And when I recognized that I had a self, I suddenly sensed I was not alone. He was beside me, streaking endlessly down like a comet as his being unraveled in brightness behind him. That was wrong. That was very wrong.
Between knowing it was wrong and wanting to do something about it, an indeterminate amount of time passed. Then I struggled to know what to do. Limit him. Define him. How? Name him. One of the oldest magics known to men. Chade. Chade. But I was tongueless, voiceless. I wrapped him in my self, containing him with all I knew of him. Chade. Chade Fallstar.
I held him. Not his body, but his awareness. We fell together. I held my awareness of my separate self and hoped without reason that there was an end, somewhere, sometime, to this endless falling. Despite my efforts, Chade was leaking away from me. Like a basket of meal in a high wind, he seemed to waft away, carried off by the Skill. Worse, I had no sense of him resisting it. I held him, gathered back what I could of him, but I also felt myself shredding in the constant blast of that place that was neither a place nor a time. The very timelessness of it was terrifying. The journey through the star-studded vastness of the stone passage seemed to slow. “Please,” I breathed, terrified that we might never emerge, that no one would ever know what became of us, that Bee would live or die believing that her father had never attempted to rescue her. But that agony was fleeting.
Merge, whispered something that was Chade but both more and less than he was. Let go. It doesn’t matter. And he surrendered to that glittering attraction of the spaces between, to the darkness that was neither a distance nor a location. Like a seedhead that, at the whisper of the wind, launches itself into a thousand pieces, so was Chade. And I, I was not a sack to hold him, but a net. With the least part of the will that remained to me, I strove to hold him together within myself, even as the lure of the sparkling darkness sought to disperse us into bits of light.
Chade. Chade Fallstar.
His name was not enough to bind him. He had hidden himself from it for too long.
Chade Fallstar. Brother to Shrewd Farseer. Father to Lant Fallstar. Father to Shine Fallstar. Chade! Shaper of FitzChivalry Farseer. I settled loop after loop of identity around him as if I were wrapping line to tie up a storm-tugged ship. But I could not enclose him without opening myself to the pull of the current.
I have them!
I did not wish anyone to have me, but then I was clutching at Dutiful and felt myself drawn from the stone that sucked at me like thick mud. Chade came with me whether he would or not, and suddenly we were both shaking with cold on the snowy hillside above Buckkeep as dawn was breaking.