by Ted Dekker
As if she’d plunged into a lake, the sounds behind abruptly faded, replaced by a gentle thrum and ebb. Her skin, thrashed and cut and bleeding, forgot pain, came alive with the sensation that every cell of her body was humming to life.
She gasped, sucking in the galvanized air. When it hit her lungs, rapture flooded her chest. Exploded into her mind like ecstasy.
Come to me, Jordin….
As she fell headlong past the veil, Jordin knew that she had entered Bliss.
She sprawled on the white desert ground and lay panting, facedown, surrounded only by the sound of her own breath.
Perfect silence.
Her skin tingled as if submerged in a living sea. She was filled with peace. It was in her cells, filling her lungs, in her very veins.
She slowly lifted her head and gazed at the hill to her left. It was the same slope as before, but now it seemed to move, as though each grain of sand were alive. She blinked, thinking her vision would correct itself, but it positively shimmered.
As did the earth beneath her palms and arms.
She looked around, saw no sign of Jonathan, but she knew that he was here, with her. In her. Surrounding her.
She rose to her feet, stared about her as though she’d stepped into a foreign world, staggered by the splendor of what had been only a barren desert valley before. It was the same valley, but now it shone with beauty.
How had she not seen it before? Known it?
She knew other things now as well. She knew that she wasn’t dreaming. That she’d somehow woken from a dream—one of her own making, which she’d mistaken for her true life. That she was one with Jonathan and had been all along, but had only now become aware of it.
The Sovereign Realm. Jonathan’s realm. It was inside her, as he was inside her—while all the while she’d been searching for him.
The awareness shook Jordin to her bones. Jonathan had called her to wake, and she had woken. To love. To the heart of the Maker himself.
Love. She was filled with it. It rushed inside her, rolled down her spine, coaxing from her every nerve a pleasure so exquisite she wondered for a moment whether she might die—a thought that brought not a single fear of death with it.
She spread her arms and stared at her fingers, moving them through the air. Space swam with visible power, barely seen but palpable as a stream of water curling around her fingers.
No. She was the stream. She was flooded with love, from the crown of her head to the heels of her feet. She felt it mushroom, gather in her chest, and pass out of her body.
She saw the silent shockwave of it entering the air before her. Watched the ripples of it spread through the space around her.
She stood in awe, aware that the power of it had in no way been depleted by its departure. It seemed to occupy two places at once. Both inside and outside of her. In infinite supply.
“Hello, Jordin.”
She whirled around and saw the thing she had craved all her life. Even in her life before she had known what it meant to live.
Jonathan.
He was standing not ten feet away, dressed in the same kind of tunic she’d seen him in dozens of times before. His hair was long, tangled, and free, and his eyes glimmered with mischief above a broad smile.
A scar just visible in his neckline angled down, disappearing beneath his tunic, a vestige left from his execution at Saric’s hand.
Tears slipped down her cheeks. They were not born of sorrow but of joy.
Jonathan’s eyes pooled with tears above his smile. He laughed and ran forward, unable to contain his own joy. Throwing his arms around her, he swung her off her feet in a hug so exuberant that she couldn’t help but wrap her arms and legs around him to keep from falling backward.
He chuckled with delight, twirling around with her arms clamped around his shoulders as she buried her face in his neck and wept her gratitude.
“Here you are!” he cried. “You’ve finally come home! I missed you so much, Jordin. I love you so much.”
She was lost in him. In love. His love.
They were one.
One!
Jonathan set her down, twirled away, and bowed at his waist, one arm extended in invitation.
“Welcome to my dance,” he said, flashing a daring grin. “I call it the Sovereign Realm. It doesn’t get any better, I can assure you.”
She laughed, smiled, as she stepped up to him. She took his hand in hers. “Well then, my prince. Show me this realm where you’ve been hiding, waiting to rescue me in my hour of need.”
He straightened and cocked his head. “Hiding?”
She immediately knew his meaning.
“No, you haven’t been hiding, have you? I am the one who has been hiding.”
He dipped his head once. Go on….
“Hiding behind a dream from which I’ve finally awakened,” she said. She considered her own statement, then asked, “It was a dream, right?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes. The dream you call your life.”
“All of my life? Not just the images I saw before passing the veil?”
“All of it. Like a dream. Is it more real than what you see now?”
