'Of My Deeper Purpose' picks up just as Covenant and Branl leave, just as Jeremiahglared blackness. His breath came in ragged chunks, as if the labor of his heart did not leave room for his lungs. He swallowed as if his mouth and throat were full of blood.
"I can’t. Don’t you understand? He’s the Despiser. He can take me whenever he wants. I won’t be able to do anything."
"Oh, stop," Covenant snapped. He might have yelled, We’re out of time! "There’s always something you can do. You have talents. You have the Staff. And you know what possession is like.’ He broke me. I hate being used. ‘If nothing else, you can just hide. You can hide as long as you want” (p. 474).
watched the silver of the krill fade like the last light in the world.
Once the light recedes, Jeremiah huddles in on himself in anger and grief. His self-doubt is causing him to wish he were back in the self-dug graves in his mind, hiding in his inner darkness, which just so happens to be matched by the setting of
Mount Thunder’s stark midnight.
He’s despairing, alone and in the dark, feeling insurmountably burdened.
The certainty of the Haruchai plays as a nice foil to Jeremiah’s doubt. He equates his failure with his identity, with who he is. He can’t figure out how to use the Staff, and he reacts by saying:"Stone and Sea!” the Ironhand panted. “Does the world end? Does time remain for the Timewarden to accomplish his purpose? Have we come so far at such cost, and arrived too late?”
“How should I know?” countered Jeremiah sourly. “I’ve never watched a world die before.” Then he rasped, “Of course we’re too late. That’s what all those Cavewights were for. Lord Foul sent them to slow us down.”
We were doomed, he added to himself, as soon as Mom and Covenant started thinking I could hold up my end.
But Canrik said like a reprimand, “He is the ur-Lord, the Unbeliever. Twice he has wrested life from the clutch of Corruption, for the Land if not for himself. We are Masters and have doubted much. Now we are done with uncertainty. While Branl remains able to speak to us, we will fear nothing.”
Like the Staff itself. Linden’s stony heart—her fury, fear and despair against Roger and the croyel at the Earthblood—caused the Staff to blacken. And Jeremiah is accepting that inheritance as his own, as who he is. But“But I can’t change what I am. It’s all just black.”
Jeremiah is naked, in a way, at his most open and vulnerable. And after a brief attack by stone monsters (which we’ve never seen before, nor which have ever even been referenced in The Chronicles, to my knowledge), which Grueburn, Coldspray, Canrik and Samil have to fight off, Jeremiah gets possessed by moksha Jehannum, the same Raver who possessed Linden in WGW. Buthis efforts with the wood had not changed it. Instead it had stripped away his denials, his defenses.
this act of possession was a gift, a benison, a benediction. It eased him like an act of grace.
All his fears and doubts from before have washed away in the release of choice, and thus Jeremiah
The Raver continues to tell Jeremiah what he should think:was free at last of anything that resembled humanity.
Self-will only accrues fear. It achieves only pain. The highest glory is reached solely by the abdication of self.
Right? Jeremiah is succumbing to the Raver’s slippery words.
Part of Jeremiah’s experience of being possessed seems to be true peace, ease and release of worry; the other part seems to be true loss of self. (Wait, are those two the same thing…?) He tells moksha that even if he’s Foul’s tool, he’s useless because he can’t do anything—same thing he’s been telling Linden and Covenant. Only in this case, moksha Jehannum, ancient wraith and servant of the Despiser, offers to give him the knowledge he needs to use the Staff in order to serve Foul. The Raver tells Jeremiah that
when it is made to serve your gifts—and when those gifts in turn serve the Despiser—it is potent to affect eternity, shaping order out of shapelessness.
Jeremiah likes this thought, and it seems to awaken a part of his self. He realizes that the Raver has not taken full control of him, that he can still have his own thoughts which the Raver cannot hear, that his freedom of choice is still intact.
Damnable Raver that he is, moksha does provide the service of reading Wildwood’s runes on the Staff.What Lord Foul wanted from him, he told himself secretly, was not something that could be compelled. Like wild magic, his talent could not be coerced beyond the small uses that the croyel had made of it. No matter how much he was whetted, he would not be able to exceed anything unless he agreed to it. At some point, the Despiser would need Jeremiah to serve him by choice.
