First of all, the last we saw, the people of the Land believed aliantha was poison. They certainly hadn't retained the custom of spreading the seeds to that point. But I guess Sunder and Holian could have started it up again.One by one, she dropped the seeds into her hand and cast them around the grassy slope as she had been taught, so that more aliantha would grow to nourish the Land. And from the pinto's back, Liand did the same. Seeing him do so comforted her. Apparently his people had retained that aspect of their birthright, whatever else they may have lost.
What bothers me more is that the people of the Land eat aliantha, feel its power, but don't think much about it. Nobody (which really means Liand, although he never mentions anyone else ever saying anything) ever thinks it is beyond anything else they ever experience. Without lore, they can't work the wood or stone. Without more luck than they obviously ever have, they don't stumble onto hurtloam (and the "Masters" likely keep them away from it anyway), and feel its magic. But they do eat aliantha. Wouldn't you think they'd say, "There's magic at work here. We should look into it." Doesn't anybody have a stronger connection with Earthpower - just as some are more musically or artistically inclined - and see possibilities?
Anyway...
They finally reach the outrageous waterfall, and Liand leads them on a path behind it. It's not an easy path, because it's slippery, and the water's deafening roar seems to be trying to pull Linden over the edge with it. No, not consciously, but it's a powerful pull. After a time, she notices that Anele seems to be becoming... sane? He feels sane to her precipience, but what he says seems to say otherwise.
OK, nothing insane in any of that, but aside from Elohim, I don't have a clue what he's talking about. What the heck are skurj and the Durance? And who is He?"Skurj! Skurj and Elohim. He has broken the Durance. Skurj mar the very air. Oh, the Earth! Its bones- Its bones cry out! Even here, they wail!"
Then he does sound crazy:
The thought that the Elohim are tainted and arrogant sure isn't crazy, but what on earth is this about him having lost the Staff? It's been missing for millennia! Yet, he feels saner to her?!"My fault! Mine! The Elohim did naught to preserve the Durance. They are tainted. Arrogant. I lost the Staff! The treasure and bulwark of Law. My birthright. I lost it!"
Then he begs her to kill him, and end his pain.
Well, Liand notices that he's pulled way ahead of Linden and Anele, who stopped during Anele's rantings. He comes back, and, when they're all finally outside, Linden tells him of Anele's fears. I very much like Liand's response:
It's very easy to like Liand, and very difficult to like the Masters.In response, Liand's expression darkened. "The Masters." His disgust was barely audible through the waterfall's roar. "The most dire perils stalk the Land, and they tell us nothing."
OK, more climbing. I tell you, I can feel Linden's exhaustion! They climb some, rest and have bread and fruit, then climb more. Linden's breath comes in heaves; her legs shake; she sees spots before her eyes.
Holy moley. She sounds a bit fatigued! Finally, without intending to, or even being aware that she did it, she stops climbing and lies down. Liand helps her up, has her hold onto one of the straps on the pinto, and she finishes the climb without any awareness of what she's doing.Eventually she found herself approaching each step as a discrete event, isolated in time from the one before it and the one which would come next. During that instant, nothing existed for her except the effort of heaving herself upward.*
When they finally stop, we learn the reason she's so out of sorts. Aside from the extreme exercising she's doing, that is.
What a dope! Heh. Anyway, that passage always gets me. I can practically feel the sweat and relief!With Liand's help, she guided the waterskin to her mouth, drank a few swallows. Almost instantly, sweat seemed to spring from all her pores at once.
Dehydration, she told herself weakly. Stupid, stupid. She was a doctor, for God's sake; familiar with the effects of exertion. She ought to know better.
But now, we get to the meat of this chapter. Linden finds Anele among some shards of granite. He's partially sane. By now, she knows that he somehow reads rock, and asks him what they're telling him now. He tells her of the destruction of the One Forest. Prothall first told us about it. Findail gave us more information, including the fact that an Elohim had been Appointed to its preservation, and had been turned into the Colossus of the Fall, to keep the Ravers out. But now, we hear it in greater detail than ever before. We knew the One Forest had an awareness, but it had never been described as beautifully as here:
The pure, uncorrupted work of the Creator was a thing of such glory that we could hear about it forever, and never hear all. Such an awareness is difficult to grasp. A consciousness the size of a continent, knowing every detail of itself; every trunk, limb, root, and leaf. Yet this consciousness was as immensely slow as it was big. It was innocent of everything except its own existence. It sounds to me like the mind of the One Forest was a Zen Mind. Simply existing; knowing its own self and place perfectly; loving its own existence; always knowing perfect contentment."And in that age, the spanning woodland was cherished in every peak and fundament of the Land, held precious and treasured by slow granite beneath and around it, for the One Forest knew itself. It had no knowledge of malevolence, or of humankind, but of itself its awareness was immense beyond all estimation. It knew itself in every trunk and limb, every root and leaf, and it sang its ramified song to all the Earth. The music of its knowledge arose from a myriad myriad throats, and was heard by a myriad myriad myriad ears."
