Page 62 of Roar of the Wild

And as I looked at all that white enormous distance, something looked back.

I felt it before I understood it, as I'd felt the river call to the power in me a lifetime ago, as I'd felt the earthquake gathering in the ground before it broke. Far out east, past the mountains, past the edge of anything I could see, something ancient stirred and reached, reached back toward me across all that distance, faint as a heartbeat heard through deep water. It lay so enormously far off that the small spoiled remnant of power in my chest turned toward it like a compass needle, helpless, drawn. The thing out there was sick. Whatever it was, I knew that much asyou know the smell of a wound gone bad, as you know a thing is dying before anyone tells you. It was vast beyond anything I had a scale for, and it was sick unto death, and had been sick for a long, long time. Somewhere under the sickness it was calling, and the calling had been going out across the whole of the world for longer than there had been anyone to hear it.

It was calling me; I understood that with a certainty that had no business existing in a mind as far gone as mine. The thing past the mountains had been calling me since before I fell through the stones, since before I was born, since before the drain and the dying world and the Council's desperate plan to load a chef full of borrowed magic and throw her back through time. All of it, the rejection, the falling, the capture, the pride, the men, the earthquake, the spending, the slow grey sinking, all of it had only ever been the long road to this. To the thing in the east that was reaching back for me now, faint across all that distance and terribly patient, waiting where it had always been waiting, at the broken root of everything.

I didn't have a name for it; I wouldn't have one for a long while yet. But some part of me, the part that had always known things my mind refused to carry, understood that I'd found the end of the road at last, or that it had found me, and that whatever waited past those white mountains was the reason for the whole of it, the answer to a question I hadn't known my entire strange life had been asking.

There it is,I thought, with the last of the window closing around me and the dark rising up gently to take me back down.That's where we've been going all along, the whole of it, from the very first step.

Daska's arms tightened around me; behind us the snow was already falling on the road we'd climbed, closing the passes one by one, sealing the way home. Ahead of us the mountains stood white against the failing light, enormous, and somewhere pastthem the healer waited, and past the healer the thing that had called me across twenty-five thousand years, sick at the root of the world, waited too.

I let the dark take me. This time, though, I went down reaching back toward the thing in the east that was reaching for me, and I did not let go of the thread of it. Somewhere far above me a wolf was singing me down into the dark, a bear was carrying me east through the snow, a king was kneeling over the fire that would be there when I surfaced again. And the last thought I had before the grey closed over was not that I was dying.

It was that we weren't there yet.