The bottom of the caldera was filled with piled bones.

They were old—God, they were old! Thousands of them, tens of thousands, lay there as though they had been simply tossed aside; as though the crater were a midden in which every other form of refuse had fallen to dust. Or perhaps Lord Foul’s armies had never bothered to burn or bury their dead. Seasons of sun and weather beyond counting had scalded the bones to an utter whiteness. Under a brighter sky, they would have been dazzling.

Trying to understand, Linden studied them. Her first thought was that they were human; but they were not. She had never seen their like before. Some had curves or condyles that seemed unnatural. Some were far too long or broad to belong to Giants. Some looked like the ribs of animals much larger than Ranyhyn. Among them, there were too many crooks and bends, too many bones that resembled flames, too many wide sheets that might have been the shoulder-blades of hills or the sides of cromlechs.

They could not be what the Ranyhyn had sought in such haste. They could not. They were not merely unimaginably old: they were meaningless. Perhaps this was the graveyard of some species that had gathered together for comfort while it fell into extinction. Or perhaps Lord Foul, for some incomprehensible reason, had discarded his failed or slain creations here. In either case, these bones had no conceivable purpose now. Whatever they had once been, they had become nothing more than the residue of vast time. They might well be as ancient as the gutrock of the Lost Deep, but they were just bones; dismembered skeletons. They remembered only death.

The sheer waste of what she and her friends had done since Covenant’s departure urged Linden to fill the sky with her frustration.

Yet the Ranyhyn felt otherwise: that was obvious. After a long pause while she scanned the caldera, and her chagrin swelled until it seemed too great to be contained, all three of the horses whinnied loudly: a sound like the clash of swords on shields as a mighty army marched to battle. Then they began to move again. As if they were approaching a seat of majesty, they paced gravely down into the hollow.

“Stave,” Linden croaked. Her heart labored toward a crisis of denied needs. “God damn it. What is this?”

“I cannot answer,” he said flatly. “The Masters have seen this place, but have no knowledge of it. And during the centuries of the Bloodguard, no Lord hazarded this region of the Lower Land. Upon occasion, the Council of Lords spoke of a time before the coming of the Bloodguard, when High Lord Loric risked forays toward Sarangrave Flat and the Spoiled Plains. But within the hearing of the Bloodguard, those Lords described neither the purpose nor the outcome of Loric Vilesilencer’s efforts. And no mention was made of these littered bones.”