Yet somehow he clung to life. He found that the torrent of
dark revelation, while testing his endurance in ways he had not
believed possible, had failed nevertheless to destroy him. He
could not think-there was too much pain for that. He did not
try to see, lost within a bottomless pit. Hearing availed him
nothing, for the echo of his cry reverberated all about him. He
seemed to float within himself, fighting to breathe, to survive.
It was the testing he had anticipated-the Druid rite of passage.
It battered him senseless, filled him with hurt, and left him bro-
ken within. Everything washed away, his beliefs and understand-
ings, all that had sustained him for so long. Could he survive
that loss? What would he be if he did?
Through waves of anguish he swam, buried within himself
and the force of the dark magic, borne to the edge of his en-
durance, an inch from drowning. He sensed that his life could
be lost in the tick of a moment’s passing and realized that the
measure of who and what he was and could be was being taken.
He couldn’t stop it. He wasn’t sure he even cared. He drifted,
helpless.
Helpless.
To be ever again who he had thought he would. To fulfill
any of the promises he had made to himself. To have any con-
trol over his life. To determine if he would live or die.
Helpless.
Walker Boh.
Barely aware of what he was doing, separated from conscious
reasoning, driven instead by emotions too primal to identify, the
Dark Uncle thrashed clear of his lethargy and exploded through
the waves of pain, through nonlight and dark magic, through
time and space, a bright speck of fiery rage.
Within, he felt the balance shift, the weight between life and
death tip.
And when he broke at last the surface of the black ocean
that had threatened to drown him, the only sound he heard, as
it burst from his lungs, was an endless scream.
CHAPTER
26
IT WAS LATE MORNING. The last three members of the
company of nine worked their way cautiously through
the tangle of the In Ju, following after the bulky, spiked
form of Stresa, the Splinterscat, as he tunneled steadily
deeper into the gloom.
Wren breathed the fetid, damp air and listened to the si-
lence.
Distant, far removed from where they labored, Killeshan’s
rumble was a backdrop of sound that rolled across earth and
sky, deep and ominous. Tremors snaked through Morrowindl,
warning of the eruption that continued to build. But in the jun-
gle, everything was still. A sheen of wetness coated the In Ju
from the ground up, soaking trees and scrub, vines and grasses,
a blanket that muffled sound and hid movement. The jungle was
a vault of stunning green, of walls that formed countless cham-
bers leading one into the other, of corridors that twisted and
wound about in a maze that threatened to suffocate. Branches
intertwined overhead to form a ceiling that shut out the light,
canopied over a patchwork floor of swamp and quicksand and
mud Insects buzzed invisibly and things cried out from the
mist. But nothing moved. Nothing seemed alive.
The Wisteron’s webbing was everywhere by now, a vast
networking that layered the trees like strips of gauze. Dead
things hung in the webbing, the husks of creatures drained of
life, the remains of the monster’s feedings. They were small for
the most part; the Wisteron took the larger offerings to its lair.
Which lay somewhere not far ahead.
Wren watched the shadows about her, made more anxious
by the lack of any movement than by the silence. She walked
in a dead place, a wasteland in which living things did not be-
long, a netherworld she traversed at her peril. She kept thinking
she would catch sight of a flash of color, a rippling of water, or
a shimmer of leaves and grasses. But the In Ju might have been
sheathed in ice, it was so frozen. They were deep within the
Wisteron’s country now, and nothing ventured here.
Nothing save themselves.
She held the Elfstones clutched tightly in her hand, free now