But those wonderous beings called "people" showed up. Thoughtless and without "true ears," they were spurred on by the malevolence within Lifeswallower.
The pain that the One Forest felt was extreme. It was also an entirely new experience, both shocking and incomprehensible. This extraordinary being had no idea what was going on! As though I felt great pain in my foot, and looked to see that, for no reason I could imagine, a toe was missing. And worse, as I watched, more toes disappeared in tremendous pain. Followed, slowly and excruciatingly, by my foot and leg. I can't begin to stop the process, because I have no idea what's causing it. I only watch my own destruction in pain and fear and horror."No tongue can tell of the shock and rue among the trees when human fires and human blades cleared ground for habitation. The mountains know it, and in their hearts they yet protest and grieve, but mortal voice and utterance cannot contain it. A myriad myriad trunks, and a myriad myriad myriad leaves, which had known only themselves in natural growth and decay, and which had therefore never considered wanton pain, then cried out in illimitable dismay - a cry so poignant and prolonged that the deepest core of the peaks might have answered it, were stone itself not also defenseless and unwarded."
Then, things got worse! Humans had only been destroying the trees to make room to live. But eventually, their destruction became a savage thing. Whether this savagery brought the Ravers or the Ravers came and caused it is not clear. But I guess it's not overly important. What matters is that the Ravers came, and the destruction of the One Forest was increased with savage glee.
As an aside, I wonder how this fits in with what Mhoram learned when samadhi touched him:Hence came the Ravers to the Land, for they were the admixture of men and malevolence, and enduring hunger for evil coalesced and concentrated in transient flesh generation after swift generation until they became beings unto themselves - spirits capable of flesh, yet spared the necessities of death and birth. Thus they gained names and definition, three dark souls who knew themselves as they knew the One Forest, and who aspired above all things to trample underfoot its vast and vulnerable sentience."
Unknowingly, the humans were lead by the Ravers, and the destruction grew and grew. And still, the One Forest was helpless and ignorant:"They were triplets, the spawn of one birth from the womb of their long-forgotten mother..."
The mind of the One Forest slowly dies:"Still the One Forest could only wail and weep, unable to act in self-defense. Despite its vastness, it, too, lived in ignorance. It knew only itself and pain, and so could not comprehend its own possible strength. Born of Earthpower, sustained by Earthpower, knowing Earthpower, the One Forest could not grasp that Earthpower might have other uses."
This is far worse than my disappearing foot. For all the fear and pain I would go through, my mind doesn't become less aware as my leg vanishes. If my awareness was like the One Forest's, the loss of every inch of flesh would diminish it. The pain and fear would always be the biggest part of my awareness, but, with each passing second, I would be less and less aware of my pain, fear, and awareness. How can we comprehend the destruction of this being? Maybe if we were horribly damaged, slowly dying in pain, but dying of carbon monoxide poisoning at a faster rate? Yeah, I know, I'm just full of cute analogies. But if you aren't sickened and horrified by the One Forest's destruction, then I haven't gone far enough.Thus the destruction of the trees grew as the ambitions of humankind and Ravers mounted. And with that bereavement came another loss, inseparable from the first, but more bitter and deadly. In the slaughter of each tree, one small gleam of the Forest's Land-spanning sentience failed, never to be renewed or replaced. Thus the wishes of the Ravers were fulfilled. As the butchery of the trees increased, so the One Forest's knowledge of itself diminished, lapsing toward slumber and extinction.
Anele's ability to read rock would be the coolest thing ever if the reader was not insane. See how powerful and specific it is:"That grief was too great to be borne. Even mountains could not endure it. Peaks shattered themselves in sorrow and protest. This very cliff split as a heart is torn asunder by rage and loss, and by helplessness."
