The music around Infelice sounded like teeth grinding in frustration. Lordly and contemptuous, she answered, “Wildwielder, the Worm is mere extinction. The prison which the boy will devise is eternal helplessness, fully cognizant and forever futile. It will out-live the ending of suns and stars. Which doom would you prefer? Which would you elect for your son?”

Still Stave stood motionless, like a man who had no part to play in the world’s ruin. Behind Infelice, Jeremiah had used two more heavy bones like huge femurs snapped in half to complete the frame of his second wall: the side of an entryway, or the start of a corridor. Now he was busy filling the space between the uprights with fingers and limbs and lumps and gnarled boughs of bone. And as he worked, without haste or hesitation, Earthpower flowed from his hands like water, binding together the many pieces of his construct.

By degrees, theurgy swelled in the bones. It was still nascent, still tenuous and vague, but Linden sensed that soon it would start to burgeon. His creation was beginning to resemble the numinous box which he had used to reach the depths of Melenkurion Skyweir: it was coming to life.

“All right,” Linden said for the third time; perhaps the last time. “I’ll give you that one. It makes sense.

“So tell me. I’m ready to hear it now. What’s ‘the worst evil’? If imprisoning you is worse than the Worm of the World’s End, what could possibly be ‘the worst of all evils’?”

Infelice had become unalloyed wrath, a tintinnabulation too clangorous to be ignored. “The Despiser,” she rang out, “who is called a-Jeroth and Lord Foul and many other names, has placed his mark upon the boy. You claim the boy as your son, but you do not know him. You have not grasped that there is no limit to what he can achieve when he is given suitable aid.

“Assuredly the Despiser desires his escape from the Arch of Time—and to accomplish that end, he does not require the boy. In his secret heart, however, he nurtures a darker intent. He seeks to devise a prison for the Creator, making use of the boy’s gifts when the Arch has fallen. This he means to accomplish in the moment of collapse, when all things have become mutable. As the Despiser has suffered, so he wishes all possible Creation to suffer, in unending emptiness and lamentation.

“This you do not comprehend. Your mortal mind cannot encompass such absolute loss. Yet I beseech you to hear me. You have asked after the shadow on the hearts of the Elohim. The eternal end of Creation is shadow enough to darken the heart of any being.”

Linden stared, shocked in spite of her allegiance to her son. Was it possible? Possible? Could Lord Foul do that? With Jeremiah’s help? The eternal end—

—but of my deeper purpose I will not speak.