Garion drew in a deep breath and looked around the amphitheater. It was not as large perhaps as he had first imagined certainly not large enough to contain what had happened here but then, all the world would probably not have been large enough to contain that. The faces of his companions, bathed in the fiery light from the sky and periodically glowing dead white in the intense flashes of the stuttering lightning, seemed awed by the enormity of what had just happened. The amphitheater was littered with dead Grolims, shrunken black patches lying on the stones or sprawled in boneless-looking clumps on the stairs. Garion heard a peculiar, voiceless rumble that died off into something almost like a sigh. He looked incuriously at the dragon. Its tongue protruded from its gaping mouth, and its reptilian eyes stared blankly at Him. The sound he had heard had come from that vast carcass. The beast's entrails, still unaware that they, like the rest of the dragon, were dead, continued their methodical work of digestion. Zandramas stood frozen in shock. The beast she had raised and the demon she had sent to possess it were both dead, and her desperate effort to evade the necessity of standing powerless and defenseless in the place of the Choice had crumbled and fallen as a child's castle of sand crumbles before the encroaching waves. Garion's son looked upon his father with unquestioning trust and pride, and Garion took a certain comfort in that clear-eyed gaze.

Cyradis was weeping. All else in Garion's mind was drawn from reflection and random impressions. The one incontrovertible fact, however, was that the Seeress of Kell was crushed by her grief. At this particular time she was the most important person in the universe, and perhaps it had always been so. It might very well be, Garion thought, that the world had been created for the one express purpose of bringing this frail girl to this place at this time to make this single Choice. But could she do that now? Might it not be that the death of her guide and protector the one person in all the world she had truly loved had rendered her incapable of making the Choice?

Cyradis was weeping, and so long as she wept, the minutes ticked by. Garion saw now as clearly as if he were reading in that book of the heavens which guided the seers that the time of the meeting and of the Choice was not only this particular day, but would come in a specific instant of this day, and if Cyradis, bowed down by her unbearable grief, were unable to choose in that instant, all mat had been, all that was, and all that was yet to be would shimmer and vanish like an ephemeral dream. Her weeping must cease, or all would be forever lost.