The Last Dark: The climax of the entire Thomas Covenant Chronicles (Last Chronicles of Thomas Cove)
followed the Forestal’s symbols into the recesses of
moksha
Jehannum’s memories.
Everything that Jeremiah beheld,
moksha
viewed with hate, with savagery and revulsion. The dirt under his feet had drunk the deaths of Ravers. Their assumed bodies had dangled from the gibbet of the Howe while their spirits had shrieked in agony. Anywhere else in the Land, anywhere at all,
moksha
or
samadhi
or
turiya
could have simply slipped away when their flesh was taken, sparing themselves the horror of being slain. But in Caerroil Wildwood’s demesne, they had been denied that luxury. The Forestal had
forbidden
them. They could not escape.
The recollection made
moksha
Jehannum froth with fury and frustration. Nonetheless what the Raver sought was here, in the innate lore of forbidding; in Caerroil Wildwood’s ability to draw power or sentience or resolve or rage from every leaf and branch, every twig and trunk and root, throughout his loathed realm—and then to express that force in ways which
moksha
and his brothers could not withstand.
For the Raver, Gallows Howe summed up everything that he abhorred about forests. But his hatred was more than that. It was wide as well as deep. It included every tree of every variety everywhere: young and old, graceful and gnarled, upright and outstretched. Alone they were each as vulnerable as kindling. Together they were as mighty as mountains. Therefore
moksha
hated them with a vehemence that trembled in every particle of his being. They were everything that he was not: stately, grand, generous, welcoming, austere, fecund. Their existence justified every stretch of ground where they flourished—and the Raver hungered for their extinction.
Jeremiah saw all of this as
moksha
Jehannum saw it. He felt the Raver’s fulminating outrage so keenly that he appeared to share it. And he knew that
moksha
wished him to share it. But he also saw the Howe and the Deep with his hidden eyes. He knew the wrath and grief of the innumerable trees. He understood how those passions formed the essence of the Forestal’s power. More, he recognized that the forest’s vast appetite for bloodshed was not inherent. It was a response to a terrible crime.
The force which lay behind it was not rage, but rather a bereft adoration for the green and living world in all of its fragile guises. The substance and sorrow of everything that Caerroil Wildwood had been and done was his love.
And Garroting Deep was an emblem of the Land.
Moksha
’s hatred of trees was only one manifestation of a more encompassing evil: the fury and despair that despised or feared every aspect of the Land’s rich beauty.
This, too, did not trouble Jeremiah. He felt no indignation, no desire to protest. Instead he considered it among his private selves. He resisted nothing, and so nothing was taken from him. Passive as a victim, he kept his thoughts to himself, as he had done for most of his life.
Frostheart Grueburn still circled on unsteady legs, flailing with her blunted longsword. Rime Coldspray hacked and hacked at her foe until her glaive was shattered to the hilt. Canrik twisted between the stone-thing’s legs, trying to trip or topple the monster. But that tactic failed him. The creature was too strong, too heavy.
Still the
Haruchai
struggled. And he had resources of stamina which exceeded even the Swordmainnir: he could still think. When he realized that he was too weak to bring down the monster, he slipped away. Snatching up a long sliver of the Ironhand’s sword, he sprang again onto the creature’s back. His ragged dirk he pounded into one of its eyes.
The force of his blow sliced open his hand. Blood spurted between his fingers. But the sliver penetrated. Actinic blue blazed for an instant. Then the eye went dark.
The stone-thing had no voice. It could not scream. Nevertheless the reflexive slap of its hands at its face was as wounded as a shriek. One hand swept the shard from its eye. The other caught Canrik’s wrist. A fierce swing flung him away.
Entirely by chance, the monster threw him into the tunnel toward Kiril Threndor. He vanished from the cave.
Jeremiah did not see what became of him. He did not know how the Giants stayed on their feet. Yet this sight also did not distress him. He watched his friends impassively, as if he had already succumbed.
He understood forbidding now: the how of it, the why, the necessary power. He had absorbed it without the hindrances of language because
moksha
and the
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