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

“Maybe we can escape the worst of this storm.”
    As if he had triggered it, lightning shrieked overhead. Thunder made the air shudder.
    “To my sight,” Rime Coldspray remarked, pitching her voice to carry, “the coming downpour does not appear extensive. Nonetheless it will be extreme. The Timewarden counsels wisely.”
    “Branl!” Covenant barked over his shoulder. “How far have we come?”
    The Humbled sat Rallyn with the
krill
raised in one hand and Longwrath’s sword leaning on his shoulder. “Our translations have increased, ur-Lord,” he replied. “We have traversed nigh unto thirty leagues, and have lost but a portion of the afternoon.”
    Stave nodded in confirmation.
    Linden tried to remember how much ground the Ardent had covered when he had conveyed the company out of the Lost Deep. Another glare and shout among the clouds distracted her. The rain was becoming a deluge.
    Cursing, Covenant started back toward the head of the company. Incipient torrents belabored his head and shoulders.
    At once, Branl dismounted. The flamberge he handed to Onyx Stonemage. With Covenant and Loric’s dagger, he strode beyond the company.
    Rain hammered the ground. It beat the dirt to mud. Clotted rills squirmed past the feet of the Giants. Linden felt herself sinking under the weight of the downpour, hunching over her heart. Her son needed help, and she had nothing to give him.
    The Giants braced themselves for a sprint which would have no perceptible beginning: it would simply come over them somewhere within the blank space created by wild magic and Loric’s blade. Hyn tossed her head, repositioned her hooves. Khelen snorted a warning at Jeremiah. Lightning ripped through the gloom. Thunder roared against the cliff like the wrath of mountains.
    Branl moved swiftly, carrying Covenant. Covenant’s line of fire defied the torrents as if dirt and rain were fuel. Flames danced like Wraiths on Linden’s wedding band. Reflexively she held the Staff as far away from her ring as she could.
    When the world vanished, her heart plunged into darkness. She and her companions were taking Jeremiah to Mount Thunder.
    To the Despiser.
    He would relish her son.

    ithout transition, the horses and the Giants were running as if their lungs would burst. They strained at a steep slope, labored forward against the obstructions of their mortality. Then they pitched down a hillside, plummeting like a landslide.
    There was no rain. The dusk of late afternoon held the world under a sparse sprinkle of stars. Every breath sucked at a humid miasma of putrefaction and worse poisons.
    On the left some distance away rose a high cliff sheer as a cut slab. And water lay
there
, on the right: the rank wetland of the Sarangrave, brandishing its tortured trees and twisted scrub and fetor. Branches writhed like the beckoning limbs of demons. The companions hurtled toward the Flat as if they aimed to cast themselves headlong into its reek.
    Then Covenant heaved on Mishio Massima’s reins, yelled at the beast to stop. Rallyn braced his legs against the descent: the Ironhand and her comrades dug in their heels. Stride by stride, the company slowed.
    A tree flashed past, and another. Ironwood? Hyn splashed through a stream. A glowering cluster of cypress reached out from the edge of the marsh. Following Rallyn and Covenant’s mount, the companions veered away, angling closer to the cliff.
    As Hyn mastered her momentum, Linden realized where she was. Although she had never seen the mountain from this perspective before, she recognized Mount Thunder. In profile, it resembled a titan kneeling against or within Landsdrop with its forearms and torso braced on the Upper Land, facing west. The nearby cliff was a side of the mountain rather than an extension of the great precipice which divided the Land. The hillside down which Hyn moved, trotting now, was one of the titan’s calves. The other formed the far side of a valley leading from the base of the cliff into the Sarangrave.
    The valley was wide enough to hold a large herd of Ranyhyn, long enough to accommodate several hundred Masters fighting Cavewights or
kresh
. On the lower slopes and in the bottom grew scattered ironwood trees nourished by streams of fresh water tumbling downward on both sides, north and south. Marsh grasses climbing out of the Flat wrestled for room to grow with bindweed and more noxious plants.
    But the spine of the valley bottom was a riverbed that stank like a sewer.
    Black