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

Despiser needed him to understand it. It was essential to Lord Foul’s deeper purpose. But Jeremiah’s epiphanies went further. On Gallows Howe, with Garroting Deep unfurled like a banner around him, he realized that forbidding was essential to other purposes as well, to desires which were not the Despiser’s.
    Forbidding was Earthpower, of course; but it was Earthpower transformed by trees and their Forestal into an entirely different form of magic.
    To
moksha
, Jeremiah said, I need more.
    If forbidding alone had been enough, the Forestals could have defeated Lord Foul themselves.
    Indeed.
Moksha
Jehannum’s approval was incandescent. Abhorrence is but one refinement. Other whetstones are needed to perfect the blade.
    While Jeremiah watched, helpless and unmoved, the Raver took him on a coruscating plunge through other memories, other expressions of recalled lore.
    His passage was a whirlwind, a giddy chiaroscuro, a torrent of glimpses and insights. He did not try to grasp them: he hardly looked at them. Instead he simply accepted them; allowed them to be imprinted on his nerves, written into his brain. Some were millennia old: a jeweled casket sunk deep into the mire of the Great Swamp, a tapestry sealed in a cavern lost among the snows of the Northron Climbs, a periapt as crowded with knowledge as a tome. Others were immeasurably ancient: the creation of Forestals from the substance of an
Elohim
, the complex theurgies which had fashioned the Colossus of the Fall, the invocation of Fire-Lions. He did not need to make sense of them because they were already his, ready for his submission and use.
    But among the swift confusion of those recollections, Jeremiah found one memory that filled
moksha
Jehannum with a particular delight. It was the Raver’s recall of that horrific, wonderful moment when
moksha
had taken possession of Linden.
    Perhaps her straits should have appalled Jeremiah; yet they did not. He was intimately familiar with the excruciation which the Raver had inflicted on her, the relish for her torment. He had survived such things himself. And he knew that she had somehow expelled
moksha
Jehannum for Covenant’s sake, or for the Land’s. She was Linden Avery.
Moksha
’s cruelty could not define her.
    However, some of her own memories lived among the Raver’s; and
those
wrung Jeremiah’s heart. They erased his calmness, dismissed his given relief as if it were nothing more than a mirage. For the first time, he learned what his mother had suffered when she, too, had been just a kid.
    Remembered by
moksha
, Jeremiah stood in the attic with her, watching her father bleed out of his cut wrists, and helpless to force the blood back into his veins. Already gashed and dying, that aggrieved man had locked her in with him so that she would not be able to go for help. In effect, he had compelled her to witness his surrender to self-pity: her father.
    She had been only eight.
    Mom. Jeremiah wanted to wail.
Mom
. But the Raver was not done.
    Crowing,
moksha
remembered Linden’s mother. At about Jeremiah’s present age, she had been at her mother’s bedside while her mother had prayed for death. According to
moksha
, the woman’s illness may not have been terminal. But Linden had heeded her mother’s pleading. Her mother had blamed her, Linden, for causing her husband’s death; for making her life unsupportable. And Linden had been left alone to provide care. Wipe away sweat. Mop up dribbling mucus. Tend bedpans. So when Linden had exhausted her own misery, she had—
    Jeremiah did not know how to bear it.
    —taken wads of tissues and forced them down her mother’s throat; forced more and more of them down until her mother would never blame anyone else again.
    The Raver reveled in those events.
Moksha
wanted Jeremiah to understand that his mother had always been a victim and a killer. The woman who had claimed to love him was as pitiful and weak as his natural mother. Linden’s parents had made her who she was. She would never be anything more. Because of her—
moksha
Jehannum insisted on this as if the truth were beyond question—Jeremiah had always belonged to Lord Foul. From the first, he had been raised to serve Despite by women who had earned their own victimization.
    The gift that Lord Foul offered now was more than mere peace, more than simple relief: it was transcendence. Jeremiah’s submission would be rewarded with a place in eternity, a form of godhood in which his wounds and