MARLEY: Hear me, Covenant! My time is nearly gone. I am here tonight to warn you,
that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate. You will be haunted ... by Three Spirits.
Thomas Covenant lay in his pajamas, and felt the puissance of Marley's words. The thought of the Three Spirits sent his skin crawling, as if his deadened nerves were suddenly sensistive to formication. In time, he drifted off to sleep....
He awoke with a start to a sound in the hallway. It sounded like......graveling being dragged over hardwood flooring.
His bedroom door opened and there in the doorway stood Lena, Atiaran-daughter.
"I am the ghost of the Land past! Come with me. There are things you need to see."
"Hellfire! Hellfire and bloody damnation! You're not even
real!" Covenant roared out of bed, with a feeling like formication as
the blood rushed back into his limbs.
He was whisked away into the clouds of time.
There before him unfolded the Land, in all its former glory. Birds sang loudly in the crisp spring air. A stone village appeared
in the near distance, drawing nearer as he and Lena drifted through the heavens. He felt the puissance of her touch as they hovered.
This is not formication he thought.
Then they were on the banks of the Mithil. Covenant watched himself rape Lena again. Tears of agony streamed down his cheeks as he relived his nightmare. Then they were on a high balcony of Revelstone. A tapestry scrambled downward through the air to alight on the foothills below.
He then transubstantiated into a firelit crevasse. Pietten was saying "Am I not the best tender of the Ranyhyn in the Plains of Ra? And do I not make the best razzleberry dressing in the Land?"
A woman's face appeared before him. He was now standing in crisp air, soft grass under his feet. He watched himself as he rent her shift and reached out to stike the woman a hard blow on her cheek.
Oh Elena!!
Then he was drawn to a man with an iron dirk in his chest, brough through suns of varying hues, where he was attacked by bees.
Eventually he was aboard a
dromond, being attacked by a frenzy of rats, then all was dark and he was standing in a field with someone running toward him. In an instant that felt like forever, Covenant found himself giving Foul his ring. He relived the searing pain of the blast of his own power as it struck him down.
"That's enough! Hellfire! I can't stand anymore! This isn't even
real!"
Covenant sat up screaming. Sweat crawled across his face like formication as he relived the puissance of his dream.
A dream
he told himself.
Nothing more.
He was finally drifting off to sleep when another sound reached his ears from the hallway. It was surely the sound of whining.
Once again, the bedroom door opened, and there standing at the threshhold was Linden Avery.
"I am the ghost of the Land present!" she exclaimed.
"Ahh...damn it all to hell! Hell and bloody damnation! Let's get this over with."
He was whisked through time and worlds alongside Linden; her puissance felt like formication on his skin.
Runes spoiler
He was shown caesures and the twisted wreck of the Waynhim as it handed Linden the Staff of Law. He saw Esmer beat an
Haruchai within an inch of his life. Is that Bannor...no it couldn't be. He saw Linden give Joan her ring. He saw Joan bloodying her temple with sporadic blows from her own hand. Linden took him through the caesure on a Ranyhnh, and he felt the formication once again as he rode within the puissance of the caesure. He emerged at Revelstone and saw Anele burning amid massive figures that charged mercilessly behind.
He was taken inside Revelstone where he saw an old woman in a patchwork dress knitting a red stocking and staring at him, measuring him with the knowledge behind her one orange and one blue eye.
He saw himself and a boy he did not recognize riding a frantic pace toward Revelstone.
"What is this?!?! Why have you brought me here?!?! Haven't I done enough harm already?"
And as if nothing happened, as if he never left the safety and comfort of his cotton sheets, Covenant found himself once again in his bed. The only reminder that what he had experienced was real was the lingering sense of formication he felt while he rubbed his dead hands together.
Too tired to do anything but fall asleep, Covenant relapsed into a troubled slumber.
It was not long before he was awakened once again by a sound in the hallway.
"Hellfire and bloody damnation! Can't a man get any sleep around here?!?!"
The door to his bedroom opened slowly to reveal a man with a kind face and a hooked nose standing at the end of the hallway. By some trick of the moonlight, Covenant appeared to see flecks of gold in the specter's eyes.
"I am the ghost of the Land yet to come!" the specter announced.
Covenant's reply was both disinterested and annoyed. "Why are you here? I am dead in the Land, remember?"
"Dead you may be, but not ineffectual. Come. There is much I mean to show you"
Covenant felt the formication of Mhoram's touch as the puissance put forth whisked him away into the neverness between worlds.
Runes spoiler
Below him the vast expanse of the Land appeared as he was guided into the North. Here he laid eyes upon a great fire, burning relentlessly and engulfing all in its path. "Joan did this" explained Mhoram's ghost. "With her ring, she has formed living affronts to Time itself!
One of her creations, a caesure unlike any other, rearranged time itself in this region, thus undoing the millenia-long interdiction of the Appointed Elohim. You may remember him--tales were told during your time in the Land. He is Kastenessen, and is now free to enact his revenge upon the Heart of the Earth."
"No! That can't be! He was Appointed! He has no choice!"
With dull, tired eyes, the specter looked into Covenant's bleak face. "Much that was once impossible has become possible. The world is not what it was."
Turning away, Mhoram's specter once again guided him through the North, where Covenant saw great beasts of fire devouring land as if
it were just so much dirt. He saw the snows of the highest peaks of the Northron climbs melt and converge into floodwaters that targeted the Land from Revelstone to Coercri. He saw Linden Avery fighting on the side of Lord Foul the Despiser. He was
shown his own son with a glowing emerald shard in his hand, turning the fire-beasts to his will.
And all the while, he heard Foul laughing.
"This is too much! Why are you doing this to me? How much more do you think I can take?"
"Ahh, Ur-lord. There is much that I wish to tell you. But knowledge unearned does harm to the bearer. Only this am I allowed to reveal:
Failure is not always what it seems. Remember that all ends are also new beginnings, even though the end is not what we would have desired."
"Take me home. I have to get ready."
__________________________________________________________________
Reese: "Listen! And understand. That Foulinator is out there! It can't be bargained with, can't be reasoned with!
It doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear, and it absolutely will not stop. EVER! Until you are dead!"
Covenant: "Can we stop it?"
