Stephen Donaldson: The Power That Preserves

For a long moment that almost broke his will, there was no sound in the thronehall. Lord Foul blazed contempt at his captor; the Lords stood aghast, uncomprehending; Foamfollower hung in his chains as if the burden were too great for him to bear.

“Help me!” Covenant cried.

Then slowly his plea made itself felt. Some prophecy in his words touched the hearts that heard him. With a terrible effort, Saltheart Foamfollower, the last of the Giants, began to laugh.

It was a gruesome sound at first; writhing in his fetters, Foamfollower spat out the laugh as if it were a curse. On that level, the Lords were able to share it. In low voices, they aimed bursts of contemptuous scorn, jeering hate, at the beaten Despiser. But as Foamfollower fought to laugh, his muscles loosened. The constriction of his throat and chest relaxed, allowing a pure wind of humor to blow the ashes of rage and pain from his lungs. Soon something like joy, something like real mirth, appeared in his voice.

The Lords responded. As it grew haler, Foamfollower’s laugh became infectious; it drew the grim specters with it. They began to unclench their hate. Clean humor ran through them, gathering momentum as it passed. Foamfollower gained joy from them, and they began to taste his joy. In moments, all their contempt or scorn had fallen away. They were no longer laughing to express their outrage at Lord Foul; they were not laughing at him at all. To their own surprise, they were laughing for the pure joy of laughter, for the sheer satisfaction and emotional ebullience of mirth.

Lord Foul cringed at the sound. He strove to sustain his defiance, but could not. With a cry of mingled pain and fury, he covered his face and began to change. The years melted off his frame. His hair darkened, beard grew stiffer; with astonishing speed, he was becoming younger. And at the same time he lost solidity, stature. His body shrank and faded with every undone age. Soon he was a youth again, barely visible.

Still the change did not stop. From a youth he became a child, growing steadily younger as he vanished. For an instant, he was a loud infant, squalling in his ancient frustration. Then he disappeared altogether.

As they laughed, the Lords also faded. With the Despiser vanquished, they went back to their natural graves-ghosts who had at last gained something other than torment from the breaking of the Law of Death. Covenant and Foamfollower were left alone.

Covenant was weeping out of control now. The exhaustion of his ordeal had caught up with him. He felt too frail to lift his head, too weary to live any longer. Yet he had one more thing to do. He had promised that the Land would be safe. Now he had to ensure its safety.

“Foamfollower?” he wept. “My friend?” With his voice, he begged the Giant to understand him; he lacked the strength to articulate what he had to do.

“Do not fear for me,” Foamfollower replied. He sounded strangely proud, as if Covenant had honored him in some rare way. “Thomas Covenant, ur-Lord and Unbeliever, brave white gold wielder-I desire no other end. Do whatever you must, my friend. I am at Peace. I have beheld a marvelous story.”

Covenant nodded in the blindness of his tears. Foamfollower could make his own decisions. With the flick of an idea, he broke the Giant’s chains, so that Foamfollower could at least attempt to escape if he chose. Then all Covenant’s awareness of his friend became ashes.

As he shambled numbly across the floor, he tried to tell himself that he had found his answer. The answer to death was to make use of it rather than fall victim to it-master it by making it serve his goals, beliefs. This was not a good answer. But it was the only answer he had.

Following the nerves of his face, he reached toward the Illearth Stone as if it were the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of life and death.

As soon as he touched it, his ring’s waning might reawoke. Immense red-green fire pillared upward, towered out of the Stone and his ring like a pinnacle tall enough to pierce the heavens. As he felt its power tearing through the battered hull or conduit of his being, he knew that he had found his fire, the fire for which he was apt like autumn leaves or a bad manuscript. In the heart of the whirling gale, the pillar of force, he knelt beside the Stone and put his arms around it like a man embracing immolation. New blood from his poisoned lip ran down his chin, dripped into the green and was vaporized.

With each moment, the conjunction of the two powers produced more and more might. Like a lifeless and indomitable heart of fury, the Illearth Stone pulsed in Covenant’s arms, laboring in mindless, automatic reflex to destroy him rather than be destroyed. And he hugged it to his breast like a chosen fate. He could not slay the Corruption, but he could at least try to break this corruptive tool; without it, any surviving remnant of the Despiser would have to work ages longer to regain his lost power. Covenant embraced the Stone, gave himself to its fire, and strove with the last tatters of his will to tear it asunder.

The green-white, white-green holocaust grew until it filled the thronehall, grew until it hurricaned up through the stone out of the bowels of Ridjeck Thome. Like fighters locked mortally at each other’s throats, emerald and argent galled and blasted, gyring upward at velocities which no undefended granite could withstand. In long pain, the roots of the promontory trembled. Walls bent; great chunks of ceiling fell; weaker stones melted and ran like water.

Then a convulsion shook the Creche. Gaping cracks shot through the floors, sped up the walls, as if they were headlong in mad flight. The promontory itself began to quiver and groan. Muffled detonations sent great clouds of debris up through the cracks and crevices. Hotash Slay danced in rapid spouts. The towers leaned like willows in a bereaving wind.

With a blast that jolted the Sea, the whole center of the promontory exploded into the air. In a rain of boulders, Creche fragments as large as homes, villages, the wedge split open from tip to base. Accompanied by cataclysmic thunder, the rent halves toppled in ponderous, monumental agony away from each other into the Sea.

At once, ocean crashed into the gap from the east, and lava poured into it from the west. Their impact obscured in steam and fiery sibilation the seething caldron of Ridjeck Thome’s collapse, the sky-shaking fury of sea and stone and fire-obscured everything except the power which blazed from the core of the destruction.

It was green-white, savage wild-mounting hugely toward its apocalypse.

But the white dominated and prevailed.

IN that way, Thomas Covenant kept his promise.

For a long time afterward, he lay in a comfortable grave of oblivion; buried in utter exhaustion, he floated through darkness-the disengaged no-man’s-land between life and death. He felt that he was effectively dead, insensate as death. But his heart went on beating as if it lacked the wit or wisdom to stop when it had no more reason to go on. Raggedly, frailly, it kept up his life.

And deep within him-in a place hidden somewhere, defended, inside the hard bone casque of his skull-he retained an awareness of himself. That essential thing had not yet failed him, though it seemed to be soaking slowly away into the warm soft earth of his grave.

He wanted rest; he had earned rest. But the release which had brought him to his present dim peace had been too expensive. He could not approve.

Foamfollower is dead, he murmured silently.

There was no escape from guilt. No answer covered everything. For as long as he managed to live, he would never be clean.

He did not think that he could manage to live very long.

Yet something obdurate argued with him. That wasn’t your fault, it said. You couldn’t make his decisions for him. Beyond a certain point, this responsibility of yours is only a more complex form of suicide.