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

the Staff in the other. The lines of his runes began to burn like his eyes, silver and severe.
    “Yet I am grievously diminished. My strength falters. Therefore I will make use of your blackness to sustain me, as I have written that I must.”
    With the Staff and his scepter held high, he brandished gleaming like certainty over the Howe. “Harken now. Hear my answer to your need.”
    Extremes contradicted each other in Linden’s heart, a turmoil of unexpected hope and dread. Possibilities that she had failed to foresee daunted and exalted her. In the dirt under her boots, complex emotions thrummed as if Gallows Howe had forgotten or surrendered none of its desires. Ahead of her, Mahrtiir stood with his hands open as if he were waiting for the weapon which would give them meaning at last: an import which no mere garrote could supply. Higher on the hill, and wreathed in compulsions which appeared to draw only purity from the Staff of Law, Caerroil Wildwood made his music louder, more encompassing, until it became a hymn chorused by the entire woodland. At the same time, he tuned his singing to a pitch that resembled language. Perhaps with her ears, or perhaps only with her health-sense, Linden listened to an arboreal melody more numinous than speech.
        “It is my heart I give to you,
    My blood and sap and bone and root,
    To serve the woods with what we are
    While what we are endures to serve.
        “I guard and grow the world’s deep love.
    Its loveliness must justify
    The sterner truths of rock and sea,
    For they persist but do not grow
    And so their life is only Law:
    It is not melody or joy.
    Their substance, substanceless, is woe
    Unless it is redeemed by green,
    By growth and verdure that relieve
    The world from stone’s commanding cold.
        “If rock does not erode it does
    Not feed the trees that give it worth.
    If sea does not give way to rain
    It does not vindicate its surge.
    Such passage is Creation’s pulse:
    Its transformation brings forth love
    From Law’s unending rest and flood,
    For only life which passes on
    Can glorify remaining life.
        “For loving’s sake I guard the green:
    Its steward I became and am—
    And you as well, for by my song
    It is my soul I give to you
    To serve the woods until we die.”
    And while the Forestal’s invocation swelled across tree and hill, Manethrall Mahrtiir of the Ramen began to change. Ineffable magicks wrapped him in their cocoon until he was barely visible. Swathed in Caerroil Wildwood’s power, his bandage was burned away, and his raiment fell from him like dross. His lean form with its scars of struggle and its ropes of muscle was robed in samite that shone like incarnate cleanliness. An unalloyed argent too rare and refined to be wild magic transformed his visage. As if he had brought it forth from within him, a twig grew in his grasp until it became a sapling nearly as tall as himself: a child-tree crowned with new leaves, its roots clinging to a ball of rich loam, which he held with the ease of supernal strength.
    The end of his human life had come upon him. When he emerged from the Forestal’s theurgy, the man who had been steadfast in the face of every peril would be gone. Like the
Elohim
of the Colossus, he would not be able to revoke his transubstantiation. Nevertheless his gladness aspired among the harmonies of Garroting Deep, and his eagerness for strife contributed a peal of joy.
    Watching him, Linden wanted to cry; but she had no tears for a friend who had found his heart’s desire.

11.
    Back from the Brink

    Thomas Covenant could hardly stand. He felt like wreckage. Certainly he looked like a derelict, with his tattered jeans and T-shirt, and his silver hair wild. Only his boots had come intact through his immersions in Sarangrave Flat. If Rallyn had not led Mishio Massima through an arduous series of translations by wild magic, he would not have arrived anywhere. He and Branl would still be trudging along the edges of the lurker’s wetland an impossible distance from where he was needed. Traveling through argent circles drawn on grass and stone and dirt with Loric’s
krill
, he had exceeded his image of himself.
    But he had not done so without help. He was not as weak as he should have been, or as numb. Some of the effects of hurtloam lingered deep within him. He had drunk water made clean for him by the Feroce, and had eaten
ussusimiel
melons. Aided beyond any reasonable expectation, he had been able to