Part 69 (1/2)

She had demonstrated again and again that she could not save Jeremiah alone. Without Covenant, she was inadequate to the task.

Gazing steadily through her eyelids at the Land's redeemer, she murmured his name in an exultation of fires. Then she brought her hands together, wild magic and Earthpower.

A blast that seemed to quell the stars erupted from Loric's krill. Deliberately she invoked a concussion which compelled conflicting energies to become one.

This was not culmination. It was apotheosis. Power shocked the bedrock of the world: it strove to claim the sky. Convulsions like the earthquake under Melenkurion Skyweir cast reality into madness.

Around the vale, the Wraiths scattered suddenly; fled and winked out. They may have been screaming. Someone wailed or roared: Elena or Kevin, Infelice or the Harrow. Emotions trumpeted from the High Lords. But Linden heeded nothing except Covenant and her own purpose.

Through the gem, her powers took hold of him as if she had chosen to incinerate his soul.

An instant later, the sheer scale of the forces which she had unleashed overwhelmed her; and the world was swept away.

Covenant's agony must have been terrible to behold. His cry of protest may have deafened the night. But Linden was no longer able to see or hear him. Absolute vastness stunned every nerve in her body, every impulse in her mind. For a moment, her detonation left her entirely insensate, unable to feel or think or move. She did not know that she had dropped Covenant's ring as if it had scalded her. Her fingers were too numb to realize that the Staff had slipped from her grasp. Her eyes might as well have been charred away: she did not see the knits coruscating puissance rupture and vanish, blown apart by fundamental contradictions.

She did not recognize what she had done until darkness rea.s.serted her mortality, and the frantic labor of her pulse began to force new awareness into her muscles and nerves.

When she opened her eyes, she saw Covenant's resurrected form standing, twisted with pain, on the far side of the blank gem, the dead stump. Theurgies flared and spat from his arms, his shoulders, his chest. Linden had burned him as badly as Lord Foul had burned him in Kiril Threndor. But she had burned him to life instead of death. The fading energies of his transformation wracked him as though he had emerged from a bonfire.

Like Joan, he bore the consequences of too much time.