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

to try. Singing, he seemed to become higher and mightier, exalted by the inadequacy of her silence.
    “Great One—” she began. But then her littleness caught in her throat, and she faltered.
    “Ringthane,” Mahrtiir urged privately, “you must. It is as you have said. He is aware of his doom. There lies the true heart of his torment. With every leaf and sprout of his realm, he cries out in bitterness and supplication. I hear now that he cannot decline to heed you. Some hope he must have. Is it not for this that he has clung to his devoir? Is it not for this that we have come, to proffer hope? Or, if not hope itself, then our striving in the name of hope?”
    Linden feared the guardian of the Deep. Oh, she feared him!
From border to border, my demesne thirsts for the recompense of blood
. Now more than ever, that was true. He had known for millennia that he could not prevail over heedlessness and malice. His trees were too vulnerable—
    Vulnerable and precious.
    Yet his insights when she had met him before had surpassed her comprehension. They might do so again.
    She made another attempt. “Great One. You know me.”
    She wanted to raise her voice even though she had no music to match Caerroil Wildwood’s. But she could not be peremptory in his presence. She had to speak softly.
    “You gave me a gift.” She insisted on her Staff as if it were a pledge. “And you asked me a question that I couldn’t answer. I need your help.”
    Vexation spread through the trees. “What is that to me?” the Forestal countered: raw tatters of sound that seemed to arise from the woods at his back. “In a bygone age, my heart was wrath. I was avid for bloodshed, and my ire suffused every leaf and twig and branch and trunk and root of my demesne. Yet now I recall that time as a halcyon era. Though I knew myself and all forests doomed, I remained capable of much, potent for both killing and nurturance in the name of trees and green. As you foretold, I feasted on the flesh of a Raver. But the years have become an age of the Earth, and the time of my power has passed. My strength withers in my veins. I cannot restore it.
    “Do you ask my aid? I have none to give. My every effort is required to slow the ruin of all that I have held dear.”
    He fell silent, although his music went on weeping.
    “You’re right,” Linden replied, forcing herself. Such honesty was difficult for her, but she had no other response. “You’ve always been doomed. But soon it’s going to get worse. Much worse.” She meant the Sunbane. “The Clave is going to create an evil like nothing that the Land has ever seen before, and it won’t stop even when it has destroyed every last fragment of the One Forest. Eventually even Caer-Caveral will be gone. He’ll reach the end of himself and let go.
    “But long ago I told you that you would have a chance to make a Raver suffer. Now I tell you that the coming evil
will
be stopped. White gold and Law and love will cast it out. A new forest will grow,” Salva Gildenbourne, “and it will be vast. The world will keep on turning, Great One.
    “But that’s not the end of what I know. Eventually there will be new evils. Worse evils. That’s why I’m here. I can’t offer you hope. I have to ask for it. I need
forbidding
. I need to know how to
forbid
. Otherwise my time will be as doomed as yours. Where I come from, the world won’t keep on turning. The evil has gone too far. Nothing except forbidding can save it.”
    “What is that to me?” the august figure asked again. “The end of my days crowds close around me. I cannot forbid the waning of my own strength. My trees must perish. What will you forbid that I have not already failed to prevent? Soon or late, all things come to dust. I have no other purpose than sorrow.”
    “Now, Ringthane,” Mahrtiir breathed like the breeze. “You are acquainted with despair. Harken to his, and he will heed you. His song speaks to my heart. In this, he and I are one.”
    Linden winced. She understood the Manethrall. She feared that she understood him too well. She had been given hints enough. But she could not afford to falter in her purpose.
    “Great one, look at me,” she implored. “Look at my Staff.”
This blackness is lamentable
—“Look at your runes. You know what they mean. You gave them to me long ago, but even then you saw what was coming. You could already feel the hopelessness that eats at you now. You were so angry then because you were