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

exchange.”
    Jeremiah flinched. Before he could stop himself, he retorted, “It’s the same thing.” He did not want to say this. The words were compelled from him by pressures which he yearned to defy. “My mother gave us away.” He remembered it vividly. The
croyel
had delighted in raising such spectres from their graves. “I mean my natural mother, not Mom. She must have thought she was getting something. She sacrificed my sisters and me when she handed herself to Lord Foul.” The bonfire had cost him two fingers. If he had not hidden from them, eyes as hungry as fangs would have claimed him. “We were too young to know what she was doing.”
    But he had not been too young to be terrified—
    Grueburn’s shoulders slumped. “Then I will grieve for you. And I will hold out hope for Lostson Longwrath, that he may evade his
geas
as you have foiled your imprisonment.”
    Jeremiah poked at his leg with the tip of his rock, trying to suppress a residue of agony. Dust had already begun to fill his lines. In any case, they were shrouded in twilight, almost imperceptible. Resisting the unspoken appeal in Grueburn’s voice, he asked roughly, “Can you still see where I want to build?”
    “We are Giants,” Latebirth replied as if she were certain of herself. “We will not forget.”
    “Good for you,” Jeremiah muttered under his breath: a sour whisper. Then he turned toward the rubble. “Come on. We’ve wasted enough time.”
    Almost immediately, however, he regretted his tone. It sounded too much like petulance, the whining of a boy who did not want to grow up. As an apology, he clenched his hands into fists, then opened them with cornflower flames in his palms.
    Lighting the way, he led Frostheart Grueburn and Latebirth onto the rockfall to search for malachite.

    ome of the stones with their secret deposits of minerals and hope were small enough that he could manage them without help. Those he ignored temporarily. Instead he probed the rubble until he located two or three rocks that required Giants. These he indicated to Grueburn and Latebirth. When they assured him that they would be able to wrestle the stones from the slope without causing it to shift, he quenched his fires. In darkness softened only by the half-light of evening, he returned to the smaller pieces of granite and basalt, and began hurrying them downward.
    He was going to need a lot of them. And dozens or scores of bigger chunks. The proportions of malachite were meager. With purer, richer deposits, he could have contrived a structure no taller than himself, its walls closer together: little more than a shrine. But with these rocks, his construct would have to be the size of an impoverished temple, crudely raised by people too poor to afford a better place of worship. And even then, he could not be sure that he would find enough malachite for his purpose.
    The right materials in the right amounts with the right shapes. If he succeeded, the
Elohim
would come. They would have no choice. But if he failed to locate enough malachite—or to build his temple before every
Elohim
perished, or before the Worm came—then everything would be wasted. His own life would have no meaning. Mom would have saved him and then left him for nothing.
    While he fretted, however, other facets of who he was made their preparations with a confidence that seemed almost autonomic. Hardly thinking about his choices, he set the stones he carried where they would be readily accessible. As Grueburn and Latebirth struggled down the slope, supporting between them a massive boulder, and gasping stertorously, he estimated its shape in relation to its freight of malachite, then directed them to place it like a cornerstone where two of his lines met. When they dropped it where he indicated, and leaned on it to ease their trembling, he instructed them to turn it slightly. And as soon as they complied to his satisfaction, he followed flurries of wind back onto the rockfall to retrieve more fragments of his intent.
    In moments, he found a chunk of a size that threatened to exceed him. But before he could pry the rock out of the slope, he felt Stave coming toward him.
    “Permit me,” the former Master offered. “There is little else that I can do to aid you. I lack the stonelore of Giants. Nor, it appears, do my senses equal yours. Yet strength I have.
    “Also I am not needed to stand guard. In the absence of such glamour as the Unbeliever’s son has wielded, any force