 Who is the Watcher?
But its outward perils could not compare with the Ryzgas themselves, who slept within, ready to wake and conquer.... While she waited he spun a dream, attaching it to the crags that loomed over the pass, and to the frozen ground underfoot. It was black night, as it would really be when Groz and his henchmen reached this place; lurid fire spewed from the Ryzga mountain, and strange lights dipped above it; and for good measure there was an avalanche in the dream, and hideous beasts rushed snapping and ravening from the crevices of the rock. The Watcher was four hundred years old; beside him even Groz, who had always seemed so ancient, was like a boy. Var saw with some surprise that all the walls were sheathed in ice—warm to the touch, bound fast against melting by the Watcher's will. Behind them began a tinkling of falling water, thawed from the glacial ridges above to descend sheet-wise over the cave mouth, freezing as it fell into lengthening icicles. The Watcher was broodingly silent; his eyes shifted to Neena, where she nestled by Var's side. That is the second part of the law the First Watcher made: to guard lest the unwary and the ignorant should bring harm on themselves and on all men." I did not see the sleepers, nor will any man until they come again, but I met their sentries, the sentinel machines that guard them now as they have for two thousand years. "Because of them we must build with dreams instead of iron, and our only fire is that of the Sun, and even now, two thousand years later, the Earth is still slowly recovering from the pangs and poison of that age. Meanwhile they redoubled the yoke and the punishments, hastening the completion of the last of the starships. "From the memories that the old Watchers have left here, and from the memories of dead men that still echo in the air, I have gathered a picture of that world's end. Before them death waited around the citadel where the masters still fought. From the center, over the citadel, an immense white globe soared upward, rising swiftly without sound. These raised a black mountain from the Earth's heart, and in hollows within it cast themselves into deathless sleep, their deathless and lifeless sentinels round them, to wait till someone dare arouse them, or until their chosen time—no one knows surely. Our world is unwise and sometimes evil, full of arrogance, folly, and passion that are in the nature of man.
 Someone who has been granted the honor of watching over the mountain region
 Someone who has been granted the honor of watching over the mountain region  A man who was exiled from society because of violent tendencies  An old man who has retracted from society  An alien in charge of protecting the planet