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

accept your consolation, deeming it well-meant.”
    In response, the chant of the creatures became a shout. Green that shed too little light flared and danced on all sides. The arms of the lurker let go.
    When Covenant fell into the mud, his whole world became spangles of gold like the rising of little suns.

    ater Branl drew him out of the hurtloam. Tentacles lifted Covenant and the Master again; carried them away. At the eastern edge of the Sarangrave, the lurker lowered them onto a swath of grass on a hillside unspoiled by ancient wars or poisons. Then the arms withdrew, leaving only a few of the Feroce to watch and wait.
    But Covenant knew none of this. He was deeply asleep, resting as though he had received an act of grace.

    hen he awoke, he came from the depths of dreams which he did not know how to interpret. He had sojourned among the Dead: they had given him obscure counsel. But they had stood, not in Andelain, but on the friable span of the Hazard, speaking of doom while below them raved the many maws of She Who Must Not Be Named, as ruinous as the Worm. Behind them, Branl had slain Clyme again and again; but the Dead had paid no heed. With infinite relish, the bane had devoured Elena and Linden and the future of the Forestals, making them participants in an eternal scream.
    In dreams, time blurred and ran, as chaotic and rife with death as the mingled perils of the Sarangrave.
    Forbidding, the Dead had urged. Forgotten truths.
    The Chosen’s son.
    Kastenessen.
    A-Jeroth of the Seven Hells, who desires all things unmade.
    Repeatedly Branl hacked at Clyme and
turiya
until only gobbets and blood remained.
    Baffled and thwarted, Thomas Covenant opened his eyes to the grey murk of dawn in a world where the sun did not rise.
    But his own condition seemed to repudiate Branl’s ferocity and Clyme’s death. He had slept deeply and long. God, he had
slept
. On this open grass, he had slept the sleep of renewed health, fathomless as the growing gaps between the stars. It was an anodyne that he had not expected, as salvific as hurtloam, and as necessary.
    No doubt he had slept too long. Every hour counted against him. But he could not regret losing the night.
    When he opened his eyes and looked at the sky, he saw the stars clearly. Those that remained were as bright as gems of Time, and as disconsolate as condemned children. One after another, they went on dying.
    Their slow plight grieved him. Yet it was countered by the sheer freshness of his physical sensations. Every burn and blister had been replaced by a tingling that resembled eagerness. His heart beat with a vigor which he did not recognize, as though it had been unshackled after a lifetime of imprisonment. His fingers flexed as if they had never known excruciation. Potential smiles twitched in the muscles of his face. And his feet—By hell! He could feel his toes, actually
feel his toes
. They told him that his socks and boots were still sodden.
    Hurtloam was a miracle: there was no other word for it.
    And like his body, his health-sense had become stronger. It assured him that his new life would be temporary. Kevin’s Dirt shrouded the region, wreaking its incremental havoc; working against his restoration. Nevertheless he was grateful for any reprieve. The strange alchemy of hurtloam made even Clyme’s death seem less bitter. At least for a little while, the future did not look as bleak as this day, the second without true sunlight. When numbness returned to his fingers and toes—when his sight began to fail again—he would be able to bear it.
    Propping his elbows on the thick grass of his bed, he raised his head and shoulders to gauge his circumstances.
    He lay on a gradual slope that he did not remember, cushioned by turf like luxuriance. Therefore he was somewhere north of Lord Foul’s many battlefields; somewhere in the long wedge of hale ground between Sarangrave Flat and the Sunbirth Sea. The lurker must have carried him here.
    Shaking his head in surprise at such consideration, he regarded his companion standing like a sentinel a score of paces past his feet. Branl appeared to be keeping watch on the rank mass of the wetland. Or he may have been—
    Beyond the
Haruchai
, Covenant finally noticed a small cluster of emerald fires burning in the hands of four, no, five Feroce. They waited a few steps outside the border of their native waters. Branl may have been guarding Covenant against them; refusing them in some fashion.
    Apparently their