All alone Carse and Ywain made their way into the hills above Jekkara and came at last to the Tomb. They stood together on the rocky ledge, looking out across the wooded hills and the glowing sea, and the distant towers of the city white in the sunlight.
“Are you still sure,” Carse asked her, “that you wish to leave all this?”
“I have no place here now,” she answered sadly. “I would be rid of this world as it would be rid of me.”
She turned and strode without hesitation into the dark tunnel. Ywain the Proud, that not even the gods themselves could break. Carse went with her, holding a lighted torch.
Through the echoing vault and beyond the door marked with the curse of Rhiannon, into the inner chamber, where the torchlight struck against darkness—the utter darkness of that strange aperture in the space-time continuum of the universe.
At that last moment Ywain’s facet showed fear and she caught the Earthman’s hand. The tiny motes swarmed and flickered before them in the gloom of time itself. The voice of Rhiannon spoke to Carse and he stepped forward into the darkness, holding tightly to Ywain’s hand.
This time, at first, there was no headlong plunge into nothingness. The wisdom of Rhiannon guided and steadied them. The torch went out. Carse dropped it. His heart pounded and he was blind and deaf in the soundless vortex of force.
Again Rhiannon spoke. “ See now with my mind what your human eyes could not see before!”
The pulsing darkness cleared in some strange way that had nothing to do with light or sight. Carse looked upon Rhiannon.
His body lay in a coffin of dark crystal, whose inner facets glowed with the subtle force that prisoned him forever as though frozen in the heart of a jewel.