When the horses gained the bottom of the caldera, Linden found that the mound of bones did not rise much higher than her head. And around them lay a clear space perhaps a dozen paces wide, suggesting that the bones had been placed here rather than simply discarded. At some point in the lost past, someone had arranged the scatter of skeletons into a heap like a cairn. But why anyone had bothered to do so, she could not conceive.

In the cleared flat, the horses halted, facing the bones. Their muscles trembled with fatigue. Sweat still ran from their flanks. But they did not shift their hooves or walk around the pile. Instead they stood motionless, waiting, as if they expected something ineffable to manifest itself within the clutter.

It is ever thus. The alternative is despair.

Linden closed her hand around Covenant’s ring through her shirt. She was finding it harder and harder to believe that despair was not a better choice. Here her deeds had come to doom, as they must—She could not escape their ramifications.

She had violated the Laws of Life and Death to restore Thomas Covenant; but she had failed to bring him back whole. From that moment, it was probably inevitable that he would abandon her. Only his fatal loyalty to other people’s mistakes had prevented him from turning his back sooner.

She should have listened—

Without warning, Jeremiah slipped down from Khelen’s back; and a caesure appeared, seething luridly among the teeth of the caldera’s rim.

Christ!

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.