There are two passages in this chapter that I think are thematically central to the entire Second Chronicles story, perhaps central to the entire series of Chronicles books, where there is no external action but deep internal struggle is happening.
"Take me to Foul," he said. He had lost his mind. This was not despair; it was too fierce for despair. It was madness. The Banefire had cost him his sanity. "I'll give him the ring."
His gaze lanced straight into Linden. If she had owned a voice, she would have cried out.
He was smiling like a sacrifice.
Then she found that she did not have to watch him. The Raver could not require consciousness of her. Its memories told her that most of its victims had simply fled into mindlessness. The moral paralysis which had made her so accessible to moksha Jehannum would protect her now, not from use but from awareness. All she had to do was let go her final hold upon her identity. Then she would be spared from witnessing the outcome of Covenant's surrender.
With glee and hunger, the Raver urged her to let go. Her consciousness fed it, pleased it, sharpened its enjoyment of her violation. But if she lapsed, it would not need exertion to master her. And she would be safe at last--as safe as she had once been in the hospital during the blank weeks after her father's suicide--relieved from excruciation, inured to pain--as safe as death.
There were no other choices left for her to make.
She refused it. With the only passion and strength that remained to her, she refused it.
But extremity and striving made those three moments as long as agony. During them, Linden Avery pitted her ultimate will against her possessor.
She forgave Covenant. He was too poignant and dear to be blamed. He had given everything that her heart could ask of him.
But she did not submit.
Gibbon had said, The principal doom of the Land is upon your shoulders. Because no one else had this chance to come between Covenant and his defeat. You are being forged as iron is forged to achieve the ruin of the Earth. Forged to fail here. Because you can see.
Now she meant to determine what kind of metal had been made of her.
Gibbon-Raver had also told her she was evil. Perhaps that was true. But evil itself was a form of power.
And she had become intimately familiar with her possessor. From the furthest roots of its past, she felt springing its contempt for all things that had flesh and could be mastered--a contempt born of fear. Fear of any form of life able to refuse it. The Forests. Giants. The Haruchai. It was unquenchably hungry for immortal control, for the safety of sovereignty. All refusals terrified it. The logic of its failures led inexorably to death. If it could be refused, then it could also be slain.
She had no way to understand the lost communal mind of the Forests. But Giants and Haruchai were another question. Though moksha Jehannum ripped and shrieked at her, she picked up the strands of what she knew and wove them to her purpose.
The Giants and Haruchai had always been able to refuse. Perhaps because they had not suffered the Land's long history of Ravers, they had not learned to doubt their autonomy. Or perhaps because they used little or no outward expressions of power, they comprehended more fully that true choice was internal. But whatever the explanation, they were proof against possession where the people of the Land were not. They believed in their capacity to make choices which mattered.
That belief was all she needed.
Moksha was frantic now, savage and brutal. It assailed every part of her that was able to feel pain. It desecrated her as if she were Andelain. It made every horrifying memory of her life incandescent before her: Nassic's murder and Gibbon's touch; the lurker of the Sarangrave; Kasreyn's malign cunning; Covenant bleeding irretrievably to death in the woods behind Haven Farm. It poured acid into every wound which futility had ever inflicted upon her.
And it argued with her. She could not choose: she had already made the only choice that signified. When she had accepted the legacy of her father and stuffed it in handsful of tissue down her mother's throat, she had declared her crucial allegiance, her definitive passion--a passion in no way different than her possessor's. Despite had made her what she was, a lost woman as ravaged as the Land, and the Sunbane dawning in her now would never set.
But the sheer intensity of her hurt made her lucid. She saw the Raver's lie. Only once had she tried to master death by destroying life. After that, all her striving had gone to heal those who suffered. Though she had been haunted and afraid, she had not been cruel. Suicide and murder were not the whole story. When the old man on Haven Farm had collapsed in front of her, the stink issuing from his mouth had sickened her like the foretaste of Despite; but she had willingly breathed and breathed that fetor in her efforts to save him.
She refused it. With the only passion and strength that remained to her, she refused it.
But she did not submit.
They believed in their capacity to make choices which mattered.
That belief was all she needed.
After that, all her striving had gone to heal those who suffered. Though she had been haunted and afraid, she had not been cruel. Suicide and murder were not the whole story.
Perhaps this all rings true for me simply because I
want it all to be true, that we always have choices to make and can always make choices that matter. Perhaps I believe this because as striving mortals we
need this to be true. Either way, this capacity of choice to confront and defeat our inner Despiser(s) has a lot to do with why I find these books so inspiring.