But he knew that, for him, it was a one-way journey.
This time, there was no way he could come back.
He was terrified of dying, of giving up the only life he would ever have, but he was more terrified of living without Kahlan.
He was fully committed to what he had to do. He had made his decision. Nothing was going to deter him.
He knew full well that this was the last time he would cross through the veil.
CHAPTER
86
Nicci’s power slammed into him like a bolt of lightning, compressing his chest. In an instant his heart was stilled.
Richard’s eyes squeezed closed under the unrelenting pressure. With desperate effort, he gasped a breath under the enormous weight of pain pressing in on him.
He was all too aware that it was the last breath he would ever draw.
His muscles went rigid against the searing pain. Pain burned through the nerves of his jaw, down his arms, and into his back.
Things were happening too fast, spinning out of control. He felt himself suffocating as he was unable to get any air.
Time stretched until it became meaningless. Gradually, the agonizingly pain began to become more and more distant. The pain seemed to recede in his awareness as darkness increasingly seeped in around him to take its place.
He felt as if he was trying to hold back the night, but the weight of it was overwhelming.
At some point, he lost track of what the pain had felt like. It no longer seemed important.
But in place of the pain came something far worse: a kind of blind panic at the sensation of slipping away from the world of life.
It was happening too fast.
He felt icy-cold fear as he fully grasped that he was dying, felt the finality of it, and tried desperately to cling to the slender thread of life he still had left as light and images flashed through his mind. He saw people he remembered, places he had been. The colors were vivid and bright and real. He heard distant laughter. It was him, when he was a boy, laughing as he ran from Zedd. Zedd was laughing as he chased after Richard.
Mostly, though, through it all, there was Kahlan. He saw glimpses of her gazing at him with love, her whole face radiant with it, as she smiled with her special smile that she gave no one but him.
Then that, too, faded away as his mind descended into ever-gathering darkness, a kind of heavy, thick darkness unlike any other.
He could smell sulfur.
There was no up, no down. There were no boundaries of any kind, only a black void.
He focused on what he had to do, on why he had done this.
That overpowering need became all.
In that eternity of darkness, he had to find the one person he loved more than life itself.
He had to find his soul mate.
With that thought, the thought of how Kahlan was the one, the only one that he could ever love in the way he loved her, in the way that only one soul mate could love another, he began to have a sense of a track of light in the forever of darkness. It wasn’t light, though, the way the sun created light.
This was a kind of spiritual light, the kind of glow that he would expect to see from the good spirits. It seemed to be everywhere, and nowhere. It was a feeling, a presence of spirit.
He recognized that it was the right one, the right spirit.
He thought that the light was beginning to coalesce, but then he realized that it really wasn’t. Rather, it was that he was traveling along the trail left by that spirit he knew so well, and as he did, he was moving along a line, a pathway that it formed moving through the eternity of darkness.
He knew, then, that he was actually seeing the glowing line of the gift within the Grace itself.
And then he spotted the glow of her spirit moving ever onward, farther and farther away, sinking ever downward.
He was confused. It felt wrong. He didn’t understand why it was spiraling downward.
And then he saw them.
The demons.
They were so dark they blended with the eternal blackness. They were darkness itself, the way a night stone was dark beyond simply black. And yet, he could see them, see their shape when they writhed and tumbled and twisted downward.
The dark ones had enveloped Kahlan’s spirit and were taking her with them as they descended ever deeper toward the darkest depths of eternity, taking her where they could smother her spirit and keep it forever from the light, even as they smothered the light of her spirit so that only the glow of the trail it left was visible to Richard.
A snarl of glistening black fangs turned to him. With menacing, fluid grace they spread their wings wide.
Rather than resist, Richard used the rage from the sword to propel himself toward them. It felt like he had jumped from a cliff, falling through bottomless space that was not even space, but merely a black emptiness as he traveled ever farther from any light. Even Kahlan’s spirit was dimming as it was being suffocated under the weight of dark wings wrapped around her, pulling her downward.
Richard shot through that dark tangle of wings and reached Kahlan, embraced her, joining with her soul to do what he needed to do.
In that instant, for a glorious, singular spark in time, he joined with his soul mate and they were one.
He knew that that brief, singular connection when they were alone and together in the darkness would have to last him—would have to last both of them—for eternity.
And yet in the underworld, there was no time. He knew that in the brief spark of time when they were joined, he had forever to do what he needed to do, even if it might be only a fleeting second back in the world of life.
But here, time was his.
Once it was done, Richard used all his will to leave her and streak past the demons, running from them, drawing that overwhelming, uncontrollable, predatory need to chase. Hungry for his soul, driven to chase, they all turned and then suddenly swept through the darkness to go after him.
They drew ever closer as he streaked away. Black fangs glistened in the darkness as they growled and snapped at him, eager, hungry for his soul. Richard let their claws hook into him, sinking ever deeper so they could pull him in until they were close enough for their black wings to wrap around him and capture him. Even as they did, he let the rage power him so that he could keep racing away from Kahlan’s spirit, keep their fury and their attention on him.
