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

as rock. In Salva Gildenbourne, he had referred to
the necessary forbidding of evils
. Now he insisted, “If it is not forbidden, it will have Earthpower. If it is not opposed by the forgotten truths of stone and wood,
orcrest
and refusal, it will have life.
    “When the Worm of the World’s End drinks the Blood of the Earth, its puissance will consume the Arch of Time.”
    The forgotten truths? Linden wanted to ask. What truths? But Anele’s distress kept her silent.
    Then he lifted his head, looked directly at her with his blind eyes. As if he were speaking for someone else, he said precisely, “Everybody concentrates on stone, but that’s not the whole story. Wood is important, too.”
    Forgotten, she thought. Forbidding.
    It requires aid.
    Like an affirmation or a denial, reality veered again. In silence that battered her like the clamor of mighty bells, she was driven deeper, farther. Anele and stone vanished. Mount Thunder’s betrayed sorrow evaporated as though it had never existed.
    Linden feared the bitterness of killing her mother, the horror of watching her father’s suicide. Instead she felt the barren dirt of Gallows Howe under her feet, bereft by the knowledge of endless slaughter, and crowded with wrath; avid to repay the cost of so much death. She sensed recrimination and the long butchery of trees. Music had brought her here, the fraught melody of Caerroil Wildwood’s singing. Again she was not alone, but she could not see her companion. She saw only the Forestal.
    He stood beside the dead trunks of his gibbet with song streaming from his robe as if the fabric were woven from threnodies and dirges. The silver vivid in his eyes hinted at wild magic, although he had no white gold. His beard had the luster of age and vigor and unending travail.
    “While humans and monsters remain to murder trees,” he mused, angry and doleful, “there can be no hope for any Forestal. Each death lessens me.”
    Showing more restraint than Linden had any right to expect, he sang, “I have granted boons, and may do so again. But you have not requested that which you most require. Therefore I will exact no recompense. Rather I ask only that you accept the burden of a question for which you have no answer.”
    He enthralled and terrified her. Her own anger was fresh from her failure to rescue Jeremiah; from the carnage of stone under
Melenkurion
Skyweir. Her heart was as hard as the mountain’s, and as flawed.
    “How may life endure in the Land,” inquired Caerroil Wildwood, “if the Forestals fail and perish, as they must, and naught remains to ward its most vulnerable treasures? Must it transpire that beauty and truth shall pass utterly when we are gone?”
    “I don’t know.” What else could she say?
    Another voice, the voice of her companion, said, “He does not require that which the lady cannot possess. He asks only that she seek out knowledge, for its lack torments him. The fear that no answer exists multiplies his long sorrow.”
    And because she stood on Gallows Howe—and because her spirit burned for Thomas Covenant after her failure to redeem her son—and because Caerroil Wildwood could still wring her heart in spite of all that she had endured—she made a promise that she did not know how to keep.
    “I will.”
    Then the Forestal took the Staff of Law, black as fuligin after her battle—and she lay on her back on the hard ground with the night sky above her like the abyss that awaited all striving. A sensation of impact throbbed in her forehead, a shock too sudden to bring instant pain. The hurt would come later; soon. Her neck felt wrenched and torn. Dying stars filled her eyes, consumed one after another in slow sequence by the Worm’s unappeasable hunger.
    “Damn it, Stave!” Jeremiah yelped. He plunged to his knees beside her. “Did you have to hit her so hard?”
    Stave replied without inflection. “She fell under the glamour of the Feroce. I could not scry what might transpire. And her grip on the Staff was urgent.”
    Linden thought, You hit me?
    She had told him to do so.
    She could not look away from the ruin of the heavens; the inexorable depredations. Too many things had been made clear to her. The actions of the Ranyhyn were only the most immediate of her new insights—and the least cruel.
    “Mom!” Jeremiah urged, tugging at her shoulders. “Are you all right? Can you move? Stave is too strong.”
    Because he was her son, she dragged her gaze down from the sky. His