And so there, in that moment, in the deepest stronghold of the Dark, Darien made his choice.
And Rakoth Maugrim laughed.
It was the laughter of a god, the laughter that had resounded when Rangat had sent up the hand of fire. Darien didn’t know about that. He hadn’t been born then. What he knew, terrified, was that he’d given himself away.
The window of the chamber still showed the high ridge of land above the battle. It showed his mother standing there. And Rakoth had been watching as Darien looked upon her.
The laughter stopped. Maugrim stepped very close. Darien couldn’t move. Slowly his father raised the stump of his severed hand and held it over Darien’s head. The black drops of blood fell and burned on Darien’s face. He couldn’t even scream.
Maugrim lowered his arm. He said, “You need not tell me anything now. I know everything there is to know. You thought to bring me a gift, a toy. You have done more. You have brought me back my immortality. You are my gift!”
It was to have been so, once. But not like this. And not now, not anymore! But Darien stood .there, frozen in his place by the will of Rakoth Maugrim, and heard his father say, “You do not understand, do you? They were all fools, fools beyond belief! I needed her dead, that she might never bear a child. I must not have a child! Did none of them see? A child of my seed binds me into time! It puts my name in the Tapestry, and I can die!”
And then came the laughter again, brutal crescendos of triumph rolling over him in waves. When it ended, Maugrim stood only inches away from Darien, looking down upon him from his awesome height, from within the blackness of his hood.
He said, in a voice colder than death, older than the spinning worlds, “You are that son. I know you now. And I will do more than kill you. I will thrust your living soul out beyond the walls of time. I will make it so that you have never been! You are in Starkadh, and in this place I have the power to do that. Had you died outside these walls I might have been lost. Not now. You are lost. You have never lived. I will live forever, and all the worlds are mine today. All things in all the worlds.”
There was nothing, nothing at all, that Darien could do. He couldn’t even move, or speak. He could only listen and hear the Unraveller say again, “All things in all the worlds, starting with that toy of the lios that you wear. I know what it is. I would have it before I blast your soul out of the Tapestry.”
He reached forth with his mind—Darien felt it touch him again—to claim the Circlet as he had claimed the dagger and take it unto himself.
And it came to pass in that moment that the spirit of Lisen of the Wood, for whom that shining thing of Light had been made so long ago, reached out from the far side of Night, from beyond death, and performed her own last act of absolute renunciation of the Dark.
In that stronghold of evil, the Circlet blazed. It flared with a light of sun and moon and stars, of hope and world-spanning love, a light so pure, so dazzlingly incandescent, a light so absolute that Rakoth Maugrim was blinded by the pain of it. He screamed in agony. His hold on Darien broke, only for an instant.
Which was enough.
For in that instant, Darien did the one thing, the only thing, that he could do to manifest the choice he’d made. He took one step forward, the Circlet a glorious radiance on his brow, rejecting him no longer. He took the last step on the Darkest Road, and he impaled himself upon the dagger his father held.
Upon Lokdal, Seithr’s gift to Colan a thousand years ago. And Rakoth Maugrim, blinded by Lisen’s Light, mortal because he’d fathered a son, killed that son with the Dagger of the dwarves, and he killed without love in his heart.
Dying, Darien heard his father’s last scream and knew it could be heard in every corner of Fionavar, in every world spun into time by the Weaver’s hand: the sound that marked the passing of Rakoth Maugrim.
Darien was lying on the floor. There was a bright blade in his heart. With fading sight he looked out the