Kevin's Watch

stutty wrote:Linden gets whiny and self-doubty here, a Linden feature I've never liked. But I have this to say, while she moans and questions, she does make a decision and pick a path.

Wayfriend wrote:

stutty wrote: I'm conisdering an LA pin.

We'll get you.
One at a time, we'll get you.

Stutty wrote:

lurch wrote: I'm conisdering an LA pin.

stutt (formerly of THOOLAH)

If you convert, may the fleas of 1000 Coursers infest your underwear.

Relayer wrote:Regarding "He": Wasn't it decided that Esmer was the one blocking Anele in Runes, before they got to the Verge? I suspect it may be him again here, although the comment "if I even say his name" throws me. Mostly, I suspect this is just a way SRD can keep the mystery going...

wayfriend wrote: I'm going to believe that "he" is not Esmer or Kastenessen. That Covenant has multiple foes, multiple beings able to stop him communicating through Anele. It seems like a better bet.

Finally, she shifted her gaze to Liand's, addressing him last because his uncomplicated concern and affection touched her pain directly.

"Liand, please don't ask me any questions." He also seemed privately uneasy, although he conveyed none of the Manethrall's eagerness--and little of Pahni's fear. "I'll tell you everything that happened. I'll tell you what I plan to do about it. But it will be easier for me if I can just talk. Questions make it harder for me to hold myself together."

Liand mustered a crooked smile. "As you wish. I am able to hold my peace, as you have seen. Yet allow me to say," he added with a touch of rueful humor, "that since my departure from Mithil Stonedown, no experience of peril and power, no discovery or exigency, has been as unexpected to me as this, that I must so often remain silent."

"What about you, Stave?" she asked. He had emerged from the Fall apparently unscathed. "What was it like for you?"

The Haruchai did not hesitate. "As the Manethrall has said, both the ur-viles and the Ranyhyn served us well. We rode upon a landscape of the purest freezing while our flesh was assailed as though by the na-Mhoram's Grim. Also there stood a woman among rocks, lashing out in anguish with wild magic. Toward her I was drawn to be consumed. However, turiya Herem held her. He is known to me, for no Haruchai has forgotten the touch of any Raver. Therefore I remained apart from her, seeking to refuse the doom which befell Korik, Sill, and Doar."

Remained apart--Linden thought wanly. Damn, he was strong. From birth, he had communicated mind to mind; and yet he retained more of himself in the Fall than anyone except Anele. Even she, with the strength of the ur-viles in her veins, had been swept into Joan's madness.

Stave's severance from his people must have hurt him more than Linden could imagine.

Still the loremaster extended its open palm; poised its blade to shed its own blood.

Trust yourself.

Until now, she had accomplished almost nothing that had not been made possible by the ur-viles--and the Waynhim.

Holding her breath, Linden opened her hand and proffered it to the loremaster.

Swift as a striking snake, as if it feared that she might change her mind, the creature flicked at her with its eldritch dagger, slicing a quick line of blood across the base of her thumb. Then the loremaster cut itself and reached out to clasp her hand so that its acrid blood mingled with hers.

Involuntarily all of her muscles clenched, anticipating a rush of strength and exaltation that would lift her entirely out of herself; elevate her doubts to certainty and power.

In the Verge of Wandering, the loremaster's ichor had changed her, transcending her sickness and dread; her sheer mortality. It transformed her again now--but in an entirely different way. The wedge in front of her, more than a hundred creatures all chanting together, had called a new lore to her aid; had given her a new power. Instead of strength like the charging of Ranyhyn, she felt an almost metaphysical alteration, at once keener and more subtle than simple health and force and possibility. The creatures had not made her any stronger; they had augmented her health-sense, increasing its range and discernment almost beyond comprehension.

Now she could have pierced the closed hearts of the Masters, if she had wished to do so. Hell, she could have possessed any one of them--Or she could have searched out the mysteries locked within the Demondim-spawn themselves. They had given her the power to lay bare the complex implications of their Weird. Or she might have been able to discern the causes of Covenant's strangeness, and Jeremiah's. Certainly she could have identified the nature of her son's unforeseen power--

But she found that she had no desire for any of those things; no desire and no time. The same given percipience which made them possible also made her aware that her enhancement would be ephemeral. She had perhaps a dozen heartbeats, at most two dozen, in which to exercise her whetted perceptions.

And she was already able to descry every single one of the Demondim far below her. The ur-viles and Waynhim had been formed by Demondim; they understood their makers. They had given her the capacity to penetrate all the defenses which the horde had raised against her.

That was enough. She did not need more.

With Stave and Liand beside her, she turned to face the cliff and the siege again. There she raised the Staff high in both hands, gripping her own blood and that of the loremaster to the surface of the incorruptible wood.

Now she beheld plainly all that was required of her. The opalescent surges and crosscurrents of the monster's subterfuge were clear, as etched and vivid as fine map-work. And they were transparent. Through them, disguised and concealed by them, she found the means by which the Demondim deployed the Illearth Stone. With all of her senses, she watched baleful green glints swirl and spit, many thousands of them, outlining precisely the mad hornet-storm of time that allowed the horde to exert the Stone's evil.

While her heart beat toward the instant when her transcendental percipience would fail, she reached through the veil of emerald to the horde's caesure.

It was as obvious to her now as the Fall which Esmer had summoned to the Verge of Wandering on her behalf; as unmistakable as the chaos which she herself had ripped in time. Fed by the insight, lore, and vitriol of the wedge at her back, her health-sense at last recognized the exact location and shape, as specific as a signature, of the monsters' Fall. Each piece of time that Joan shattered with wild magic had its own definitive angles, texture, composition; its own place in the wilderland of rubble at Joan's feet. With the telic power of the ur-viles and Waynhim in her veins, Linden was able to name unerringly the unique substance which Joan had destroyed to form this particular caesure.

When she was utterly certain of what she saw, she called forth a blaze as bright and cleansing as sunfire from the Staff. In an instant, she had surrounded herself with brilliance and flame, lighting the proud jut of Revelstone as if she had effaced the storm and the gloom, the shroud of rain; as if she had pierced with Earthpower and Law even the vile fug of Kevin's Dirt.

For perhaps as long as a heartbeat, she considered hurling her fire directly against the Illearth Stone. Through the open door of the Fall, she could have striven to excise the Stone's perversion at its source. Then she rejected the idea. If she failed--if she proved inadequate to that unfathomable contest--she would lose her ability to unmake the Fall. And if she did not fail, she would alter the Land's past so profoundly that the Arch of Time itself might break.

Instead, risking everything, she took a moment to search through the rampant insanity of the caesure for Joan, hoping somehow to soothe that tormented woman. In spite of the danger, she spent precious seconds seeking to send care and concern through the maelstrom created by Joan's pain.

Then she had to stop. She had no more time.

Relinquishing thoughts of Joan, Linden exerted all of her bestowed percipience to concentrate the energies of the Staff. And when she had summoned enough conflagration to reach the heavens, she sent a prodigious wall of fire crashing down like a tsunami on the horde's Fall.

That caesure was huge, even by the measure of the one which she had created. And it had been nurtured as well as controlled and directed with every resource of cunning and lore that the Demondim could command. It was defended now by the entire virulence and will of the monsters. The woman whom she had been before the loremaster had shared its blood with her would not have been able to overcome such opposition.

As the bestowed potency of her health-sense faltered and failed, however, she heard the horde's feigned confusion become a feral roar of rage; and she knew that she had succeeded.