He held up one hand to stop her from interrupting. “Don’t ask me if I am sure of this because I most assuredly am. I discovered it for myself just the other day—the closer you get to the pit, the easier it is to understand the voice. Although I still can’t understand it the way you can. It is the old magic speaking, but you are the one it speaks to. If Paranor and the Druids are doomed, you are the one who needs to find out. If it’s simply a matter of setting the old wards in place, you need to find that out, too. But nothing can be determined without going to the source and hoping that proximity will provide you with the answers you require.”

He turned back to his books. “There, I’ve said everything I have to say on the matter. It’s up to you now. Maybe my speculations are entirely wrong. But I don’t think so.”

Aphenglow looked down at her hands where they rested in her lap. “But why has it chosen me?”

“Good question.” Woostra did not bother to look up. “You should ask it when you get close enough to do so.”

For long moments, Aphenglow sat there debating what the old man had told her. Then she stood and went out the door.

She really had no choice. If she wanted to test Woostra’s theory, she needed to enter the Keep’s main tower and descend from its lower levels into the huge pit that opened all the way down into the black center of the earth. She didn’t want to do this, didn’t want to be there even for the barest few seconds. She had gone into the pit only once, when she was newly come to Paranor and still exploring its boundaries, and she still regretted having done so. The cold and dark had a visceral feel, and she could sense the presence of something old and dangerous and inhuman. Magic, she had thought even then, dark and cunning, but she could not put a name to it.

When she had asked the Ard Rhys, Khyber had told her she was not to go down there again. What lived there was ancient and immutable and should be left to slumber undisturbed until the end of time.

She had not pressed the matter further, just happy to know she needn’t go back. Now she wished she had insisted on knowing more. Perhaps some of what was happening now might have been avoided.

The main tower was a huge structure settled at the north end of the Keep, thick and massive in its look, but deceptive, as well. Nowhere was it evident that it tunneled into the earth much farther than it rose above it, and nowhere did the Outer Walls reveal the nature of the unpleasantness trapped within.