And then, claws firmly gripping him, wings enfolding him, the dark ones dragged him downward, tumbling ever downward with him, suffocating the light of his soul.
But in doing so, in coming after him as he raced away, they had abandoned Kahlan’s spirit, her soul.
In that infinite span of time he had been with her spirit, he had accomplished what he needed to accomplish.
He had given her the chance she needed to live.
Suddenly freed from the weight of the dark demons, the light of her essence, that spirit, that soul, still carrying the buoyant spark of life from being part of the third kingdom—part of both worlds fused together—began to ascend, ever faster all the time, ever higher, escaping the forever of darkness.
Richard saw her glowing arms open, reaching for him as she was pulled ever upward toward life. She tried to reach out to touch him, to draw him to her, to bring him with her, but she no longer could because as she rose he was sinking with ever-increasing speed under the weight of the demons that had cocooned their inky black wings tightly around him.
The last thing he saw was her spark in the darkness high above him as it winked out, and then she was gone.
He was suddenly alone with the dark ones, alone with them in an eternity of blackness under the dead weight of oblivion where there was nothing, where even his soul would be crushed under the pressure of darkness until it ceased to exist.
His last thought was one of joy that he had been able to save Kahlan from that fate, that he had been able to give Kahlan the gift of her life, that he had done what he had always said he would willingly do.<
br />
He had traded his life for hers, so that she might live.
In so doing he had also been able to draw all the demons with him into the dark eternity below. They could no longer shadow her in death. When it was her time, she would rest forever in the Light.
Even as he felt his own spirit become insubstantial as it faded away into an eternity of darkness, he felt joy.
It had been worth it to him.
Kahlan would live.
CHAPTER
87
Kahlan gasped as she sat bolt upright, her eyes wide. She desperately gasped again, trying to get enough air.
Nicci cried out, jumping back as if she had seen a ghost.
Kahlan was only dimly aware of the warm colors of the strange room, the rust-colored carpeting, the heavy, blue-green fabric draped overhead and down around the bedposts. Almost her entire focus was on urgently drawing life and air into her lungs.
On desperately drawing her severed soul back into her worldly self.
None of it really made any sense. Everything was a jumble. She couldn’t quite put all the images and events together into a coherent concept.
“Kahlan!” Nicci cried out as she rushed in close to take up Kahlan’s hand. “You’re alive!”
Kahlan looked down at her own hand in Nicci’s. It did not look to her the way she thought it should look. It didn’t look like it belonged to her, or like it could possibly be hers.
It should be light, luminescent.
It should be without form. It should be insubstantial.
But this was substantial. It had form. It was not made of light. It was flesh and bone. She could feel blood pumping through her, she could feel life coursing through her, she could feel weight, touch. She could feel herself whole again.
She still gasped for air, still struggled to get enough, to catch her breath, but she was beginning to feel like she was finally getting it under control.
“Where am I?” she asked, gulping for air.
Nicci was crying for some reason. “In one of the bedrooms in the citadel.”
“No, I mean where am I?”
Nicci frowned through her tears. “I don’t understand.”
“Is this … death? It’s all wrong. It doesn’t make sense. Something isn’t right. Where am I?”
“You died,” Nicci said through her tears. “You were murdered. But you have both life and death in you, and that life sustained you for a bit while you were in the underworld.
“But now you are back, Kahlan. You’re alive. Dear spirits, you’re alive.”
Kahlan felt euphoric. She had been murdered, but now she was alive. She understood what it meant that she was going to live. Life, wonderful life, wasn’t over. She couldn’t stop smiling as she looked around. She was going to live.
“Where’s Richard?”
Nicci’s face went ashen.
Kahlan followed the woman’s stricken gaze and saw that someone lay beside her.
It was Richard.
Her heart jumped with a flash of joy at seeing him.
But as soon as she saw him, she knew that something was terribly wrong.
He was too still.
He wasn’t breathing.
He stared up at nothing with dead eyes.
Kahlan screamed when she realized the awful truth.
The instantaneous joy she had felt at seeing him, turned to horror.
She fell on him, throwing an arm over his chest, over his sword’s hilt clutched in his fists resting over his heart.
“No! Dear spirits, no! Don’t bring me back to this! Please, don’t do this to me!”
Nicci rushed to draw Kahlan back, pulling her arms from him, turning her away from Richard to take her up in her arms.
“What’s happening?” Kahlan wept against Nicci’s shoulder.
Nicci swallowed back her own sobs. “I’m so sorry, Kahlan. Richard gave up his life to go after you, to bring you back to life. He has only been gone a moment.”
Kahlan looked over at the horrifyingly still body of the man she loved, her everything. “But why isn’t he here? If I was able to return because I still had that third kingdom spark of life in me, then why didn’t he…”
She remembered, then.
It all flooded back in like a terrible, dark, profoundly troubling dream seeping back into your memory after you woke, a dream that left a sickening feeling behind in you that you couldn’t escape no matter how hard you tried.
