The epilogue seems to be part love letter to the fans, part tidy bow for some story arcs, part bow to the audience, part rainbow message to the re-creation of the Land. The title provides SRD’s answer to Wildwood’s question about truth and beauty passing utterly. It’s pretty wild that these words ring so true here at the end considering that they were written before the author ever had any intention or conception for writing the Second or Last Chronicles. So with that in mind, let me dig into the background of the title of this epilogue (all quotes in this section are from LFB chapter 'Mithil Stonedown'):
After being translated to the Land for the first time, Covenant scraped up his hands and bruised his legs while climbing down from Kevin’s Watch with Lena. She collected some hurtloam for him, and it healed his wounds. Of course, he is incredulous at this fact, cannot believe it. He then gobbles a bunch of treasure berries, and becomes immediately drowsy. According to Lena,
He falls asleep and is later aroused by Lena singing the following song to him:The hurtloam does this, but I did not expect it. When the wounds are very deadly, hurtloam brings sleep to speed the healing. But cuts on the hands are not deadly. Do you have hurts that you did not show me?
Something there is in beauty
which grows in the soul of the beholder
like a flower:
fragile—
for many are the blights
which may waste
the beauty
or the beholder—
and imperishable—
for the beauty may die,
or the beholder may die,
or the world may die,
but the soul in which the flower grows
survives.
This is essentially a folk song written by a Stonedowner, more specifically a wedding song.
Covenant and Lena set off towards Mithil Stonedown, and he continues to have tingling sensations in his extremities, which are coupled with his noticing Lena’s body in ways he did not before. His potency is awakening; hurtloam is healing his leprosy. Wending along the Mithil to the Stonedown,He had an unexpected sense that this Land might offer him some spell with which he could conjure away his impotence, some rebirth to which he could cling even after he regained consciousness, after the Land and all its insane implications faded into the miasma of half-remembered dreams. Such hope did not require that the Land be real, physically actual and independent of his own unconscious, uncontrolled dream-weaving. No, leprosy was an incurable disease, and if he did not die from his accident, he would have to live with that fact. But a dream might heal other afflictions. It might.
Although he does not seem to be completely aware of it at this time, the seed of Covenant’s Unbelief is planted and sown in this first experience of his in the Land. The paradox is born for him right at the very beginning, yet so is the experience of restoration, restitution. And it is his reaction to this restoration, something impossible to a leper, which leads to his Unbelief. His Unbelief was always a form of restraint.Covenant became slowly more conscious of the reassuring solidity of the Land. It was not an intangible dreamscape; it was concrete, susceptible to ascertainment. This was an illusion, of course—a trick of his wracked and smitten mind. But it was curiously comforting. It seemed to promise that he was not walking into horror, chaos—that this Land was coherent, manageable, that when he had mastered its laws, its peculiar facts, he would be able to travel unscathed the path of his dream, retain his grip on his sanity.
I open this epilogue dissection with a look back at LFB because the very title of the epilogue begs us to reflect on it; Donaldson is inviting us to make a connection…
After the End
(All subsequent quotes are from TLD's epilogue)
So the world is destroyed; all life and time and law have been decimated and undone; and in the blink of an eye or the turn of a page, the Land is remade anew. Whoa, how did this happen? How did the three protagonists who were lifted by fire and rose to glory recreate creation? We do not know, Donaldson does not tell us, we are left to fill in that gap ourselves.
I know that I found the absence of any description of this process somewhat disappointing upon a first reading, but as time passed and it sank in, I came to understand a bit more, and I became more comfortable with this last dark being left for us to enlighten in our own imaginations. Many times in the Gradual Interview, SRD stated that he will not try to explain magic, or that he will only try to a certain extent (or something like that). I think the culmination of this whole story, this last dark, is his final example of this in the Chronicles.
