“This is the day, Kheldar,” she said, ”but it is not the instant. In the instant of the Choice, a great light shall appear, a light which even I will see."

It was the strange detached calm that came over him that alerted Garion to the fact that the ultimate Event was about to take place. It was the same calm that had enveloped him in the ruins of Cthol Mishrak when he had met Torak.

Then, as if the thought of his name had aroused, if only briefly, the spirit of the One-Eyed God from its eternal slumber, Garion seemed to hear Torak's dreadful voice intoning that prophetic passage from the last page of the Ashabine Oracles:

"Know that we are brothers, Belgarion, though our hate for each other may one day sunder the heavens. We are brothers in that we share a dreadful task. That thou art reading my words means that thou hast been my destroyer. Thus must I charge thee with the task. What is foretold in these pages is an abomination. Do not let it come to pass. Destroy the world. Destroy the universe if need be, but do not permit this to come to pass. In thy hand is now the fate of all that was, all that is, and all that is yet to be. Hail, my hated brother, and farewell. We will meet or have met in the City of Endless Night, and there will our dispute be concluded. The task, however, still lieth before us in the Place Which Is No More. One of us must go there to face the ultimate horror. Should it be thou, fail us not. Failing all else, thou must reave the life from thine only son, even as thou hast reft mine from me."

This time, however, the words of Torak did not fill Garion with weeping. They simply intensified his resolve as he finally began to understand. What Torak had seen in the vision that had come to him at Ashaba had been so terrifying that in the moment of his awakening from his prophetic dream the maimed God had felt impelled to lay the possibility of the dreadful task upon his most hated foe. That momentary horror had surpassed even Torak's towering pride. It had only been later, after the pride had reasserted itself, that Torak had mutilated the pages of his prophecy. In that one bleak moment of sanity, the maimed God had spoken truly for perhaps the one time in his life. Garion could only imagine the agony of self-abasement that single moment of truth had cost Torak. In the silence of his mind Garion pledged his fidelity to the task his most ancient foe had lain upon him. "I will do all that is in my power to keep this abomination from coming to pass, my brother," he threw out his thought to the spirit of Torak. “Return to thy rest, for here I take up the burden."