Read Online Fatal Revenant by Stephen R. Donaldson - Free Book Online

are content to be who we are. Lacking any clear cause to approach Glimmermere, I deemed it unseemly to distance ourselves from Revelstone and your uncertain plight.”
    She sighed. Now she understood the blind distress of Mahrtiir and his Cords when she had met them in the Close. But she had scant regard to spare for the Manethrall’s strict pride. Her own needs were too great.
    â€œAll right,” she murmured. “Don’t worry about it.
    â€œI’m going on ahead. I want you to stay here. I need to be alone for a while. If the Masters change their minds—if the Humbled decide that they have to know what I’m doing—try to warn me.” Glimmermere’s potency might muffle her perception of anything else. “When I come back, we’ll talk about this again.
    â€œI think that you’ll want to see the lake for yourself.”
    She held his gaze until he nodded. Then she turned to stride up the hillside without him.
    Almost at once, he seemed to fall out of her awareness. Her memories of Covenant and Glimmermere sang to her, dismissing other considerations. At one time, she had been loved here. That experience, and others like it, had taught her how to love her son. She needed to immerse herself in Earthpower and clarity; needed to recover her sense of her own identity. Then she could try to make herself heard; heeded.
    She was breathing hard—and entirely unconscious of it—as she passed the crest of the hill and caught sight of the lake where Thomas Covenant had given her a taste of joy; perhaps the first joy that she had ever known.
    In one sense, Glimmermere was exactly as she remembered it. The lake was not large: from its edge, she might have been able to throw a stone across it. On all sides except its outlet to the south, it was concealed by hills as though the earth of the plateau had cupped its hands in order to isolate and preserve its treasure. And no streams flowed into it. Even the mighty heads of the Westron Mountains, now no more than a league distant, sent their rivers of rainfall and snowmelt down into the Land by other routes. Instead Glimmermere was fed by hidden springs arising as if in secret from the deep gutrock of the Land.
    The surface of the water also was as Linden remembered it: as calm and pure as a mirror, reflecting the hills and the measureless sky perfectly; oblivious to distress. Yet she had not been here for ten long years, and she found now that her human memory had failed to retain the lake’s full vitality, its untrammeled and untarnishable lucid purity. Remembering Glimmermere without percipience to refresh her recall, she had been unable to preserve its image undimmed. Now she was shocked almost breathless by the crystalline abundance and promise of the waters.
    Taken by the sight, she began to jog down the hillside. She knew how cold the water would be: she had been chilled to the core when Covenant had called her into the lake. And now there was no desert sun to warm her when she emerged. But she also knew that the cold was an inherent aspect of Glimmermere’s power to cleanse; and she did not hesitate. Covenant and Jeremiah had been returned to her, but she no longer knew them—or herself. When she reached the edge of the lake, she dropped the Staff of Law unceremoniously to the grass; tugged off her boots and socks, and flung them aside; stripped away her grass-stained pants as well as her shirt as if by that means she could remove her mortality; and plunged headlong into the tonic sting of memory and Earthpower.
    In the instant of her dive, she saw that she cast no reflection on the water. Nothing of her interrupted Glimmermere’s reiteration of its protective hills and the overarching heavens. The clustered rocks around the deep shadow of the lake’s bottom looked sharp and near enough to break her as soon as she struck the surface. But she knew that she was not in danger. She remembered well that