She heard her name called from 4 afar, threading through the snowy forest. She kneeled in the snow, arms wrapped around herself, one shoulder leaning against a tree trunk. She closed her eyes. She was beyond freezing.

The call was too far away, and she too drowsy to respond. She wanted to rest and sleep. She sank deeply into darkness and peace.

A horn bellowed, and clumps of snow fell from branches above and plopped on her head. She fluttered her eyes open. The horn blared again, and she recognized the call, the Rider call.

Why wouldn’t it leave her alone? First it had made her join the Green Riders, now it was forcing her to leave this place of tranquility. She decided to ignore it and close her eyes. She had ignored it before, and she could again.

But it wasn’t to be so. It was as if somebody grabbed her by her shortcoat and slapped each cheek. Her cheeks stung and light assaulted her eyes. She found herself kneeling not in snow, but in a chamber of stone, and leaning not against a tree, but against a fluted column.

She gasped, trying to make sense of everything.

Columns ringed the whole of the chamber, and a green oval of stone glistened on a pedestal at its center. Above the pedestal a dark cloud floated glistening with . . . stars? An old man paced beside it. He was twisting his fingers in his long whiskers, and for some reason she had a sort of secondary vision of him pacing back and forth on a vast plain cloaked by night.

“Terrible, oh, most terrible,” he was muttering to himself.

Beyond both the old man and the pedestal, on the far side of the chamber, stood an Eletian. Karigan did not know where she was, or why she was there. She had no idea of what was going on or why, but she did recognize the Eletian, with the tines protruding from the forearms and shoulders of his armor. He held an arrow nocked to a bow. The tip of the arrowhead glinted, and she could feel his line of sight searing into her heart.

She could not move, could not speak.

“The time of watching is over,” the Eletian said. “And despite the warning, you came to the wall anyway.”

“Let us be reasonable here,” the old man said. “There is a crisis at the moment and—”

“I will not hear an illusion,” the Eletian snapped. “I have my duty to fulfill.”

“This is an outrage,” the old man sputtered. “The wall is—”

“The outrage is that this Galadheon is tainted, tainted by dark wild magic.”

“Indeed?” The old man turned to Karigan and crooked a bushy eyebrow.

“One,” the Eletian continued, “whose presence could bring about the destruction of the wall.”

Karigan’s temper rose, and her anger warmed her. She rose unsteadily to her feet, sucking in a breath at the wound that stretched beneath her ribs.

“Endangers the wall?” the old man asked. “Like the Rider who calls himself a Deyer?”

Both Karigan and the Eletian looked at the old man and stared.

“Alton?” It was the first word Karigan managed to utter, her voice strangely hoarse.

“Yes,” the old man said. “He called himself that. Claimed he was going to fix the wall. He’s merged with it now, destroying it instead.” He tugged on his whiskers, his face full of despair.

“Where?” Karigan croaked.

“I can’t tell you,” the old man said. “It seems you Riders have grown deceitful. So many lives were sacrificed to build this wall, and now you would undo it.”

“No!” she cried. “Mornhavon is—we—”

“His taint is within you,” the Eletian said, and he drew the bowstring taut.

“You don’t understand!”

As the words left her mouth, the Eletian loosed the arrow. It barreled at her and she could not move. Then a familiar tug on her brooch carried her through time, briefly enough that she had been pushed ahead a mere moment. When the traveling ceased, Karigan stood in the same spot, but the Eletian’s arrow clattered against the wall behind her as though it had passed right through her. It all had happened in the span of a heartbeat.

You are on your own now, said the distant voice of Lil Ambrioth. I have nothing left to give.

The Eletian scowled and was reaching for another arrow when behind him the wall came to life with silver runes.

A man emerged through the wall. He was wild and unkempt, his eyes haunted. His clothes looked as though they had once been the fine attire of a lord, but now they hung from him, soiled and torn. With some surprise, Karigan recognized Alton’s unpleasant cousin, Pendric.

The runes pooled on the stone beneath his feet, and he seemed oblivious to all else. When the runes streaked across the chamber and veered under an arch and into its dark passage, he followed, and Karigan darted after him.

The runes illuminated the short passage that ended at a stone wall. Sprawled on the floor was Alton.

“Alton!” she cried. She pushed past Pendric and knelt beside him, and placed her hand on his chest. Its rise and fall was barely perceptible. Otherwise, she would have taken him for dead.

Pendric hovered over them, fists cocked, a face devoured by rage and madness. “He should die.”

“No!” Karigan sprang up at him, but he punched his fist into her wound. She staggered back against the passage’s wall. The pain stole her breath away, turned her sight red. She sank inward, inward into the darkness and snow again. The last image of her fading sight was of the Eletian and the old man peering in from the end of the passage, before she collapsed across Alton’s legs.