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

Worm? Do you know? Can your High God feel it?”
    The creatures replied with a thin wail, quickly cut off. Almost gibbering, they forced themselves to say, “It is near. How do you not know that it is near? Our High God asks what he must do. He asks with desperation. His alarm is terrible.”
    Near? Covenant muttered to himself. Hellfire!
    “I’m sorry,” he told the Feroce gruffly. “You’ll just have to wait. I won’t know what to say until I see it.” Almost at once, he went on, “And I won’t see anything until you get rid of those fires.” They blinded him to everything else; cast a pall of memories over his mind. He remembered the Illearth Stone too well. “If you can’t survive without them outside the Sarangrave, hide them somewhere. I won’t abandon you. I’ll tell you as soon as I have something.”
    The creatures quailed. They moaned like the wind. But they did not protest. One by one, they retreated among the stones. For a while, their emerald lingered on rims of granite and basalt. Then Covenant lost sight of them.
    “Branl?” he asked anxiously. “Anything?”
    “Perhaps,” replied the Humbled. “I am uncertain.”
    Cursing, Covenant surged to his feet. The wind seemed to blow darkness into his covert. Branl was little more than an outline against the rocks.
    If the Master’s acute senses were uncertain, Covenant would be effectively eyeless; but he had to look. Pressing himself against his companion, he stared through the eastward oriel until the strain of trying to see made his forehead throb as if he had bruised it. Still he found nothing.
    Or something.
    A hint of light at the boundary between sea and sky.
    “There.” He pointed. “Did you see it?”
    At first, he thought that it was heat-lightning: a storm brewing. Almost immediately, however, he realized that he was wrong. The light did not flicker and glare. Instead it appeared to float on the distant turmoil of the seas.
    Wind lashed at his eyes. It had become a gale.
    “It resembles fog.” The last of the Humbled sounded utterly dispassionate. “A luminous fog, lit from within. Storms which arise nowhere else clash within it.” After a moment, he remarked, “The fog and its storms shroud an immense power. It brings havoc in all sooth, such havoc as no
Haruchai
has ever witnessed. Yet the power does not harm the seas. It merely disturbs them.”
    Waves hammered harder at the base of the cliffs. In spite of his numbness, Covenant felt the ground under his boots trembling.
    Hell and blood. “That’s the Worm?”
    Coming from the east? Straight for the Great Swamp?
    “I deem that it is. And it is swift. Yet the fog—and indeed the storms—run some distance ahead of their source.” Branl turned to Covenant. “Ur-Lord, I must speak of this. Time remains to us. If you wish it, we may flee in safety. Wild magic will enable us to traverse many leagues ere this peril achieves landfall.”
    Covenant clenched his teeth until his jaws ached. “Who do you think you’re kidding? We can’t leave now. Not until we see what that thing does.”
    The eerie glow expanded on the horizon. Already it was distinct even to his marred vision. He felt its force in the wind on his face. Its teeth seemed to gnash at his cheeks. The luminescence did indeed resemble fog, vapor filled with lightning. But the lightning did not waver or strike: it
endured
, a convulsion of bolts without beginning and without end.
    And the fog did not flow toward the southwest. Rather it sent tendrils like arms ahead of the storms, questing over an area as wide as the delta. Soon, however, even the most distant streamers began curving inward, reaching for Lifeswallower.
    Reaching as if they had found the spoor of the Worm’s prey.
    Oh, bloody hell!
    Bands of fog drifted over the seas. They drew closer with every harsh thud of Covenant’s heart. Wild winds hurt his eyes, but he could not look away. Now he saw that the actinic glare within the brume was not truly constant. Instead of jumping and crackling, it swelled and receded incrementally, a slow seethe which belied the speed of its advance; a gradual rhythm like the undulating heave of a tremendous body. And every surge flung the vehemence of the waves harder against the cliffs. Collisions and crashes sounded like thunder; like the blare of steerhorns announcing ruin.
    “Ur-Lord,” Branl stated, “we must not delay. These forces threaten the headland. We cannot withstand them.”
    Damn
it! The wind