The Runes of the Earth

selves.

And among them moved sad gleaming creatures like misshapen children.

As the creatures squirmed over and among the stones, they emitted a sick emerald radiance; light the hue of acid and gangrene. They might have been the fouled progeny of the Illearth Stone, if that condensed bane had not been destroyed by wild magic millennia before her own time in the Land.

Nonetheless she recognised them. They were skest, and their touch was death: they were formed of a rank corrosive which devoured flesh. At one time, they had served the lurker of the Sarangrave, herding prey to the lurker’s hungry tentacles. Without aid, she and Covenant and their Quest for the One Tree would not have survived their passage through Lifeswallower, the Great Swamp.

Now the acid-children appeared to serve her, occasionally placing tasteless food and brackish water in her mouth, offering their bitter warmth to her wind-chilled skin, and mewling for pity which she did not deign to provide. At other times, they dissolved from sight, perhaps melting between the rocks in order to replenish her viands, or to restore their own lambent green lives. When they reappeared, they resumed their diligence.

Sharp formication: lost white and cold: a wasted vista of torn stone and skest. All simultaneous, overlapping around her and within her as though they occupied the same space at the same time. If the caesure took other forms as well, they lay beyond the reach of her senses.

Tearing ants and fiery cold slowed her perceptions. Gradually, however, she became aware that in the wasteland among the skest she was someone else: that she inhabited a flesh not her own; gazed about her through eyes which did not answer to her will; made choices over which she had no control. Although she wailed and grieved, she altered nothing, affected nothing. None of her pain or her yearning escaped the mind where she was imprisoned.

She should have died, consumed by fire ants and cold. She should have been driven mad by the loss of her friends and her purpose; of her son. She had brought them all to ruin and deserved no less. Yet she could not escape.

Instead she felt a hand which was not hers clench and rise abruptly toward her head. Through the eyes of her prison, she saw the body’s right fist strike against its temple. Nerves that did not belong to her felt blood weep from an aggravated sore, dripping like tears down an abused cheek. Dissociated whimpers leaked from a mouth that had lost most of its teeth. When the throat swallowed, she tasted the seepage of bleeding gums.

At the same time, a flash of argent fire burst from the ring hanging against a sternum on its chain. Silver anguish blazed and coruscated among the stones, the rent instances, until one of them had been torn to confusion and dust.

Then, simultaneous with her other agonies, Linden understood that she was trapped in Joan’s mind; that the woman who tortured this wasteland of rubble with the sea at her back, the woman whom the skest served, was Covenant’s ex-wife. Charred by the Despiser’s lightning, Joan had indeed found her way to the Land, as Linden had feared.

And here Joan herself had been found by turiya Herem.

Linden knew the Raver’s touch intimately: she could not fail to recognise it. During her own translation to the Land, she had met turiya in Joan’s mind. She had been afflicted with visions of pain and destruction which she still did not know how to bear. But there were no visions now. Even they required sequences and causality which did not exist within the caesure. Instead she felt only the Raver’s insatiable abhorrence of life.

Goaded by turiya Herem’s malice, Joan continued to strike herself, measuring out her despair against her temple. And with each blow, her power lashed out to create Falls, shattering coherent fragments of time until every moment within that fragment was torn apart.

Wild magic could have unmade the entire landscape in one towering gout of power; broken the Arch of Time instantly. Trapped in Joan’s mind, however, Linden understood that she was incapable of such an act. Coercion and insanity fettered her pain: she could utter no cry louder or more sustained than this piecemeal devastation.

Gauged by the scale of Joan’s blasts, the wasteland around her was immense. The Earth might endure and suffer for centuries before the damage became irrecoverable.

To Linden, that seemed still worse than formication and emptiness. Had she remained alive in any coherent sense, able to make choices and act, she might have striven to counteract Joan’s suffering; to hold back the harm of Joan’s self-loathing. But that possibility also Linden had lost.

Her plight surpassed endurance, yet she could not escape it. When the skest had fed her, Joan savaged another of the littered moments-and freezing white loneliness filled Linden’s senses, featureless and forever unrelieved-and myriads upon myriads of gnawing pincers bit her flesh to shreds-and she could not escape it.

Then she might have attempted deliberately to abandon consciousness and knowledge, hoping to find relief. More than once in the past, however, she had felt the same desire; the same impulse to abdicate herself. Watching her father’s suicide. Tortured in every nerve by the ravages of the Sunbane. Imprisoned in Revelstone. Possessed by a Raver while Covenant surrendered to Lord Foul. In some sense, she had sacrificed volition when she had entered Covenant’s mind in order to free him from the imposed stasis of the Elohim.

Now she could not forget what her desire for absence had cost her in the past. Or what it would cost Jeremiah here.

Nor could she forget that her companions suffered as well; that Anele and Liand, Stave, the Ramen and the Ranyhyn, even the ur-viles, had entered this demesne of horror at her behest.

And she remembered that no time had passed.

She was trapped in all moments and none simultaneously. She might spend eternity searching for an escape, and still nothing would have been lost. Nothing would be lost until the bounds of her identity frayed and failed; until she truly and entirely abandoned hope.

Until then, she could still think.

Both Anele and the ur-viles had once survived this same experience. She intended to do the same.

But they had merely entered a caesure, or been taken by it. And when the chaos had flung them forth again, by accident of Earthpower or design of lore, they had emerged thousands of years later. She needed more: not merely to survive and emerge, but to defy the inherent attributes of the Fall. Within itself, it was all moments and none, impossible confusion. Externally, however, it was a specific rock on the littoral of Joan’s madness; a discrete force which moved from place to place through time. Despite its internal insanity, it was like a river: it ran in only one direction.

Linden needed to do more than simply endure until the caesure cast her onto its banks. She needed to swim against the current, drawing her companions with her.

She needed wild magic.

Thinking was a form of movement. And the avatar of freezing whiteness was the only one which allowed her the illusion of movement. Therefore she selected a direction at random-all directions were the same in that place-and began to walk. Then she began to run-

– seeking the door within herself which opened on white fire.

The cold attacked her lungs with relentless ferocity: she should have collapsed in bloody coughing. Yet she did not. No time had passed. She did not need air. Therefore the rending in her chest never changed. She could continue to run, no matter how vast her pain.

In that way, she clung to herself through formication and loss and blazing madness.

But she had lost the door. It lay hidden somewhere within her. Twice before, she had found her way there consciously, and it had opened to her hand. Now, however, the path which might have led toward it had been transformed to chaos. She was in too much pain to rediscover the route inward.

In this excruciating tumult, only Joan had power.

Nevertheless Linden kept running. She believed now that if she stopped she would never become herself again.

Nothing changed. Nothing could change in a realm devoid of cause and sequence. Fire ants and utter loneliness ruled here. Yet Joan continued to feed occasionally, drink occasionally, and strike out; and Linden still ran, fleeing her own despair.

Then the lash of argent from Joan’s ring caused a jagged chunk of granite to detonate in incandescence,