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Earthpower from his shoulders and arms; Earthpower and absence, the same emptiness that she had known ever since he had withdrawn his halfhand from Lord Foul’s bonfire ten years ago.

One by one, he began pulling bones out of the pile; examining them; setting them on the ground beside him.

At the sight, Linden’s mind went blank.

She could not think or feel; could not react. Paralysis stopped her private world. Words seemed to whirl through her like stars and wink out as if every form of language had become incomprehensible. She had no name for what she was seeing.

He had already selected five bones, no, six. Two were twisted into unworldly shapes, but they appeared intact. One resembled the metatarsus of a creature large enough to dwarf a Giant. The others looked like phalanges of various sizes. Now he put his hands on a bone that might have been a mammoth femur.