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

his head, dropped the band under his shirt; made himself appear defenseless.
    “I’ll need metal to fight.” Fear made him savage. “And I’ll have to hurt your High God. I’ll have to hurt him
bad
. I need to cut off the infection,” sever every portion possessed by
turiya
. “I don’t know another way.” He had no idea how to kill a Raver.
    “But I can’t do anything if he doesn’t
take me where I’m needed
!”
    The lurker was enormous. It could survive terrible damage.
    As one, the creatures gave a quivering shriek as if he had appalled them to the core of their soft bodies. Their fires sprang high; dropped low. Flames dripped between their fingers like corroded flesh or spilth.
    Covenant swore in frustration. He should have gotten here sooner. If he were not so easily wounded, so damn mortal—
    “Ur-Lord,” cautioned Branl. “Ready yourself. Again you are answered.”
    While Covenant strove to see, a dark shape arose from the waters.
    Visible only as a starker blackness in the dark, a tentacle rose and rose as if it were reaching for the heavens. It was thick as a cedar, tall as an elm. Its surface squirmed with desperation. In spite of Kevin’s Dirt, Covenant felt the lurker’s strength, its bitter hunger. Reaching high above him, its arm seemed to search with inhuman senses for the taste of its prey.
    Covenant had time to tell the tentacle or the Feroce, “Leave my companions here. They can’t help me. I’ll need them later.”
    Then the tentacle lashed down. Like a cracked whip, it snapped around him. Its fingers grasped every possible surface of his shirt, his jeans, his limbs. Coils clasped his arms hard to his sides. A heartbeat later, the tentacle sprang back; jerked him into the air with appalling ease.
    He heard no response from the
Haruchai
. Only the voice of the Feroce scaled, frail and frantic, into the dark.
    “Try to believe that you are the Pure One.”
    In a flicker as brief as a blink, he thought that he saw the Humbled take hold of Horrim Carabal’s acolytes. Then the lurker snatched him through the sky as though the monster intended to hurl him into the heart of Sarangrave Flat.
    Hellfire! He could not move his arms; could hardly breathe. Black trees and obscured streams rushed below him as if they were plunging into an abyss. If the lurker did not fling him to his death, it was going to squeeze out his life.
    Your alliance was a thing of the moment.
    The Feroce would have reacted differently if their High God had been mastered by
turiya
. The Humbled would have tried to ward Covenant. But he could not be sure that the lurker understood his intentions—or knew how effortlessly he might be crushed.
    He had no measure for direction or distance. The wetland seethed like a cataract below him. Night blinded every horizon. The roar of wind in his ears covered the stricken pound of his pulse. When he was thrown, he would soar for leagues before he hit and died.
    Without warning, the coils wrenched him downward. Before he could even try to fill his lungs, Horrim Carabal slammed him into a pool, buried him in deep water acrid with poisons. His eyes would have been ruined in their sockets if he had not clenched them shut.
    But the tentacle did not stop. It tore him through water and muck as easily as it had carried him above the marsh, as if he had no substance and did not need air.
    The monster did not mean him harm. It had good reason to be terrified of white gold and Loric’s
krill
. Good reason to fear wild magic. But it did not understand its own strength—or Covenant’s weakness. He was dying for air. The corrupt water stung him like a swarm of ants, biting and endless. Apart from suffocation and dread and pain, he felt only nascent fire, as if his mere presence sufficed to set the toxic waters ablaze.
    But he was well acquainted with pain. It was human and inevitable: he could ignore it. And dread was akin to fury.
You are the white gold
. When his fear became a form of rage, he could burn his way free.
    Suffocation was altogether worse. Drowning was worse. He could more readily have endured the excoriation within a
caesure
. Drowning was desperation. It led only to unthinking frenzy.
    He had to have air.
He had to have air
.
    Or he had to have peace: the silence of the last dark, voiceless and blissful: the surrender of every demand and desire.
    Air or peace: one or the other. He could not be given both.
    But he wanted air.
    He would never get it. He was already