In the instant that the ring made contact with the gem, she became a holocaust of silver flame.

When she had spent one heartbeat, or two, measuring her borrowed power with her health-sense so that she could be sure of her control, she left the collapsing defense of her friends and began to wreak havoc as if she had been born for butchery and death.

So quickly that she appalled herself, the battle was over. While her friends and the Demondim-spawn watched, too stunned or horrified or injured to react, she ravaged every Cavewight on the ridge; rent asunder the hilltop where Roger stood; brought down cascades of fire from the blank sky. When surviving creatures turned to flee, she let them go. But she would have harried Roger until she had scorched every drop of his blood with wild magic, if he had not first hidden behind blunt hills and then warded himself with lava while he raced away on the shoulders of a Cavewight.

At his escape, she raised a scream of her own into the air; a shriek of unconstrained wild magic that seemed to challenge the Despiser himself. She yelled for Liand, and howled for Anele, and cried out for the pain of her companions, until her strength failed. Then at last her world went dark. All of her burdens fell away, and there was no more power anywhere that could hurt her.

When she recovered consciousness, she was sitting propped against a boulder at the base of Liand’s cairn. Someone must have put her there. Must have hung Covenant’s ring around her neck again, rested the Staff of Law across her lap. Stave, probably. He stood over her now, watching her while blood dripped from the ends of his fingers and the hem of his rent tunic.

Her entire being flinched at what she had done. But she could not undo it.

“Your absence has been brief, Linden,” the former Master answered before she found the will to question him. “We have only begun to tally our wounds.” His voice was strangely congested, thick with an emotion which she did not recognize. “Had you not bestirred yourself, however, I would have roused you. Our need for your aid is grievous. Among us, only the Unbeliever, the Cords, and your son lack any dire hurt.”

Then he turned and walked away as though he could no longer bear the sight of her. Oozing blood, he went to join the figures kneeling or supine near Jeremiah, Galt, Anele, and Esmer.

Thinking, Anele? she tried to pull herself to her feet. Is he still alive? Tried, and could not. If she managed to stand, she would see bodies. Hundreds of them. Thousands. She would be forced to confront the outcome of her despair.