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to Perry Donaldson:

a daughter to make a man proud

Acknowledgments

The help that I’ve received while working on “The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant” in general, and on Against All Things Ending in particular, deserves more gratitude than I can properly express. Both John Eccker and Robyn Butler have been invaluable: diligent, generous beyond all expectation, and—when necessary—relentless. In addition, their valiant efforts to think well of even my worst prose have a certain fey charm.

For entirely different reasons, I want to thank Christopher Merchant. This book could not have been written without his particular involvement.

And the whole concept of “thanks” would be meaningless if it did not include Jennifer Dunstan, who lifts me up.

What Has Gone Before

“The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever”

As a young man—a novelist, happily married, with an infant son, Roger—Thomas Covenant is inexplicably stricken with leprosy. In a leprosarium, where the last two fingers of his right hand are amputated, he learns that leprosy is incurable. As it progresses, it produces numbness, often killing its victims by leaving them unaware of injuries which then become infected. Medications arrest the progress of Covenant’s affliction; but he is taught that his only real hope of survival lies in protecting himself obsessively from any form of damage.

Horrified by his illness, he returns to his home on Haven Farm, where his wife, Joan, has abandoned and divorced him in order to protect their son from exposure.

Other blows to his emotional stability follow. Fearing the mysterious nature of his illness, the people around him cast him in the traditional role of the leper: a pariah, outcast and unclean. In addition, he discovers that he has become impotent—and unable to write. Grimly he struggles to go on living; but as the pressure of his loneliness mounts, he begins to experience prolonged episodes of unconsciousness, during which he appears to have adventures in a magical realm known only as “the Land.”

In the Land, physical and emotional health are tangible forces, made palpable by an eldritch energy called Earthpower. Because vitality and beauty are concrete qualities, as plain to the senses as size and color, the well-being of the physical world has become the guiding precept of the Land’s people. When Covenant first encounters them, in Lord Foul’s Bane, they greet him as the reincarnation of an ancient hero, Berek Halfhand, because he, too, has lost half of his hand. Also he possesses a white gold ring—his wedding band—which they know to be a talisman of great power, able to wield “the wild magic that destroys peace.”