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

had been betrayed.
    If She had not forgotten Her true name—Her real scope and power—She would have brought everything to an end long ago.
    Linden peered through splashes and rivulets at Stave. The rain was becoming torrential as millennia of lore failed, unloosed by these few ur-viles and Waynhim according to the arcane dictates of their Weird. Lashing drops and spray fraught with residues stung like acid. She tried to find her voice; swallowed bitterness so that she might shout refusals at her friend. If he would not ask the Demondim-spawn for protection, she meant to plead on his behalf.
    But she did not. She was already overwhelmed.
    I am made proud by my place at your side.
    In the small space between instants, the rainwater running over her body became vermin. It became centipedes as long as her hand, feasting maggots, spiders with hundreds of pincers, lice that scuttled and squirmed, worms burrowing. Noisome things crawled and clawed and pecked everywhere, intimate as lovers, avid as eaters of death. Desperate to quash the feeding, she thrashed like a madwoman, hit herself frantically, dug at her scalp until she drew blood.
    Stave may have shouted her name. If he did, the rain slapped his voice from the air.
    Cascades filled her mouth with biting insects. They laid their eggs in her eyes, breeding. When she tried to breathe, she gasped abhorrence into her lungs and retched. Beetles and centipedes scuttled down her throat.
    —
written in water
. The Despiser had named her fate. Water was horror. It was eager excruciation. It transformed her to carrion and shrieking.
    Now Lord Foul laughed at her from an insurmountable distance.
You have become the daughter of my heart
. Laughed as he must have laughed at She Who Must Not Be Named. Soon Time would begin to crumble, and he would be free. Linden had brought this on herself. She had given it to the world as if it were the sum and consummation of her life. It would never stop. Across every inch of her flesh, it drove her mad. She could not bear it. If she had been given a knife, she would not have hesitated to flay the skin from her bones.
    Such desecration should have finished her. But it was endless. It could always get worse.
    And while Linden flailed in torrents, the bane shouldered Her way into the cavern.
    Her power was immense. No doubt She could have shaped Herself to slip through the passages of the Lost Deep. Yet She did not. Damage suited Her: She liked wreckage in Her wake. As She entered, the rolling bulk of Her fury made a ruin of the stone. With every shrug, Her advance flung rubble at the walls. Her many faces were etched in fire. Mute screams stretched their mouths. Torment gouged their eyes.
    Without knowing what she did, Linden stopped thrashing. The scale of the bane’s extremity and rage demanded her absolute attention. Suddenly worms and maggots were no longer sensations. They became insights.
    When She Who Must Not Be Named spoke, the impact of Her voice seemed to stop Linden’s heart. The ferocity of the sound changed the rain to steam and scalding.
    “Do you speak to me?” The roar crushed Linden’s hearing. “Do you speak to me of
save
?
Do you dare?
My pain cannot be redeemed. It can only feed and
grow
.
    “You are mine. I will relish you. I require only a moment to chew the marrow from the bones of the man who has betrayed you to me. Endure your suffering. It will be brief. Then I will consume you, and you will know the ecstasy of eternal woe and regret”—She gathered Herself to cry like a beast—“
and agony
!”
    Linden could not protest. The bane’s intent was just. Linden deserved centipedes and spiders. Horror was her true heritage: the legacy of her pitiful, self-pitying parents. By audacity and blind carelessness and insufficiency, she had awakened both the Worm of the World’s End and her own worst nightmares. She had brought this doom upon herself.
    Nevertheless it was intolerable. The bane would kill
Stave
, her friend when she had no other. The knowledge that he was about to die for her sins was more than she could bear.
    Days ago, the foundations of her life had begun to shift. Now they settled into new alignments. Like a woman rising from her own grave, she changed. In a rush, her whole reality was transformed. Faster than the febrile stutter of her heart, maggots and squirming and misery became a wail of wild magic.
    She had no power to equal the bane’s. She Who Must Not Be Named transcended everything