Without transition, Covenant staggered onto a featureless plain, infinitely unrelieved, and so cold that it froze the blood in his veins. If time had been possible here, one lurching attempt of his heart to beat would have shattered him. His entire body would have burst into ice crystals and drifted like dust, falling from nowhere to nowhere. But of course his heart did not beat, or he did not shatter, because this gelid moment did not move on to another. It did not imply time of any kind. He could stagger and catch his balance—could turn his head or his whole body to scan the suzerain nothing of the horizons—could walk in any direction if he chose—because this one miniscule fragment of causality and sequence had become the universe. It was all that the Arch of Time contained.

If he wished, he could imagine his breath as frigid plumes and searing inhalations, but such things had no significance. They meant nothing. They would never mean anything.

On some other plane of perception, a dimension simultaneous with the plain and the cold, hornets in their myriads or millions burrowed into his flesh. Each of them was pure excruciation, an instance of agony like being flayed. His leper’s numbness did not protect him. Even one of them might have destroyed him; but his absolute pain was eternally suspended within itself, forever caught between cause and effect. Here there was no difference between one insufferable anguish and a thousand. A thousand stings and a hundred thousand were the same. He endured them all for the same reason that he endured one: like his body, his mind was not given a chance to shatter.

It would never have that chance. In this place, there were no chances.

On yet another plane of perception, however, another overlapping dimension, he found Joan. He was Joan. He stood where she stood, among wet rocks and reefs which had formed the floor of the Sunbirth Sea only a short while ago. He screamed her horror and rage against the pitiless night. He pounded her abused flesh with his useless fists. He tore out her hair in clumps that did not hurt enough to redeem her.

And he remembered.

He remembered her life. His memories were hers. They were broken and whetted, as sharp as flensing knives, and they sliced through him until every vestige of his sanity was cut away.

They had driven her mad. They did the same to him.

And on still another dimension of perception, he recognized turiya Raver, Herem, Kinslaughterer. The Raver wore Joan and him as if they were garments donned at will. In his hands, turiya juggled memories and realities like toys. When he found one or another that displeased him, he crushed it; discarded it. The rest he kept aloft so that each possibility and recollection scraped across the whetstone of the air and became sharper.