The images moksha gives Jeremiah are of Gallows Howe, of the wrath and grief of the trees, of how the Forestal was able to channel that force and emotion into forbidding. (And I wonder if the Raver, any Raver, is somehow specially suited to reading the runes carved by their ancient enemy…)Bubbling with glee, moksha read the Staff. His magicks lit the abstruse symbols, not with fire or shining, but with a deeper black that scorned human notions of darkness. His disembodied finger traced the script as he interpreted it. Yet he did not explain it in words. Instead he gave Jeremiah images.
But Jeremiah—a secret Jeremiah that Jehannum is not privy to—also experiences the tree’s point of view of moksha’s hate; he gets a clear sense of what Linden has tasted at points along her path: that love is the foundation of the wrath of the trees, a wrath and grief born of an inability to restore that which was lost to them, the truth and beauty of the forest. That which appears evil… Even this smallest of glimpses of truth and beauty, in the last moments of existence, is seen through the memory of a Raver.
Jeremiah continues to both placate and lure moksha into giving away more gems of knowledge:Forbidding was Earthpower, of course; but it was Earthpower transformed by trees and their Forestal into an entirely different form of magic.
a jeweled casket sunk deep into the mire of the Great Swamp, a tapestry sealed in a cavern lost among the snows of the Northron Climbs, a periapt as crowded with knowledge as a tome. Others were immeasurably ancient: the creation of the Forestals from the substance of an Elohim, the complex theurgies which had fashioned the Colossus of the Fall, the invocation of Fire-Lions.
Jeremiah absorbed them all into the fiber of his being, not unlike his reception of Anele’s gift of Earthpower. He’s being imbued with the knowledge needed to use his talents, and to use the Staff; moksha is inadvertently writing runes onto Jeremiah as he translates the ones on the Staff.
By dividing himself within himself, Jeremiah enables his mind to both accept what the Raver is telling him as well as draw his own, private conclusions about what he’s being shown. He is able to appear to moksha as authentically believing the perspective the Raver presents, while at the same time he is able to receive the knowledge from the Raver’s memories and make his own choices with what to do with it. And so when Jeremiah realizes that this Raver has some of his mom’s, some of Linden’s memories from when he possessed her back in WGW, he learns of Linden’s experiences with her own parents: being forced to watch her father bleed to death in his act of suicide, stuffing tissues in her mother’s mouth until she expires.
The turning point hits when one of the stone creatures, who have been destroying the Giants and Haruchai this whole time (they killed Samil), comes close to squashing Jeremiah.
Wow. I know that I was cheering for Jerry in this moment when I first read this. The kid finally grabbed hold of himself! Yes! And he permanently disposes of a Raver without having to kill it! Unbelievable!Inside Jeremiah, moksha Jehannum snarled an obscenity. Distracted, he snatched Jeremiah’s halfhand off the Staff of Law, drew a swift symbol in the air.
The creature began another step. Halfway through the motion, it suddenly collapsed into dust; a pile of remains stirred only by the tremors rising through the floor.
During that brief instant, Jeremiah took his chance…
In the space of a single heartbeat, he trapped moksha Jehannum inside himself…
Moksha howled horror at the ceiling. He thrashed and writhed, raked frantic claws across the barriers which Jeremiah raised against him, sank sharp teeth into the flesh of Jeremiah’s resolve. Wild and despairing, the Raver fought.
Yet Jeremiah refused the fight. He did not need to measure his strength against his foe. Instead he relied on knowledge which moksha did not share. Retracing his own past, he dissociated the Raver; committed Lord Foul’s servant to the graveyard where he himself had once lain, hidden and lost. Almost effortlessly, he dropped the Raver into the waiting earth.
Jeremiah then returns to external reality and easily destroys the last stone beast with one blast from the Staff. He then blasts both the Giants with
And then Coldspray, Grueburn, Canrik and Jeremiah all realize that the staff is no longer black. Even the Master shows surprise on his face.violent healing, a ferocity of repair.
