A choice must be made, Young Bull. One path leads to the Last Hunt.
“And the other?” Perrin asked.
Hopper didn’t respond immediately. He turned toward Dragonmount. The other path does not lead to the Last Hunt.
“Yes, but what does it lead to?”
To nothing.
Perrin opened his mouth to press further, but then the weight of Hopper’s sending hit him. “Nothing” to the wolf meant a vacant den, all of the pups taken by trappers. A night sky empty of stars. The moon fading. The smell of old blood, dry, stale and flaked away.
Perrin closed his mouth. The sky continued to churn with that black storm. He smelled it on the wind, the smell of broken trees and dirt, of flooded fields and lightning fires. As so often, particularly recently, those scents seemed to contrast with the world around him. One of his senses told him he was in the very center of a catastrophe while the others saw nothing amiss.
“This choice. Why don’t we just make it?”
It is not our choice, Young Bull.
Perrin felt drawn to the clouds above. Despite himself, he began to walk up the slope. Hopper loped up beside him. It is dangerous above, Young Bull.
“I know,” Perrin said. But he couldn’t stop. Instead, he increased his speed, each step launching him just a little farther. Hopper ran beside him, passing trees, rocks, groups of watching wolves. Upward Perrin and Hopper went, climbing until the trees dwindled and the ground grew cold with frost and ice.
Eventually, they approached the cloud itself. It seemed a dark fog, shaking with currents as it spun. Perrin hesitated at the perimeter, then stepped inside. It was like stepping into the nightmare. The wind was suddenly violent, the air buzzing with energy. Leaves and dirt and grit blew in the tempest, and he had to raise a hand against it.
No, he thought.
A small bubble of calm air opened around him. The tempest continued to blow just inches from his face, and he had to strain to keep from being claimed by it again. This storm wasn’t a nightmare or a dream; it was something more vast, something more real. This time, Perrin was the one creating something abnormal with the bubble of safety.
He pressed forward, soon leaving tracks in snow. Hopper strode against the wind, lessening its effect on him as well. He was stronger at it than Perrin was—Perrin barely managed to keep his own bubble up. He feared that without it, he would be sucked into the storm and tossed into the air. He saw large branches rip past in the air, and even some smaller trees.
Hopper slowed, then sat down in the snow. He looked upward, toward the peak. I cannot stay, the wolf sent. This is not my place.
“I understand,” Perrin said.
The wolf vanished, but Perrin continued. He couldn’t explain what drew him, but he knew that he needed to witness. Someone did. He walked for what seemed like hours, focused completely on only two things: keeping the winds off him and putting one foot in front of the other.
The storm grew increasingly violent. It was so bad here that he couldn’t keep all of the storm off, just the worst of it. He passed the ridged lip where the mountaintop was broken, picking his way alongside it, hunkered against the gusts, a steep fall on either side. Wind began to whip at his clothing, and he had to squint his eyes against the dust and snow in the air.
But he continued on. Striving for the peak, which rose ahead, rising above the blasted out side of the mountain. He knew that atop that point, he would find what he searched for. This horrible maelstrom was the wolf dream’s reaction to something great, something terrible. In this place, sometimes things were more real than in the waking world. The dream reflected a tempest because something very important was happening. He worried that it was something terrible.
Perrin pressed forward, shoving his way through the snows, crawling up rock faces, his fingers leaving skin sticking to the frigid stones. But he had trained well these last few weeks. He leapt chasms he shouldn’t have been able to leap and climbed rocks that should have been too high for him.
A figure stood at the very top of the jagged, broken tip of the mountain. Perrin kept pressing onward. Someone needed to watch. Someone needed to be there when it happened.
Finally, Perrin heaved atop one last stone and found himself within a dozen feet of the top. He could make out the figure now. The man stood at the very heart of the vortex of winds, staring eastward, motionless. He was faint and translucent, a reflection of the real world. Like a shadow. Perrin had never seen anything like it.
It was Rand, of course. Perrin had known that it would be. Perrin held to the stone with one ragged hand and pulled his cloak close with the other—he’d created the cloak several cliff faces ago. He blinked through reddened eyes, gazing upward. He had to focus most of his concentration on pushing back some of the winds to keep himself from being flung out into the tempest.
Lightning flashed suddenly, thunder sounding for the first time since he’d begun climbing. That lightning began to arc in a dome around the top of the mountain. It threw light across Rand’s face. That hard, impassive face, like stone itself. Where had its curves gone? When had Rand gained so many lines and angles? And those eyes, they seemed made of marble!
Rand wore a coat of black and red. Fine and ornamented, with a sword at his waist. The winds didn’t affect Rand’s clothes. Those fell unnaturally still, as if he really were just a statue. Carved from stone. The only thing that moved was his dark red hair, blowing in the wind, thrown and spun.
Perrin clung to the rocks for his life, cold wind biting into his cheeks, his fingers and feet so numb he could barely feel them. His beard bristled with dusty ice and snow. Something black began to spin around Rand. It wasn’t part of the storm; it seemed like night itself leaking from him. Tendrils of it grew from Rand’s own skin, like tiny hands curling back and wrapping around him. It seemed evil itself given life.
“Rand!” Perrin bellowed. “Fight it! Rand!”
His voice was lost in the wind, and he doubted that Rand could have heard him anyway. The darkness continued to seep out, like a liquid tar coming through Rand’s pores, creating a miasma of pitch around the Dragon Reborn. Within moments, Perrin could barely see Rand through the blackness. It enclosed him, cutting him off, banishing him. The Dragon Reborn was gone. Only evil remained.
“Rand, please…” Perrin whispered.
And then—from the midst of the blackness, from the center of the uproar and the tempest—a tiny sliver of light split through the evil. Like a candle’s glow on a very dark night. The light shone upward, toward the distant sky,