Loric’s dagger made that possible. You are the white gold. It enabled him to burn as if he wore a wedding band that matched his ex-wife’s.

And if he could burn, he could return to the krill. To the moment when he still gripped the krill. No memory had the power to hold him back.

Bleeding from more wounds than he could count, Covenant found the path that led toward his present self. At once, he began to work his way along it. And while he arose from the Earth’s past, he fused fissures behind him. He closed cracks. Rife with silver fire, he healed breaks until all of them were mended.

Deliberately he annealed fragments of his former being, rendering them inaccessible so that he could be whole.

Like an astral spirit done with wandering, Thomas Covenant reentered his body in front of Joan.

He stood unsteadily among rocks and pools under a night sky as gravid and heavy as the stone of a tomb. The only light came from Loric’s blade: it may have been the only light left in the world. In the gem’s argent, the seafloor looked garish, ghostly: a nightscape illuminated by lightning or phosphorescence. Clyme and Branl remained on either side of him; but now they resembled shadows of themselves, tenuous as spectres or dreams, as though they inhabited a dimension of existence which he could scarcely perceive. When he completed his reality, they would be gone, lost among the effects of Joan’s madness.

In the sequences of her life, he had not been absent for more than a few moments: that was obvious. She had not moved. Apart from the uncertain clutch of her fist on her ring, and the tremulous shudder of her breathing, and the pitiless drip of blood down her face, she might have been a corpse so meagerly loved that it had been denied sepulture. Her dulled gaze hardly seemed capable of noticing him.

But then the Raver gave fuel to a spark of awareness within her. Her eyes caught reflections from the krill: they rediscovered rage.

Shaking at the force of turiya Herem’s hate, and of her own repudiation, she readied her arm.

Covenant was still ten paces from her. And he, too, was weak; badly hurt. Blood soaked his torn clothes: they felt like bandages applied in haste. He was barely able to remain on his feet and hold the dagger. He could not reach her quickly enough to interrupt her blow.

In another moment, another instant, she would hit herself again. Then he would die.

Gasping against the pain in his chest, he shouted, “Joan!” His own gambit of distraction. “Don’t do this!

“One of us has to die. One of us has to live. You know that! You know why. And I think you’ve already suffered too much.

“Joan, please! Let me live!”