The Runes of the Earth

the obscuring blanket.

In all the region under Kevin’s Watch, that aura was the only thing powerful enough to pierce the shroud.

And like the shroud, it was wrong. It violated her percipience in similar ways, but more acutely, as if it were the distilled essence of violation. In that swirl, fundamental Laws which enabled this world’s existence were suspended or distorted: reality seemed to flow and melt into itself like the confusion in Joan’s mind. Any living thing swallowed by it might be torn apart.

And it was moving; advancing along the cliff-face toward the Watch. Soon it would be near enough to touch the spire.

Moaning in distress, Anele wrenched at Linden’s grasp. Now she understood his reaction. She might leap from Kevin’s Watch herself, if that aura came near her.

“Release Anele!” he panted urgently. “It pursues him! He must escape!”

His alarm helped her to step back from her own. Pursues him? she thought fiercely. Not damn likely. His madness misled him. That fatal aura had no interest in him. It had no interests at all; no consciousness and no volition. Her senses were certain. It resembled a force of nature hideously perverted: blind, insentient, and entirely destructive.

Yet it continued to advance on the Watch, drawing closer with every beat of her heart.

“Anele, no!” she called with as much authority as she could summon. “Don’t!” Deliberately she turned her back on the aura so that she could hold him more tightly. “I said I’ll protect you. I can’t do that if you jump.”

His white, staring eyes glistened as if they were sweating in terror.

Why did he think that the mad distortion wanted him?

But she could not phrase her questions in words that he would be able to answer. With the whirlwind approaching at her back, she could hardly think. And it moved nearer at every moment. Clutching Anele, she abandoned her confusion and reached instead for the memory of her fall to this place. The memory of wild magic.

Under her boots, the stone seemed to shiver in anticipation or dread.

Linden had healed her wounds somehow. Yet wild magic was not inherently apt for healing. Its impulse toward rampage limited its ordinary, mortal uses. She did not know whether she could oppose the aura with white gold. She was not even sure that she could muster its fire consciously.

But she did not doubt that both she and Anele would die if the seething swirl touched them.

Moment by moment, the aura advanced. At the same time, the shivering of the stone mounted; became insistent. Earlier she had felt a flaw in the spire, a suggestion of frangibility. Her health-sense had told her that the Watch had been damaged-

Its instability undermined her balance. Only her grim grip on Anele kept her from stumbling.

– but she had not been able to guess what form of power had done the spire such harm.

Now she knew.

The aura was not the only manifestation of its kind. Or it had existed for a long time-a very long time-roving the Land as its energies dictated. In some form, it had been here before.

Then it had left Kevin’s Watch barely standing. Even through her boots, the tremors in the stone assured her that the next touch would be the last.

The swirl would reach the base of the spire in moments.

“Anele!” she yelled frantically, “get behind me! Hold on! Don’t let go, whatever happens. We’re going down!”

With all her strength, she wrenched him aside so that she stood between him and the danger.

Obedient to her desperate command, he flung his arms around her neck, caught her in a hug of panic. When he shoved the side of his head against hers, his gasping sounded like a death rattle in her ear.

Seething viciously, the aura approached the base of the spire.

Enveloped it.

For an instant nothing happened. The stone quivered and quailed-and held.

Then a rending shriek shivered the Watch, and the ancient granite twisted to splinters like torn kindling.

Chapter Three: In the Rubble

Through a din like the destruction of the heavens, the massive spire of Kevin’s

Watch shuddered and snapped. Between one heartbeat and the next, it became rubble hopelessly poised a thousand feet above the hills.

Dust and flung detritus obscured the sun. Ponderously at first, and as poignant as augury, it sagged away from the cliff. Stone screams stunned the air as the platform on which Linden and Anele stood tilted outward.

She had time for one last cry; barely heard Anele’s lorn wail. Then the weight of so much granite took hold, and the ruined Watch collapsed like a cataract.

With Anele clutching her neck, Linden fell down the sky, accompanied by shattered menhirs-hundreds, thousands of them-heavy enough to crush villages. As she and her burden dropped, they seemed to rebound from one tremendous shard to the next, striking One to be deflected toward another. At any instant, they might have been smashed to pulp between stones; slain long before their flesh was flung against the hard hills.

Anele’s grasp threatened to crush her larynx: she could not breathe. Already she might have broken bones. Her last outcry was the rending of Kevin’s Watch, an eternity of terror and protest compressed into one small splinter of time.

And again she was struck, as she had been struck before: her temple collided with a boulder the size of a dwelling, and the whole inside of her head-her mind and her scream and her frantic heart-turned white with pain.

White and silver.

In the plunge of her translation here, she had given no thought to wild magic; had made no attempt to call it forth. Instead, beneath or beyond consciousness, she had reached out instinctively for her own strength. But this time she had already begun groping toward Covenant’s ring when the stark wrong of the aura had overwhelmed the spire’s ancient intransigence.

While the cruel bulk of stones swept her downward, and helpless collisions battered her bones, Linden Avery became a detonation of argent fire.

In the imponderable gap between instants, she felt that she had dropped into the core of a sun. Its glare appeared to catch and seethe in the earth’s yellow shroud, lighting the obscurity to its horizons like a lightning strike.

Then rampant flame bore her away, and she vanished into a whiteness like the pure grief of stars.

Stars, she had heard, were the bright children of the world’s birth, the glad offspring of the Creator, trapped inadvertently in the heavens by the same binding that had imprisoned the Despiser. They could only be set free, restored to their infinite home, by the severing of Time. Hence their crystalline keening: they mourned for the lost grandeur of eternity.

And wild magic was the keystone of Time, the pivot, the crux. Bound by Law, and yet illimitable, it both sustained and threatened the processes which made existence possible, for without causality and sequence there could be no life; no creation; no beauty.

No evil.

Joan held a white gold ring.

Lord Foul had taken Jeremiah.

Although she had failed at everything else, Linden took hold of Covenant’s power and with it transcended the necessary strictures of gravity and mass, of falling and mortal frailty. Bearing Anele clasped at her neck, she became the centre of a fire which emblazoned the sky. Not knowing what she did, guided only by instinct and passion, she briefly set aside the bonds of life.