Wow, lurch! Great dissection. And wayfried, excellent points as well. This is gonna be fun.
What I noticed on this read through was the way SRD used brief, one to two sentence paragraphs interspered within the large ones. The brief ones seem to be almost used as punctuation; a way to drive home a major point. And keeping the sentence brief seems to give it more force.
Consider: Initally we get a description of Stave and Liand, comlpete with reminders of what they have already suffered. But the next paragraph
At that moment, however, neither Liand nor Stave impinged on Linden's awareness. They were not real to her.
shows how they rank in Linden's eyes at the moment. And then the description of her other companions, followed by:
But none of her compainions existed for her.
Then the scene setting - Revelstone, the Demondin, the six riders, but again (in case we missed it
)
Six riders. But four of them were Masters; and for Linden, they also did not exist. She saw only the others.
Driving home Linden's focus with short, quick phrases.
And later:
Thomas Covenant was alive: the only man she had ever loved.
Her son was free. Somehow he had eluded Lord Foul's grasp.
It's
almost as though we could get the basic gist of the chapter reading only these brief paragraphs.
"Already her arms ached to hold them"
"They were her friends, but she hardly noticed them"
"Jeremiah and Covenant were not being hunted: they were being
herded"
"
Just be wary of me. Remember that I'm dead."
"In the absence of the Staff's flame, she knew only blackness and consternation."
"Unconsious that she was moving again, she hurried toward them, chasing the limits of the ambiguous illumination."
(Love that line, BTW)
"Only the eagerness which enlivened the muddy color of his (Jeremiah's) eyes violated Linden's knoweldge of him."
She's been waiting 10 years to see and an emotional response from Jeremiah, and the eagrness
violates him? Interesting word choice.....
"Between one heartbeat and the next, she seemed to find herself in the presence, not of loved ones, but of her nightmares."
"As if she were turning her back (on Covenant), she shifted so that she faced only her son."
"If Covenant could do all of this, why had he told her to
find him?"
And these are the full paragraphs. Just reading these you get the feel for Linden's focus, her longing, and her growing confusion and sense that, despite the fullfilment of her desire to have TC and J returned, that something is
wrong. Very nicely done.