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

other than vision or hearing or touch, she recognized the Demondim-spawn. They stood like kings in the wreckage of their eldritch legacy. Every visage among them now shone like the loremaster’s. The proportions of their bodies were changing, as if they were becoming human; sharing the loremaster’s transfigured spirit. They seemed taller.
    In unison, they chanted at the bane: a paean or invocation as alien as their guttural speech, and as incomprehensible. With every rise and fall, every beat, their hymn appeared to accrue peril, as if they were hazarding more than their own destruction; as if the accumulation of their words threatened the pediments of reality. And yet their eagerness was plain on their eyeless faces. Somehow they had arrived at a crisis of extermination or apotheosis toward which they had striven for millennia.
    They may have been extolling the bane—or forbidding Her.
    Her response was a cry that sent spasms through the gutrock for leagues in all directions:
    “I AM MYSELF!”
    When Linden’s heart beat again, she was no longer inside the bane. Instead she had the sensation that she was being carried; cradled with the tenderness of a lover. Powers that surpassed understanding protected her from the ruination of the Lost Deep.
    She was given a moment to watch the bane release souls into the waiting arms and mouths and bodies of the ur-viles and the Waynhim: a torrent of long anguish so suddenly relieved that she could not name what became of it. Then the bane began to rise like music, intangible as mist, and potent as divinity, through Mount Thunder’s stubborn foundations; and Linden was lifted with Her, passing among the mountain’s complex rocks and cavities as if she were as transient as a wraith.

11.
    Of My Deeper Purpose

    For a moment that felt like a protracted sob, Jeremiah watched Covenant and Branl recede along the passage toward Kiril Threndor; watched the silver of the
krill
fade like the last light in the world. Then he folded back down to the floor. Sitting with the Staff of Law gripped across his thighs and images of the Worm chewing at the edges of his mind, he stared into absolute blackness and tried to believe that he was not out of time. That the subtle trembling of the stone did not announce the collapse of the Arch. That Covenant would come back to him, since Linden had said that she would not. That he would be spared.
    His mother had not even bothered to explain where she was going; or why.
    He was angry; too angry to speak or grieve. Linden and Covenant had left him with an impossible burden, as if he were somehow responsible for saving the Earth. As if he were not still the same boy who had been too small to rescue his sisters from Lord Foul’s bonfire.
    On some level, he knew that he was also angry at himself. Angry because he hated his own childishness. Because he felt useless and stupid. Because he had not tried to get an explanation from Linden, or to change her mind, or to say goodbye. Angry because Covenant expected too much from him. But that anger belonged to some other Jeremiah—to a piece of who he had become when Kastenessen had broken him—not to the boy who had been left by his mother and his first friend.
    Sure, he understood Covenant’s reasons for walking away.
I don’t want you that close to Lord Foul until I can distract him.
The words sounded like they made sense.
But I do want you to come. I need your help to keep him busy.
That was simple enough.
    But it was not simple at all. Covenant had also said,
You aren’t strong enough?
Neither am I
.
    And
Then let him be too strong. You don’t need to beat
him
. And
Just do
something
he doesn’t expect.
    So what was
that
supposed to mean?
    And what would it accomplish? Nothing that Jeremiah or Linden or Covenant himself ever did would stop the Worm. It was already drinking EarthBlood: Jeremiah could feel or see or hear it. The whole world did not contain enough power to prevent its own death.
    What good would it do to make Lord Foul
miss his chance
?
    As guerdon for his puerile valor—
    Jeremiah was angry, all right. Of course he was angry.
    In some ways, sitting there in Mount Thunder’s stark midnight hurt more than being possessed by the
croyel
. That bitter creature had made him truly helpless, as unable as a corpse to affect how he was used or what he became. But he was not helpless
now
: not literally. He had the Staff of Law and his own Earthpower. He could kill Cavewights. Eventually he