“What?” Nicci asked, seeing the look on Kahlan’s face. “Do you remember?”
Kahlan nodded. “Richard’s spirit found me. In all that darkness, in all that eternity of nothing, Richard found me. I was lost in darkness and yet he found me.”
“Then what?” Nicci asked when Kahlan fell silent, staring off into the nightmare.
“Then he pulled the dark ones off me, drawing them away to chase after him, instead. I tried to stop him—I didn’t want him to do that to himself—but he was stronger and tore them away from me. He somehow pushed me back into the glowing lines of the Grace. I had no control. I wanted to stay with him, but I couldn’t. Those glowing lines pulled me back. I don’t know how.”
“Because you still had life in you,” Nicci said. “The Grace was healing itself, putting you back to where you belonged on that line of the gift coming from Creation.”
Kahlan gazed at Nicci in desperation. “Then why didn’t it do the same for Richard? Why didn’t he return with me?”
“He couldn’t. He went there to save you from Sulachan’s dark demons, and he did. He did what only Richard could do. He pushed you back toward life. But now, there is no one to save him, no one to help him get back to the light, to his lifeline.”
Kahlan looked over at him lying next to where she had lain. He had his sword clutched in his dead hands. His eyes no longer saw the world of life. Now, he was lost in a world of darkness.
To see Richard so still, without life in him, was beyond any kind of agony she had ever known.
“How did he die?” Her own voice sounded like someone else asking the unimaginable.
She looked back at Nicci when she heard the sorceress softly sobbing.
“Nicci, how did he die? What happened?”
She finally looked up with torment in her blue eyes.
“He asked me to stop his heart.”
Kahlan’s eyes widened. “You killed Richard?”
Nicci nodded, but couldn’t find the words as she wept with the horror at what she had done. It was a torture she would always have to bear.
“Nicci, how could you kill Richard? How could you possibly do such a thing? You, of all people. After all he has done for you, how could you have done such a thing to him?”
Nicci sniffled to get herself under control so that she could explain.
“Because not to have done so, not to have let him have his deepest wish to go after you to try to save you, would have been worse. It would have been saving his life but killing his soul.”
It was obvious what such a burden was doing to the woman. She looked ready to end her own life.
Kahlan reached out and cupped Nicci’s face. “Dear spirits, I understand. I’m so sorry, Nicci, that it had to be you to do such a thing. You, of all people.”
“I’m so sorry, Kahlan,” Nicci wept. “I’m so sorry.”
A spark of an idea, a spark of hope, came to her, then.
“Nicci, you stopped his heart. Can’t you start it again? You said you did it only a moment ago. Can’t you start his heart and let life come back into him, the way it came back into me?”
“No.”
That single word had a world of finality to it.
Kahlan touched her chest where she remembered the knife slamming into her. She remembered the pain, the helpless terror.
“But I was stabbed through my heart. How is it working now? I don’t understand. Why can’t you do that for him?”
“Richard had me heal the damage to you before he went … But I couldn’t bring back
your life, and I can’t bring back his. I don’t have the power. Your heart started spontaneously when your soul returned, when Richard sent you back. Even if I could start his heart beating again, there is no soul there, nothing to keep it going. I can’t pull his soul back from the world of the dead.”
Tears ran down Kahlan’s face as she stared at Richard lying there still as stone. She had fought countless battles, seen death more times than she cared to contemplate. She recognized that terrible stillness that existed only in death, when, after the last breath of life had faded away, the soul had left the body to journey beyond the veil.
It was a kind of stillness that was beyond redemption.
Richard was gone. It didn’t seem like it could be real, and yet, she knew it was.
Kahlan lay down against Richard’s dead body as she gave in to the agony and lost control.
All she could think was that he had come for her, traded places with her in death, and now there was no one to save him.
CHAPTER
88
Even as she wept against Richard’s body, the words kept echoing around in her mind. No one to save him.
Kahlan sat up suddenly. She sucked back the sobs and wiped the tears back from her face as she scooted to the edge of the bed and hopped down onto the floor.
“Where are Cassia, Laurin, and Vale?”
Nicci gestured. “Standing watch outside the doors.”
Kahlan raced to the doors and flung them open. The three Mord-Sith turned and gasped when they saw her.
“Mother Confessor!” Cassia cried. “How—I mean—I don’t—”
“Richard traded places with me in the world of the dead so he could send me back,” she said in a rush.
Their eyes widened, stricken with horror. “Lord Rahl is dead?” Vale asked in a shaky whisper.
“I’ll explain it later. Listen to me. Cassia, go get Commander Fister.”
She pointed to a hallway branching off not far down the corridor. “He is waiting right down there, not far but out of the way, along with a number of the men.”
“Good. Tell him to bring a few dozen men. At least half of them archers. Laurin, Vale, you two go down in the dungeon and get Dreier. That collar he is wearing keeps his powers contained, so you will be able to handle him.”
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