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

mortal. Nevertheless Linden was Thomas Covenant’s wife. He had wed her in love and joy. In passion and courage, he had made of her a rightful white gold wielder. She was not helpless.
    Swift as her pulse in her veins, she spun silver puissance around her treasured friend, caught him in a fist of bright flame: a fist or a circle. She had no
krill
to enable a translation, but she had other resources. She had the unthinking reflexes which had allowed her to step outside the sequences of time during the collapse of Kevin’s Watch. She had the whetted senses with which she had created
caesures
without stumbling into Joan’s madness. And she was not hampered by her husband’s necessary reluctance.
    While the bane surged forward, Linden grasped Stave and
threw
him. Away from this moment. Away from this place, this stone, this fate. Trusting his instincts—his
clarity of intent
—to choose his destination, she spared him the cost of her choices.
    Perhaps he would forgive her.
    When he was gone, she wrapped herself in wild argent a heartbeat before the bane pounced on her, shrieking.
    The ur-viles and Waynhim did not try to help her now. Shrouded in rain, they stood apart like witnesses: creatures condemned to watch the extinction of their obscure hopes.
    The bane’s rage took Linden, snatched her into incandescence and infernal torment. But the bane did not
have
her. Vermin and pestilence did not have her. She was cloaked in her own fire, cocooned heart and soul. Within the bane’s appalling body, she was not devoured. Instead she left the sensations of horror and eaten death behind as if they had become irrelevant.
    According to Kasreyn of the Gyre, white gold was an imperfect tool able to fashion perfection in a flawed world. But she did not seek perfection. She wanted only to preserve herself until she could at least try to keep her promise.
    She thought of herself as an embolism, a tiny clot or bubble in the flagrant bloodstream of She Who Must Not Be Named. Untouched because she was trivial. Wild magic warded her against time, against mortality. She controlled nothing. She could not harm the bane. But she could remain herself. She could think and strive. The vast being roared in frustration and bafflement, thwarted hunger; but Linden ignored Her.
    Linden Avery had chosen this fate. She knew why she had done so. She knew that she was lost. She would die as soon as her resolve and her fire failed. Nevertheless she did not falter. While she could, she pursued salvation.
    Through the tremendous roil of wracked souls, the seething turmoil of the bane’s victims, Linden searched for Elena.
    Elena Lena-daughter, child of rape, prey of Despite. Seeking to oppose Lord Foul, she had broken the Law of Death to raise Kevin Landwaster’s spectre—and by that crime, she had become the Despiser’s servant. When Linden had seen her among the Dead in Andelain, Elena had still borne the galls and wounds of her self-Desecration. Yet Linden had given her no pity, no kindness. Of Elena’s later sacrifice to the bane, Linden knew only what she had been told. But she remembered too well what she herself had done to the first Law-Breaker. Now she considered it the least forgivable of her sins.
    As if she had the right to judge—
she
, who had set the world’s last crisis in motion—she had denied to Elena the understanding and consolation which Berek and Damelon and Loric had given Kevin. Instead of mercy, she had offered Elena only demands: the selfish expostulations of her own guilt.
    Stop feeling sorry for yourself. It doesn’t accomplish anything.
    That memory still made Linden cringe. It had brought her here. Because of it—and because the implications of carrion required this—she had forsaken her husband and her son and the imminent destruction of the Earth.
    Throughout the bane’s clamoring chaos, she drifted, searching for Covenant’s daughter.
    Scores of faces wailed in front of her and fled. Hundreds. Thousands. She believed that she knew how to save them all. Or perhaps she only hoped. But she had to start with Elena, who had been four times betrayed: by the circumstances of her birth, by her own actions in the cave of the EarthBlood, by Linden, and by being cast into the inferno of the bane’s mad agony.
    Elena was here. Finding her was only a matter of time—and Linden was immune to time while her strength lasted.
    When the aghast ravage of Elena’s face appeared, Linden clutched it with silver before the