had ever emerged from life or death.

As though the harsh flare of lightning had been a revelation, Linden understood. She understood.

She was inside an incarnation of her son’s mind, a reification of his imprisonment made corporeal by health-sense and Earthpower. The tangling web of magicks knotted around the graveyard was the power of the croyel; the power that ruled him. With cruel bolts of energy, the monster unleashed what it needed from the boy: the ordinary language and movement and memory which enabled the croyel to carry out its charade of being Jeremiah. And the graves, the endless graves, careless mounds scattered beyond the farthest extent of Linden’s senses—

Sweet Christ! The graves were Jeremiah’s thoughts. They were the workings of his trapped mind moment by moment, each as solid as a corpse, and as transient as mist—and all buried alive within him.

Buried.

Alive.

Within him.

In that flash of comprehension, she forgot everything that might have been fear or paralysis. Horror she remembered—horror and unendurable rage—but every emotion that might have limited or constrained her vanished as though it had been exorcised. Jeremiah! If mere lightning could raise discrete fragments of her son’s self, she could resurrect them all with Earthpower and fury. She could set every grave ablaze, arouse in fire every instance of the identity which he had never been able to manifest as his own. In their thousands, their myriad thousands, she could gather them into herself before they evaporated and were reimmured. And then she could—