Scrambling in panic, Linden released the ring and snatched up her Staff in both hands, wheeled it around her head. Melenkurion abatha! Nausea clawed at her guts. Hornets swarmed toward her. Duroc minas mill! She had not faced a caesure like this: not since her personal descent into darkness had taken hold. The stain on her soul might weaken her. Some part of her had learned to crave violations of Law.

But she had to try.

Harad khabaal!

If the Seven Words had no outward power unless they were spoken aloud, they still served to focus her desperation. Responding to her frantic desires, fuligin fire erupted from the wood. Blackness scaled upward, baleful and abused, like a scream that she had inherited from She Who Must Not Be Named.

Savage as a tornado, the Fall surged into the crater as if Joan or turiya Raver had aimed it straight at the bones. Some effect of fury or madness—or perhaps of lessened distance—had improved Joan’s control over her blasts.

Dissociated and vacant, Jeremiah ignored the caesure. He may have been unaware of it. Certain of himself, he walked toward the jumbled skeletons.

Into the path of ravaged time.

The Ranyhyn did not react. Stave did not move. Linden wanted him to spring down from Hynyn, catch up her son, run—But he sat his mount as if there were no peril.

As if he did not fear the virulent storm.

As if he trusted Linden Avery the Chosen.

Swinging her Staff, she lashed blazing midnight into the caesure’s wild core.

You cannot have my son!

Just for an instant, a staccato heartbeat, she saw herself fail. Her gush of power seemed to exacerbate the Fall—The caesure was feeding on her soiled strength.

But her sins had not altered the nature of the Staff, or the import of Caerroil Wildwood’s script. Almost immediately, the fundamental strictures of Earthpower and Law asserted themselves. They existed to affirm the organic integrity of life: Linden’s darkness did not corrupt them. As the caesure squirmed downward, it caught fire from the inside out. Halfway down the slope, it became an ebon conflagration, writhing in hunger. A moment later, it began to collapse into itself.

The force of its inrush nearly tugged Linden from Hyn’s back. But she did not stop scourging the Fall with flame, or shouting the Seven Words in her mind, until every severed instant of its violence was quenched.

Then she staggered inwardly; let her power fade. God, that was close—Too close.

“Stave,” she panted. “Damnit, Stave. What are you doing? Why didn’t you—?”

He did not glance at her. Without any expression that she could interpret, he said, “Attend to your son, Chosen. You have spoken of such things.”

Still staggering, she wrenched her attention toward Jeremiah.

He stood at the edge of the pile, regarding it as though nothing had happened. His back was to his mother: she could not see his face. But she caught whiffs of Earthpower from his shoulders and arms; Earthpower and absence, the same emptiness that she had known ever since he had withdrawn his halfhand from Lord Foul’s bonfire ten years ago.