The characters get to say a final hello and good-bye to us all—the ones that survived, at least. The ur-Mahrtiir remains, and he now has the perfected or transformed Demondim-spawn as helpers, a new band of Forestals. Stave becomes the Voice of the Masters, and he announces that they will become the new Lords of the Land. And with their collective memories that reach back in time for millennia, they’re pretty well suited for the task. Hell, they may be better suited for it than anyone else ever was. Jeremiah knows where Kevin’s Wards are—assuredly gained from moksha—and Stave is glad to accept the knowledge when their
And I love that Stave appoints Canrik to lead the first new Council of Lords. Stave says that Canrikneed for it is ripe.
is newly acquainted with uncertainty, and will gain much from an immersion in the necessary doubts of the Lords.
Very fascinating. It’s as if we’re being told that the formation of knowledge and lore requires doubt and uncertainty. I think I agree.
Branl’s decision I found very laudable. Instead of returning to Revelstone with his kinsmen, he chooses to return to Gravin Threndor to seek out the krill (first of the new Unfettered?). He expects to encounter the Cavewights in the process, and he hopes to be able to persuade them to no longer be violent and enemy-like. I bet he’ll succeed.
The Acolyte. This is confusing to me still. I get that the three new creators need time to recover, absorb and digest all that they’ve done and become. And I get that they may need guidance in the process. It even makes sense that an Insequent can be that very guide, so perhaps it’s just the name that throws me. An acolyte is an assistant, not necessarily a leader or teacher. If anyone can cast some light on this one, I’ll be grateful. The way this figure is described, she sounds like a conglomeration of several Insequent we’ve met in these Last Chronicles. Very mysterious…
And Infelice. My, how she and the Elohim’s tune has changed! She acknowledges and honors the deeds of Linden, Jeremiah and Covenant. She comforts Linden by saying that without her desecration the world could not have been remade. She now finds no fault in the beings from beyond Time. It seems that she finally understands the redemptive potential of inadequacy.
While Covenant’s choice for how to deal with Foul was foreseeable, I am not quite sure what to make of it. I sort of like his mundane explanation that despite/despair is necessary to make us stronger, to enable us to improve or to be/do better. I am also intensely interested in imagining how TC will continue to deal with keeping Foul contained. Is a dissolution possible? Will Covenant be forever going through an identity crisis? Will Foul find a way out? Will his love and hope…gone rancid transform back into love and hope? Is there yet to be redemption for the Creator’s curdled shadow? What are your thoughts?
Present from Origin
“I can feel my fingers. They seem to have nerves again, what’s left of them. And the soles of my feet—They used to be numb. Now I know I’m standing on grass. I can almost feel individual blades.
I’ve always thought you [Linden] were beautiful, but I had no idea you’re so beautiful.”
Wow. Here at the end Covenant’s leprosy seems to be healed or healing, and he’s cool with it, accepting of it. Done with restraint, indeed. And this restoration of his is linked to his noticing the beauty of a woman, just like in LFB, only this time it’s his wife whom he loves rather than Lena whom he lusts. He’s come a long way.
It is my contention that TC’s memory of his first experience with hurtloam and treasure berries back in LFB served as the lodestone, the guiding compass for how to remake the world. The title of this epilogue has led me to draw this particular conclusion. Perhaps I am wrong, but the author has allowed and invited us to fill in this gap, and the concept of restoration/restitution that was so central in these Last Chronicles indeed does connect back to Covenant’s first experience in the Land. I will be glad to hear what others think about this, though.
Writing this dissection has proved to be more difficult than I thought. I have many more thoughts about the potential meaning of the titular quote from LFB, but I failed to capture them when they arose in my mind… And I've made no mention here of the wonderful use of language that Donaldson gives us in this epilogue. So wonderful to be able to amble through Andelain one last time...
It seems that the author is saying that it is Covenant’s soul in which the flower of the Land grows, yet he’s also saying that the beauty of the story lies in our perception of it, in our souls, in our decision of its reality or unreality: Truth in the eye of the beholder, and all that.
I also hear a final comment on paradox in the title, and in the poem/song that it’s a quote from. The flower metaphor of fragility and imperishability is an apparent contradiction—a paradox—yet it’s the very stuff that allows and enables beauty to exist or creation to be. And if “the soul in which the flower grows survives,” even in the face of the death of the beauty, the beholder or the world, then it seems the author may be saying that existence is subjective and dependent upon…fill in the blank…