The Last Dark: The climax of the entire Thomas Covenant Chronicles (Last Chronicles of Thomas Cove)

except by saving the Earth, Covenant agrees.
    True to their word, the Feroce sacrifice many lives; but their aid does not suffice. In order to reach Joan, Covenant and the Humbled enter a
caesure
: a doomed gamble from which Joan rescues Covenant so that she can kill him herself. And Joan is possessed by
turiya
Raver, who casts Covenant adrift in his memories. But before Joan can summon a killing blast, Covenant draws on her wild magic to heal his mind. When she is distracted by the Ranyhyn, he uses the
krill
to end her life.
    A tsunami caused by the Worm follows. It nearly claims Covenant, Clyme, and Branl. And when it passes—when a new day begins—the sun no longer rises. The world has fallen into perpetual twilight: the onset of the last dark.



1.
    Betimes Some Wonder

    Linden Avery’s fate may indeed have been written in water. It was certainly writ in tears. They blurred everything; redefined the foundations of her life.
    Standing in Muirwin Delenoth, resting place of abhorrence, with Jeremiah clasped in her arms, she felt emotions as extreme as the dismay which had followed Thomas Covenant’s resurrection and the rousing of the Worm of the World’s End; as paralyzing and uncontainable as the knowledge that she had doomed all of her loves. But there, in Andelain, the scale of her distress had seemed too great to be called despair. Here, in the company of bones and old death, her glad shock at Jeremiah’s restoration was too great and complex to be joy.
    Stave of the
Haruchai
stood waiting with his arms folded, impassive as a man who had done nothing, and had never lost a son. Three Ranyhyn waited near him, watching Linden and Jeremiah with glory in their eyes. In the distant west, the sun drifted down shrouded in the hues of ash and dust, casting shadows like innominate auguries from the stone blades and plates which rimmed the hollow. Heaved aside by the deflagration of Jeremiah’s construct, the skeletons of
quellvisks
sprawled against the far slope of Muirwin Delenoth as if they sought to disavow their role in his redemption—or as if they had drawn back in reverence.
    Such things were the whole world, and the whole world waited. But Linden took no notice. She was unaware that she had dropped her Staff, or that Covenant’s ring still hung on its chain around her neck, holding in its small circle the forged fate of all things. She regarded only Jeremiah, felt only him; knew only that he responded to her embrace. A miracle so vast—
    I did it, Mom
. For the first time in his life, he had spoken to her.
I made a door for my mind, and it
opened.
    Joy was too small a word for her emotions. Happiness and gratitude and relief and even astonishment were trivial by comparison. A staggering confluence of valor and trust had restored her son. At that moment, she believed that if the Worm came for her now, or She Who Must Not Be Named, or even Lord Foul the Despiser, her only regret would be that she did not get to know who her son had become during his absence.
    Somehow he had weathered his excruciating dissociation. In graves he had endured what the Despiser and Roger Covenant and the
croyel
had done to him.
    She was murmuring his name without realizing it, trying to absorb the knowledge of him; trying to imprint his hug and his tangible legacy of Earthpower and his unmistakable awareness onto every neuron of her being. He was her adopted son. Physically she had known every inch of him for most of his life. But she had never met the underlying
him
until this moment: until he had arisen from his absence and looked at her and spoken.
    The way in which she repeated his name was weeping; but that, too, she did not realize. She was no more aware of her tears than she was of Stave and the Ranyhyn and passing time and the ancient ruin of bones. Holding Jeremiah in her arms—and being held by him—was enough.
    She had no better name for what she felt than exaltation.
    Yet the exaltation was Jeremiah’s, not hers. He had become transcendent, numinous: an icon of transfiguration. He seemed to glow with warmth and health in her arms as if he had become the Staff of Law: not
her
Staff, runed and ebony, transformed to blackness by her sins and failures, but rather the Staff of Law as it should have been, pure and beneficent, the Staff that Berek Halfhand had first created to serve the beauty of the Land.
    The gift that Anele had given Jeremiah elevated him in ways that Linden could not define. He had not simply