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

sailors came two at a time to grip his shoulders or hers; to be flensed by pain and find release.
    A curtain of tears fell between Linden and her companions. For a moment, she was blind. She was almost deaf. But then the
caamora
was done. When she felt the last of the Giants withdraw, she relaxed her fire, taking Covenant’s with her. Her ring had answered his: now his answered hers. As if they had briefly become one, they let go of wild magic until they stood, unburned and unburning, in each other’s arms.
    She heard the Giants singing; but they seemed impossibly far away, and she did not listen to them. Instead she heeded only the need in her husband’s embrace and the relieved beat of his heart.
    There is also love in the world.

5.
    “No Prospect of Return”

    As if the
croyel
still had the power to dredge up his buried past—or as if Lord Foul had inherited that power—Jeremiah remembered his sisters. Two of them, both barely toddling on their stick-thin legs. There was never enough to eat. Their names were—? Their names were gone. He could not imagine their faces, except as pale smudges lit by the Despiser’s bonfire. They had existed in a different world, on the far side of a wall of absence. He was not sure now that they had ever meant anything to him, except as squalling mouths that needed food worse than he did. And yet he remembered that they had been his sisters.
    Linden and Covenant did not know that about him. It was his last secret: he remembered his sisters.
    A scornful voice told him that he should have done something to protect them.
    He
should
have, even though he had gone first, he had put his right hand in the fire as soon as his mother finished screaming, and after that he was in too much pain to feel anything else. Even after he had learned how to conceal himself so that those terrible flames could not touch him again, the idea that he should have done something twisted his heart.
    Why was he thinking about this now? It did not make sense.
Protect
his sisters?
How?
He was only five. His mother was always praying or crying. Just about the only thing he knew for sure was that he had to be good. He had to do what she told him. He had to obey Lord Foul’s eyes in the bonfire. That was what kids did. It was how they stayed alive.
    Yet they were your sisters, were they not?
    I don’t even remember their names.
    Yet you knew their peril, did you not?
    I was just a kid. I didn’t know anything.
    Yet you heard your mother’s pain, did you not? You understood that fire burns, did you not?
    I was only
five
, Jeremiah tried to protest. I had to obey.
    Did you? At such a cost?
    I couldn’t do anything else! Everything hurt too much!
    Yet they needed you, did they not? Had you refused the flames, would they not have done likewise? Are you not therefore the cause of their sufferings?
    I was just a kid.
    Yet you are no longer a child.
    Stop.
    And are you not as blameworthy now as you were then? For deeds and self-pity which imperil those whom you profess to love, are you not blameworthy still? Did you not reveal their heading and purpose by defying possession? You knew that peril also, did you not?
    Stop. Yes. Stop.
    How then do you now refuse blame?
    Jeremiah had no answer for that voice. The sanctuary which he had designed for the
Elohim
was not an answer. It was no excuse for standing on grass as if he thought that he could outface Lord Foul. He should have protected his sisters. He could not have protected them. He should have done it anyway. He deserved to watch the Worm while Linden and Covenant failed to save the world because of him. He had told Lord Foul where they were.
    So now he concentrated obsessively on the Staff of Law: as obsessively as he had worked on any construct. As soon as he recovered from the surprise of the
caamora
, the jolt of alarm, he picked up the Staff and resumed his study. Covenant was not hurt. Linden was not. Jeremiah could see that. They did not need him; and he had other things to do.
    When he held the strange black wood, he felt its possibilities. In a sense, it too was a construct. It was made of parts that he could identify. The living wood. The iron heels full of old magic. The language of the runes. The blackness, Linden’s blackness: the deep ebony which had taken over his own Earthpower when he had tried to change it. How those parts interacted was a mystery, but that did not trouble him. How the parts of his own constructs interacted was a mystery.