The Runes of the Earth

slumbers, threatening to rouse the destruction of the Earth. Now it was Linden herself. In her hands she held more power than she could comprehend or control; and with it she lashed out in a frenzy of desperation, seeking to reclaim her son, and achieving only cataclysm.

Unchecked, her needs goaded the Worm to wakefulness. It lifted its vast head, seeking havoc. For a moment as terrible as eternity, it looked into her eyes with recognition.

No! she cried in protest. No! This was more of Joan’s madness; more of Lord Foul’s malice. But it was not: it was prophecy. She had regained her health-sense and knew the truth.

If she did not quail and flee, this augury could come to pass. With Covenant’s ring, she might indeed be capable of rousing the Worm.

Nevertheless she did not falter. Her fury held. She had lost her son, and would dare any devastation to win him back. In her scales, he outweighed the life of worlds. If Lord Foul believed that she could be daunted-

Abruptly reality veered again, flinging her from vision to vision. For a moment, she ambled through a chaos of outcomes: moments of outrage and stark evil; instances of slaughter and betrayal, the cruel scything of death. Then she staggered to a halt.

Now she stood on a bluff overlooking a plain of rich life and ineffable loveliness. The ground below her undulated among hills and woodlands; luxuriant greenswards; streams delicate as crystal, cleansing as sunlight. Here and there, majestic Gilden trees lifted their boughs to the flawless sky, and vast oaks shed beneficent shade. Birds like reified song soared overhead while small animals and deer gambolled alertly among the woods. With her enhanced discernment, Linden beheld the vibrant health of the plain, its apt fecundity and kindliness. She might have been gazing down at Andelain, the essential treasure of the Land, born of its most necessary beauty; the incarnation of everything which she had striven to attain when she had fashioned the new Staff of Law.

This, too, felt like a form of prophecy.

As she drank in the gentle grandeur below her, however, a spot of wrongness like a chancre appeared amid the grasses. It was not large-not at first-but its intensity multiplied moment by moment as she studied it in dismay. Soon it seemed as bright as a glimpse into a furnace, incandescent, malefic, and brutally hot. And from it writhed forth a fiery beast like a serpent of magma; an avatar of lava with the insidious, squirming length of a snake and the massive jaws of a kraken. While she watched, appalled, the monster began to devour its surroundings as if earth and grass and trees were the flesh on which it fed.

And around it other chancres appeared. They, too, gathered intensity until they gave birth to more monsters which also feasted on the plain, consuming its loveliness in horrifying chunks. A handful of the creatures would destroy the entire vista in a matter of hours. But more of them clawed ravening from the earth, and still more, as calamitous as the Sunbane. Soon every blade and leaf of life would be gone. If the beasts were not stopped, they might eat through the world.

Then her vision fell to darkness like the closing of an eye. And she fell with it, blind and dismayed; full of woe. If this were death, then she could only believe that she was being translated, not to the Land, but to Hell.

But instead of the shrieks of the damned she heard a voice she knew.

It was fathomless and resonant, as vast as the abyss: her fall itself might have been speaking. And it brought with it a sweet and cloying reek, a stench like attar, as vile as putrefaction.

“It is enough,” Lord Foul said softly. “I am content.” His tone wrapped around her caressingly, like the oil of cerements and death. “She will work my will, and I will be freed at last.”

He may have been speaking to Joan. Or to turiya Herem.

Then the shock of her power rebounded against her, and she was flung away as if in rejection; as if the abyss itself sought to vomit her out.

For a moment longer, she could hear the Despiser. As his voice receded, he said, “Tell her that I have her son.”

She would have wailed then: the pain would have sundered her. Now, however, she tumbled headlong through the tectonic groan of shifting realities; and she could draw no breath with which to cry out. Percipience came to her in scraps and tatters, granting her glimpses of emptiness: the unspeakable beauty of the spaces between the stars. The passion of Covenant’s ring faded from her, quenched by the sheer scale of what might suffer and die.

Only the loss of her son remained.

Jeremiah-

It might be better for him if he had been slain.

Later she no longer tumbled, although she was unaware that anything had changed. She did not notice the smooth cool stone under her face and chest, or the high, thin touch of open air. Tell her that I have her son. At their fringes, her senses tasted the immense expanse of the sky; but the Despiser had taken Jeremiah, and nothing else conveyed any meaning.

No one else needs you the way he does.

Yet the old stone insisted against her face. Her hands at her sides felt its ancient, flawed strength. The danger of another fatal plunge tugged at her nerves. Along her back the breeze whispered of distant horizons and striding crests of upraised, illimitable rock.

Where was Thomas Covenant, now that her need for him had grown so vast? She was no match for the Despiser. Without Covenant, she would never win back her son.

She remembered Sheol’s touch. At its behest, she had fled from consciousness and responsibility. But she was no longer that woman: she could not flee now. Jeremiah needed her. He required her absolutely.

Covenant was gone. She lacked the strength to stand in his place.

Nevertheless.

Finally she noticed that Roger’s blood was gone from her face. It had clogged her nostrils, blinded her eyes: she could still taste its coppery sickness in her mouth. Yet it no longer stained her skin.

Despite the bullet wound in her chest-the death she could not feel-she lifted her head and drew up her hands to confirm that she had been burned clean.

When she opened her eyes, she found herself on stone in deep sunlight. Finished granite formed a circle around her, enclosed by a low parapet. She was alone.

Tell her that I have her son.

Once more she cried Jeremiah’s name. For a moment, the sound echoed back to her, vacant and forlorn under the wide sky. Then it vanished into the sunlight and left no trace.

Chapter Two: Caesure

At first Linden could not move. Her cry had taken the last of her strength. Haunted by echoes, she folded her arms on the stone and lowered her head to rest.

She knew where she was. Oh, she knew. Her brief look around had confirmed it. She had been here once before, ten years and a lifetime ago. This stone circle with its parapet was Kevin’s Watch, a platform carved into the pinnacle of a leaning stone spire high above the line of hills which divided the South Plains from the Plains of Ra.

How much time had passed since her first appearance here? She knew from experience that months in the Land were mere hours in her natural world: centuries were months. And Thomas Covenant had told her that between his imposed translations the Land had undergone three and a half millennia of transformation.

If a comparable interval had passed again, the healing which she had begun should have worked its way into every stretch of rock and blade of grass, every vein of leaf and truck of tree, from the Westron Mountains to Landsdrop and beyond.

But thirty centuries and more were also time enough for Lord Foul to restore himself, and to devise a new corruption of this precious, vulnerable place.

She would have to search for her son in a country that had almost certainly changed beyond recognition.

According to Covenant, the Land had once been a region of health and beauty, rich in vitality. In those days,