In her trembling fist, she clutched her wedding band with its chain wrapped around it.

Her knuckles were raw. Blood pulsed from the sore on her temple where she had punched and punched herself. In its own way, her self-abuse matched Covenant’s bleeding forehead. Blood made streaks of anguish down her sunken cheek. It stained the filth and tatters of her hospital gown. Rage blazed like the krill in her eyes. A rictus bared her few remaining teeth. The gaps in her gums oozed more blood. It marked her mouth as though she fed on living flesh.

From his prison inside her mind, Covenant saw that she also saw him. She saw the Humbled and Loric’s bright weapon as if they had all stepped out of her madness to confront her.

Watching himself and his companions while he also watched her, Covenant saw that he and Branl and Clyme were making their way toward her. Awash in silver, they traversed the unfathomable dark. Together they passed around boulders sharp enough to shred their flesh, avoided fingers of coral that reached for them like blades, splashed through puddles and pools left behind by the indrawn ocean.

On all sides as far as the light of the krill extended, waters and gasping fish and sea-plants quivered in the shocks of distant convulsions. But such things did not trouble Joan. She wanted the tsunami. It could not come soon enough.

Staring through her appalled eyes, Covenant saw himself and the krill and the Humbled advance toward her like the approach of horror: the ultimate apotheosis of her despair.

None of this was real: he understood that. It was a mirage of movement and sequence made possible by Loric’s lore and Joan’s wild magic, nothing more; a mere figment. Nothing had changed. Nothing could change. He remained lost in his last Fall. His own abyss would never release him.

But that did not matter. It was irrelevant. Meaningless. Because Joan believed what she saw. Participating in her thoughts, Covenant knew that she believed he had come for her.

She believed that he meant to finish what he had started when he had married and betrayed her; when he had afflicted her with a cruel son. The man whom she most loathed and feared: the man who haunted her worst terrors. The man who had made her what she was.

And she had no skest to defend her. The Raver had sent them all to oppose Covenant among the Shattered Hills.

With a shriek that seemed to split the world, she raised her fist. Striking at her forehead, she unleashed a blast savage enough to incinerate an entire legion of Thomas Covenants and Haruchai.

The krill accepted her attack. Its jewel became a sun in Covenant’s grasp. Some of her force the dagger simply dissipated. Some it absorbed until its edges became sharp enough to cut through the boundaries between realities.

Nevertheless a portion of her fury hit him.