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

fighting your own futility. That’s why you asked me a question.”
How may life endure—?
“Now I’ve come back. You’ve been waiting for millennia, and I’m finally here. Let me try to answer you.”
    Let me tell you why I need you.
    The Forestal did not reply at once. For a time that strained Linden’s nerves, he sang to himself as if he were considering her plea, or her death; debating the many cruelties of his plight. Small winds carried plaints through the struggling grass.
    When he spoke at last, his melody sounded sharp enough to draw blood.
    “Then come, human woman.” He gestured imperiously with his scepter. “Bring your companion if you must. If you would dare my scrutiny, you must stand upon Gallows Howe. In the presence of my doom and denunciation, you will speak. There you will live or be slain.”
    Before Linden could give her assent, Mahrtiir’s voice rang out, pealing against the chime of the Wildwood’s music. “What of proud Narunal, Great One? What of Hyn, loyal and loving? They are Ranyhyn, as revered as trees. Without them, we are lost.”
    For the third time, Caerroil Wildwood demanded, “What is that to me?”
    Then Linden no longer stood on open ground. Ripples altered the surface of her senses, and she drifted among the trees where the Forestal had waited. The Forestal himself was gone: his song remained. It summoned her like a
geas
from the depths of the dark Deep.
    While she staggered within herself, the fringes of the forest wavered like disturbed water. She stepped without transition onto a thin track like a path for deer wending crookedly among monarchs thick with age. She had no sensation of movement, but she had already come far. Aching branches swathed her in shadows defined by sunlight falling cleanly between the leaves. Caerroil Wildwood was drawing her toward the heart of his demesne. Doing so, he seemed to call her in the direction of her own past, and the Land’s. With every stride, she crossed decades and leagues as if they were seamless, woven together by the fecund mutter of music from a thousand thousand voices.
    Vaguely she was aware that Manethrall Mahrtiir walked at her side, passing farther and farther into Garroting Deep and time. He did not speak, and she did not. Like her, he appeared ensorcelled by the counterpoint of the Forestal’s ubiquitous song.
    Together she and her companion traveled among changes in the terrain: hills and streams; low stone buttresses grey with age and clad in moss; complex trails like a web of welcome for the animals that enriched the woodland. Variations among the trees themselves measured the progression of leagues: stands of new growth interrupted by the magisterial contemplation of ripe oaks; thickets crowded with orchids and
aliantha
; vibrant tracts of aspen and cottonwood on higher ground in the west, draped cypress and willow in lowlands and swales to the east. If the sun moved at all in the distant heavens, Linden did not notice it.
    How far had they come? How far were Gallows Howe and the Black River from Cravenhaw? She did not know—and could not care. While Caerroil Wildwood’s trance carried her, compelled her, she only took one step after another, and filled her lungs with the woodland’s wealth of scents, and marveled that so much largesse had withstood the depredations of centuries and humankind and malevolence.
    The woods seemed as timeless as the chaos of a
caesure
; but Garroting Deep was not Desecration. In spite of its enduring bitterness, its galls of woe and ire, it had been formed for peace. The lost nature of the One Forest was irenic, as rapt as
Elohim
, and as self-absorbed. Perhaps that similarity, that kinship, explained the willingness of the
Elohim
to take action for the preservation of woodlands. The result was an anodyne for travail even when the trees were stiff with outrage. If Linden had ever been afraid, or desperate, or appalled, she had forgotten it; or the Forestal’s music warded her from herself.
    For her, the way was not long. Denser shade cut out more and more sunlight. Darker trees gathered gloom beneath their branches: their roots fed on shadows. Vines like hawsers tangled the underbrush on both sides of the trail where she and Mahrtiir walked. Swaths of leaves looked as black as dying blood except when brief glimpses of the sun revealed their true green. After unremarked moments or hours, she found herself approaching the barren slope of Gallows Howe.
    The hill seemed higher