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

appeared to horrify him. “It is what I am.”
    “It is not,” she countered, undismayed. “When it is gone, you will remember that you and you alone among the
Elohim
have both loved and been loved.”
    To that assertion, he had no reply.
    She did not repeat her invitation. Instead she reached out one hand to clasp his severed wrist. With chiming and mercy, she stanched his bleeding. If the pollution of the
skurj
within him caused her any hurt, she accepted it.
    His eyes bled anguish. He made no attempt to pull away.
    Briefly Infelice glanced at the Giants, at the Ironhand. “Be warned,” she told them. “
Moksha
Jehannum now rules the
skurj
. He will wield them with cunning and malice. And do not forget that the Chosen-son is precious to a-Jeroth.”
    Then she surrendered at last to the imperative of Jeremiah’s construct. Drawing Kastenessen with her, she entered the fane. In an instant, they were gone as if they had stepped out of the world altogether.
    “Damnation,” Covenant gasped. “I wasn’t sure I could do that.”
    Lowering his arms as if he had been beaten, he tried to approach the Swordmainnir. But his legs failed, and he dropped to his knees.
    Overhead Kevin’s Dirt had already begun to dissipate. If more stars perished, they did so beyond the horizons. Jeremiah did not see them die.

10.
    But While I Can

    As if they were each entirely alone, Linden Avery and Manethrall Mahrtiir rode through hell to save or damn the Earth.
    They did not exist for each other. They were mounted on Ranyhyn that did not exist. Immersed in a cyclone of rent instants, they were consumed by the kind of hiving that drove men and women mad. Every nerve was stung beyond endurance, assailed by bitter particles of reality. At the same time, every perception had become white ice, gelid as the gulfs between the stars. Linden and her companion inhabited a frozen wilderland eternally unrelieved in all directions. They had entered a realm in which excruciation defined them. It was all they knew because it was all that they had ever known. It was all that they would ever know. One moment did not lead to the next, and so there was nothing to see or do or understand.
    In that perfection of agony, Linden may once have imagined that she and Mahrtiir would be defended by experience. They had endured
caesures
twice before, and had survived. Surely they would be sustained by the knowledge that what they were trying to do was possible? But she was wrong. Memory was meaningless in a place that contained all time and none simultaneously. One instant,
this
instant, was the whole truth of who and what they were.
    Yet it was not the whole truth of their plight. The
caesure
imposed other dimensions of torment as well, other forms of futility. She had asked the Ranyhyn to take her and Mahrtiir backward in time, against the current of the Fall’s wild rush; and that effort had consequences. While hornets burrowed into her flesh, and she occupied a bitter wasteland as if it were the summation of all her needs and desires, she also floated inside herself like a spectator, helpless amid the chaos, watching her own desecration as if she were dissociated from it.
    Days and days ago, she had once hung suspended like this inside Joan’s mind, observing ruin through Joan’s eyes because she had entered a
caesure
of Joan’s making. But now Linden was the cause of her own suffering. While other tortures failed to tear her apart only because their duration had no meaning, she also bore witness to herself.
    She watched the Linden Avery who had always been inadequate to what her life required of her. The Linden who had allowed herself to be misled by Roger Covenant and the
croyel
. The Linden who had defied every Law by resurrecting Thomas Covenant,
compelled by rage
—and had nonetheless failed to resurrect him whole. The Linden who had been consumed by She Who Must Not Be Named, and had not sufficed to raise her precious son from his graves.
    The Linden Avery who had roused the Worm of the World’s End.
    But there was more. Observing, she was able to recall things which the storm of time denied.
    There is no doom so black or deep that c
ourage and clear sight may not find another truth beyond it
.
    Covenant had told her that. In the aspect of her anguish that resembled a shadow cast by her own flawed self, she yearned to believe him.
    Trust yourself.
    Oh, she ached for the ability to believe. But he had also said,
Don’t touch me
, as if he