Rid the Staff of Law of its lamentable blackness: check.
Thus ends the chapter. Thus culminates Jeremiah’s story arc; it’s the fulfillment of his inheritance. He is whole. What was his weakness (being possessed, hiding in graves within his own mind, dissociating) became his strength when applied in a specific way at a specific moment. Hope in contradiction.The Staff felt like recognition in his hands. It sent out broad swaths of flame as kindly and soothing as sunshine. Its shaft shone with the cleanliness of healthy heartwood. Along its surface, Caerroil Wildwood’s runes remained, distinct as promises, but their meaning was no longer obscure. They were an offering and an appeal: they enabled and prayed.
To Jeremiah Chosen-son, the descendant of Sunder and Hollian in spirit if not in body, the Forestal’s script pleaded for restoration.
This chapter also sort of ties up the character thread of the Ravers. Turiya was killed earlier by Branl and Clyme, samadhi was rent back in WGW (and perhaps taken care of once and for all by the Fire-Lions??). And now moksha is locked away, seemingly forever.
Rid the world of the Ravers: check.
And the last sentence of the chapter leads me to think that this final transformation of Jerry’s—perhaps only possible with the catalyst of moksha’s knowledge granted by direct infusion—is the completion of Anele’s story arc as well. Last hope of the Land, indeed. Perhaps whatever overwritten or residual part of Anele’s spirit that may have come across into Jeremiah back in AATE was, in this chapter, unlocked and necessary in order to return the Staff to cleanliness.
And retracing Anele’s birthright, the connection back to Caer Caveral is made. Only his death enabled Anele’s life; that, and the breaking of the Law of Life. Maybe Jeremiah has now enabled Law to be remade, rendered it remakable; or maybe he’s just enabled or empowered himself to remake it… So I might also say that this chapter brings Caer Caveral’s sacrifice full circle. And if that is permissible, then I might also proffer that this Staff of Law, made from the wild magically melded Findail and Vain, also finds its culmination in this chapter.
Or perhaps Jeremiah has remade the staff, not exactly “shaping order out of shapelessness,” but more re-ordering components or redistributing/redirecting the flow of essences of the Staff into a more integrated whole, a more direct flow, one attuned with its wielder. It’s as if Jeremiah completed the Staff when making it clean again, not unlike Covenant completing his resurrection when sealing the fissures in his mind. Son correcting/completing/perfecting(??) the instrument of Law his mom made with wild magic just like Covenant finalizing what Linden accomplished with both Law and wild magic together.
Or maybe successfully dissociating the last Raver from the world enabled the inherent Earthpower of the Staff to cleanse itself, allowed its in-built structural integrity to reassert itself, invited some wonder to be wrought for its redemption.
Lots of speculation in there, and for me, the many layers of things that fold over onto one another in this chapter sort of lure the mind in the direction of pondering. The chapter itself is a layer upon a layer, an overlap of time with the other two climaxes happening in the Lost Deep and the Heart of Thunder.
Sentences and Vocabulary
While this can surely be said about the entire Chronicles, I found that there were some powerful sentences in this chapter.
The whole world did not contain enough power to prevent its own death.
Covenant and Linden might as well have asked Jeremiah to remake the world.
Towering plumes of dust and ruin cast a pall across the Land’s last dusk.
I will trust that Linden Giantfriend and Covenant Timewarden will exceed every expectation, as they have done from the first.
He was beginning to understand that there was more than one path to godhood.
Descriptions of Melenkurion Skyweir crumbling:
In the distance, the implied roar and clatter as Melenkurion Skyweir collapsed shook the world.
‘Actinic’ is used twice on one page (p. 496), once to describe the eerie blue light that is not discernible by health sense, and once to describe the eyes of the stone beasts. The word means anything that has to do with the chemical changes brought on by radiation, especially ultraviolet light, and I can’t quite grasp why this word works in this context…Far to the southwest, time was beginning to twist and flow. Mountains which had once leaned against Melenkurion Skyweir slumped as if they were melting. Confusion distorted the foothills. Trees which had died thousands of years ago in Garroting Deep flashed into existence and blurred away.