The choir was in chaos, and unprepared, and for eternal moments Tamsin and Lord Kerak tried to hold their adversary by themselves.

Far away in Lissen Carak, the choir raised its voices all together; Miriam’s high alto and Amicia’s low alto and over them all, a young novice’s magnificent soprano raising their praise of God to heaven. Amicia spread her arms, and the glow of golden light that suffused her began to intensify.

The choir’s power grew. The power passed west to Kerak and to Tamsin.

Ash could no long ignore the immanence of Amicia. It was a crisis for which he was prepared, and yet unprepared.

“Damn,” muttered Lord Kerak, and he was hit as Ash’s power began to leak through his mind, unable to hold the power of the choir and the power of Ash in his head. In no time he was dying, but the Army of the Alliance lived, and Ash turned, rushing east to try to prevent a disaster to all his plans, and he cursed, his curses palpable, abandoned any immediate hope of destroying the Allies, and cast from the ops he sucked from the fountain at Lake-on-the-Mountain and he took the wyrm’s way to Lissen Carak in a single mighty effort of will.

Tamsin herself left her fortress and stepped through reality to save Kerak. She reached as far down Kerak’s lifeline as she could, trying to save the ancient Warden sorcerer, greatest of his kind and perhaps as great as Harmodius himself.

Kerak’s physical body lay in a crumbled heap in the midst of the Whale’s Jaw, a huge rock outcropping on the reverse slope of the ridge where two ley lines converged, hiding him in the aethereal. Tamsin stepped through reality even as she reached far into the aethereal, but Kerak was far beyond her, his fading self already almost gone even from the farthest halls and tunnels of his great and Wyrm hole–like memory palace.

“Oh, Kerak,” Tamsin said, or something equally foolish. Tamsin and Kerak had been allies and foes many times in many contests; now, at what she knew to be the end of her age, she would have traded every knight and archer and every irk in the Army of the Alliance for Lord Kerak, her peer and friend.

She knelt in the darkening cave of his memory palace, and bowed her head. And ash and grit fell on her from the lowering sky.

Far to the east, in the darkening sky over the great abbey, Ash poured fire onto the battlements to no effect. He cursed, and raved; a thunderstorm, feeding on his excess and rich in volcanic ash, burst over the high castle. He was unwise in his expenditures, and his will lost adherence, and still he could not penetrate the choir’s canopy of resistance.