Amazing!! The Unfettered in TPTP would have been very jealous of Anele's ability.For a moment, he gaped at the riven walls. Their yearning had come upon him like a geas. They needed his mortal tongue to articulate their interminable rue. Cold exhaled down the rift like a sigh of protest and loss.
But then his head jerked to the other side, and he seemed to find a new vein of song. His voice dropped to a murmur which Linden would not have been able to hear if he had not chipped each word off his stone lament like a flake of obsidian, jagged and distinct.
"The Earth itself heard that cry. Every knowing ear throughout the Earth heard it. And at last, when much of the Lower Land had been slain of trees, and the devestaion of the Upper had truly begun, the cry was answered."
Abruptly Anele leaned forward, shifted the angle of his head. "There." With one trembling, gnarled finger, he pointed into the center of the sloping rubble. "It is written there - the coming of the Elohim."
Anyway, the Appointed Elohim finally arrives. ...singing of life and knowledge, of eldritch power beyond the puissance of any Raver. And singing as well of retribution. Hey, here's an interesting point to ponder:
Excellent #$%^&*@ question! I can't grasp it either! Findail said the Elohim loved the One Forest. It's not difficult to see the reluctance such a being would have to being Appointed, since being Appointed always seems to lead to such a change that the Appointed is, more or less, dead. Certainly, it is no longer the same Elohim. I can't blame them for not wanting to risk it. But what prevented a dozen of them from going to the people and explaining what was happening, or kicking their asses out of the Land?? They could have easily done so long before the Ravers came, or even after. "Tainted" and "arrogant" indeed! Bastards!"Why the Elohim came then and not earlier, before so much had been lost, these stones cannot grasp."
Well, we know the rest. Anele tells about the Appointed being turned into the Colossus. Linden continues with the creation of the Forestals, which Anele says is not written in that stone.
And now, Stave shows up. He's warning that they were foolish to stop, because "they have caught your scent." Liand is, quite justly, upset with the Masters.After a long moment, Liand stirred. He rose to his feet; gathered up the food and waterskins. "No one remembers it." His bitterness echoed Anele's tale. "The Masters do not speak of it. This treasure of the Land's past, these memories of glory, they keep to themselves."
He's a pretty cool guy."It is you we flee, Master." Once again his innocence and resolve conveyed a dignity that she could not match. "If we have erred, it is because we were granted opportunity to hear a tale which you have denied us."
However, the "they" Stave was referring to are kresh.
*Nothing to do with the story, but the awareness of individual footsteps reminds me of a passage from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, when Phaedrus attempted to climb a mountain, but failed:
He never reached the mountain. After the third day he gave up, exhausted, and the pilgrimage went on without him. He said he had the physical strength but that physical strength wasn’t enough. He had the intellectual motivation but that wasn’t enough either. He didn’t think he had been arrogant but thought that he was undertaking the pilgrimage to broaden his experience, to gain understanding for himself. He was trying to use the mountain for his own purposes and the pilgrimage too. He regarded himself as the fixed entity, not the pilgrimage or the mountain, and thus wasn’t ready for it. He speculated that the other pilgrims, the ones who reached the mountain, probably sensed the holiness of the mountain so intensely that each footstep was an act of devotion, an act of submission to this holiness. The holiness of the mountain infused into their own spirits enabled them to endure far more than anything he, with his greater physical strength, could take. To the untrained eye ego-climbing and selfless climbing may appear identical. Both kinds of climbers place one foot in front of the other. Both breathe in and out at the same rate. Both stop when tired. Both go forward when rested. But what a difference! The ego-climber is like an instrument that’s out of adjustment. He puts his foot down an instant too soon or too late. He’s likely to miss a beautiful passage of sunlight through the trees. He goes on when the sloppiness of his step shows he’s tired. He rests at odd times. He looks up the trail trying to see what’s ahead even when he knows what’s ahead because he just looked a second before. He goes too fast or too slow for the conditions and when he talks his talk is forever about somewhere else, something else. He’s here but he’s not here. He rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then it will be ‘here’. What he’s looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn’t want that because it is all around him. Every step’s an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.
Drew!
When Anele is sane, he refers to himself in the first person. When he is not, he refers to himself in the third person. We need to watch for these verbal clues when he speaks. And make a connection to anyone else who speaks of themselves in the third person. 
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