“We all die in time,” the gunslinger said. “It’s not just the world that moves on.” He looked squarely at Eddie, his faded blue eyes almost the color of slate in this light. “But we will be magnificent.” He paused. “There’s more than a world to win, Eddie. I would not risk you and her—I would not have allowed the boy to die—if that was all there was.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Everything there is,” the gunslinger said calmly. “We are going to go, Eddie. We are going to fight. We are going to be hurt. And in the end we will stand.”
Now it was Eddie who said nothing. He could think of nothing to say.
Roland gently grasped Eddie’s arm. “Even the damned love,” he said.
5
Eddie eventually slept beside Susannah, the third Roland had drawn to make a new three, but Roland sat awake and listened to voices in the night while the wind dried the tears on his cheeks.
Damnation?
Salvation?
The Tower.
He would come to the Dark Tower and there he would sing their names; there he would sing their names; there he would sing all their names.
The sun stained the east a dusky rose, and at last Roland, no longer the last gunslinger but one of the last three, slept and dreamed his angry dreams through which there ran only that one soothing blue thread: There I will sing all their names!
AFTERWORD
This completes the second of six or seven books which make up a long tale called The Dark Tower. The third, The Waste Lands, details half of the quest of Roland, Eddie, and Susannah to reach the Tower; the fourth, Wizard and Glass, tells of an enchantment and a seduction but mostly of those things which befell Roland before his readers first met him upon the trail of the man in black.
My surprise at the acceptance of the first volume of this work, which is not at all like the stories for which I am best known, is exceeded only by my gratitude to those who have read it and liked it. This work seems to be my own Tower, you know; these people haunt me, Roland most of all. Do I really know what that Tower is, and what awaits Roland there （should he reach it, and you must prepare yourself for the very real possibility that he will not be the one to do so）？ Yes . . . and no. All I know is that the tale has called to me again and again over a period of seventeen years. This longer second volume still leaves many questions unanswered and the story’s climax far in the future, but I feel that it is a much more complete volume than the first.
And the Tower is closer.
—STEPHEN KING
December 1st, 1986