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

have done what we have done. The Feroce can do no more.”
    While Covenant stared, stricken witless, Branl called, “Ur-Lord!” He sounded uncharacteristically urgent. “Heed the Feroce! The waters rise!”
    “Well said,
Haruchai
,” muttered a Giant as he snatched Covenant into his arms. He had a seamed face, and skin toughened by wind and sun, yet he looked as slender as a sapling, or as incomplete, like a man whose body was decades younger than his visage. Nevertheless his muscles were hawsers. “This fog masks a mounting flood. A tide gathers from the east. Even Giants cannot swim such waters.”
    The
skurj
turned away from the cliff, away from the Sandgorgons. Those monsters which had bitten into other
skurj
, seeking blood and sustenance, ceased their feeding. Rearing like serpents, they brandished their fangs at Covenant; at Branl and six unknown Giants.
    Together the Giants scrambled out from under a breaking wave of reified lava. Covenant dangled, helpless in his rescuer’s arms, trying to understand events which had become as sudden as vertigo. At the rear of the group, Branl fought alone, swinging Longwrath’s flamberge in a blur of cuts. But he retreated as he slashed, moving quickly without giving the monsters his back. The thunder of the Fire-Lions sounded like ruin, the gutrock rumble of an earthquake powerful enough to tear Landsdrop apart. The tumult of water rising from the Sarangrave resembled the onrush of another tsunami.
    At the full stretch of their long limbs, the Giants raced for the southern rim of the valley. A long stone’s throw away, more Giants bore Linden and Jeremiah upward. Swinging a longsword, Stave accompanied them. Branl cut twice more at the nearest creatures, then turned to follow the Giants.
    When the Fire-Lions met the wall of Sandgorgons, and Horrim Carabal’s flood found the
skurj
, the result was cataclysm. It shook the foundations of the Lower Land for leagues in every direction. Struck by acrid eruptions of steam and fury, the thunderheads became a bludgeoning deluge that seemed to erase the valley from existence. Rain fell like the ultimate darkness.
    Then the Giants raised a huzzah, ragged and grateful. The monsters were dying, all of them. Dimly Covenant realized that most of his companions had survived. He had seen Linden’s fire before the end. Lord Foul would not have permitted harm to Jeremiah.
    Carried by a Giant whom he had never met before, Thomas Covenant felt no relief. He had exhausted himself. Now he was too stunned to feel anything.

4.
    Reluctances

    The downpour lasted until the Fire-Lions were done with the Sandgorgons; until all of the
skurj
were dead, and the lurker’s flood dwindled to the east; until
samadhi
Sheol’s sentience had faded entirely from existence. Then the thunderheads drifted apart as if they had forgotten their purpose. The chill of rain and darkness dismissed the fog. Glittering as if they trembled at what they beheld, stars pricked the night sky with loveliness.
    Linden did not see the Fire-Lions depart. For all she knew, they, too, had perished. But she did not think so. Gravin Threndor’s ancient fire and glory were inherent to the world, as natural as the Worm. She doubted that they could be unmade.
    She rested under the shelter of an ironwood high up on the side of the valley, as far as possible from the craters and carnage of the battle, the plague-spots like stigmata in the ground, the clinging reek of gangrene. Leaning against the hard trunk with the Staff of Law in her lap, she waited for some semblance of strength to return.
    She was too tired to be afraid. Too drained even to stay on her feet after Hurl had delivered her here. Too depleted to regard Jeremiah, or Covenant, or the Giants. Instead she floated into the lucidity of exhaustion: that numb mind-set in which unbidden thoughts followed their own logic to conclusions that might not have made sense at any other time.
    In your present state, Chosen—
    She was done with fighting. That much had become clear to her.
    —Desecration lies ahead of you.
    God, she had endured so much violence—From her struggles against Roger Covenant and the
croyel
to the horrors and killing beside the Defiles Course, she had fought and fought. With wild magic, she had shed the lives of scores or hundreds of misled Cavewights.
    You have become the daughter of my heart
. It was enough. She was done. Ever since Jeremiah’s escape from his graves, the foundations of her life