Cold and scalding as congealed fire, the flat wilderland ached toward its illimitable horizons. An infinitude of disarticulated instants burrowed like screaming into Covenant’s helpless flesh. Within Joan’s mind, he returned to Haven Farm and horses in sunlight. He lived through what had become of her over and over again, as she did. Endlessly they repeated the cycle of her terrible dismay.

Such things held him. They had always held him, and always would. This moment would never lead to another, and so he could neither escape nor die. Nothing would ever change.

Nevertheless Branl and Clyme stood on either side of him. They remained exactly where they had been ever since this specific instant had been ripped out of its natural continuum.

They did not look at him. They had never looked at him. They were unaware of his presence—or they, too, no longer existed.

“Ur-Lord,” Branl said: a gust of vapor as gelid and unbearable as stark ice. “You must return to yourself.”

“You must,” Clyme said. Plumes of frost issued from his mouth. “We cannot ward you.”

“We are Haruchai,” Branl said. “We cannot share our minds with you.”

“We are Haruchai,” Clyme echoed. “We do only what we can. Nothing more. As we have ever done.”

They stood beside Covenant. Companions. He was not alone.

Nothing changed. Here there was no possibility of change.

Nonetheless Branl put his hand on Covenant’s left elbow. Clyme grasped the right.

Together they lifted Covenant’s arms until he could see Loric’s krill clenched in both of his numbed hands.

Oh, they were Haruchai! They lived in each other’s thoughts. They could carry the burden of too much time without faltering. And they stayed away from Joan. They had that power; that salvific intransigence. Stave had done the same. Even when he could have witnessed the private writhing of Linden’s spirit, he had held himself apart.

The dagger’s shining did not pierce Covenant’s sight. His eyes were frozen. They had been chewed out of their orbits. Mere radiance could not blind him to what he saw; what he had seen; what he would always see. It was only wild magic. It was not redemption.

But it was wild magic, an inherent and inextricable aspect of the Arch of Time. It added a new dimension to the overlapping realities of his helplessness.

While Clyme and Branl supported him—while they upheld the krill’s transcendence—he saw more than the flat plain; more than swarming hornets; more than Joan’s reiterated suffering.

He also saw her as if from the outside. As if he were present in her present.

She stood ankle-deep in muck and water surrounded by jagged rocks and cruel reefs. Somehow she had crept or clambered several hundred paces across the seabed. Now she faced the blasted cliff where Foul’s Creche had fallen. Under the sealed doom of the night sky, she faced Covenant and the Humbled.