She looked deeply into his eyes, imagined diving into them.
“No,” she breathed. “Not even close.”
“When you put a stick in the water, does it look straight or does the water distort it?”
“It distorts it.”
“In the same way, your mind distorts your life. Your mind doesn’t know it, but it’s looking through dirty water most of the time. Soon, I’ll show you a new kind of water.”
“You will?”
He flashed another smile. “I will. Look around you. What do you see?”
Jordin lifted her gaze from him for the first time since he’d set her down and looked around at the desert. At the hills, the valley floor, the two canteens, the trail left by Roland’s horses. All as they had been, now shimmering with energy.
“I see the Bethelim desert,” she said. “I see it new. I see it truly.”
“And you see me,” he said.
“Yes,” she whispered. And then, in her heart: Yes!
He walked up to her. Lifted his hand. Pressed his palm against her chest. Love pressed into her lungs and wrapped itself around her heart, her spine, rode through her nerves to every fiber of her being.
“I am here, Jordin. I am the I am in you. And you are in me. Do you feel it?”
“Yes.” Tears spilled from her eyes again. “Yes.”
“The moment you took my blood you became Sovereign. I offered you salvation, and yet you found none from fear and anger. You found no true love, no true peace, no true joy. They’re the fruits of my realm, not the anxiety spawned by a diseased mind. Now you may be set free of your mind.”
“I was possessed by a mad mind,” she said, lost in thought.
“There’s no need to become perfect, Jordin. Only to be perfect, not in what you do, but in how you are being. Beneath the layers and lies of the mind, you are perfect already. So be, even as I am.”
It all made sense. Jonathan had repeatedly spoken of the fact that his kingdom was within. Not one of earthly thrones or political futures.
“You’ve called yourself Sovereign. As have Rom and the others. But you haven’t lived Sovereign. How can you be saved from hatred and yet imprisoned by it at once? You’ve spoken of love, but now you know—love and fear cannot remain in the same heart at the same moment. Your mind has become your master, imprisoning you in a dungeon that’s bound by flesh and thought. You aren’t your mind or thoughts, Jordin. You never were. Now you know a new realm, one with me. And in this Sovereign Realm, my love, there is more power than you can possibly imagine.”
“How is it possible to be one with you? We’re the same?”
He removed his hand from her chest. The warmth remained.
He winked. “Let me show you.”
Stepping back, he lifted his hand and snapped his fingers. Immediate
ly, a green plant sprouted from the desert floor ten feet away. Jordin watched, stunned, as the plant grew before her eyes, first into a sapling, and then larger, and larger still, until its branches spread out, full of rich green leaves that threw shade over them both.
“You see? The tree of life. The same veins run through trunk and branch to offer life to the world. Are branch and trunk not one?”
Of course!
“I see,” she whispered. And then: “I see!”
He laughed, grabbing her hand and spinning her around. “You see!”
“I see! I really see!”
Why this simple revelation was so profound, she wasn’t sure. But at that moment it felt like the gateway to an entire universe.
He took both of her hands in his and drilled her with a mischievous grin. “Would you like to see more?”
“I have to see more!”
“Would you like to see me move mountains?”
“I would like to see you build a new earth!”
“Would you like to dive into a lake and breathe the water?”
“Yes! Yes!”
“A lake within you. An eternal spring of life-giving water as vast as an endless ocean.”
She threw back her head, eyes closed, and cried for the heavens to hear her every word. “I want to dive into a lake and breathe your love!”
Mirth peeled through the air, her own, carried by the unbridled enthusiasm of the child she’d become in Jonathan’s Sovereign Realm.
“I want to dance and sing!” she cried. “I want to fly and laugh and sing and dance and swim in an ocean of love! I want to….”
She stopped short, unsure what else she could possibly want. Only then did she become distantly aware that the very faint hum in the air had shifted. It sounded more like music—a perfect strain of haunting, harmonic tones that flowed directly into her nerves as though they were highways of light, taking her back to the dream she’d had in Roland’s Lair.
Come to me, Jordin….
Her eyes snapped wide. The blue sky swam with long, ethereal, wavering swaths of red and purple against a deep, golden background.
She lowered her chin. Jonathan was no longer holding her hands. Was not before her. The hill directly in front of her was no longer hardened, pale desert. It had been transformed into a lush landscape, alive with green grass, blossoming with white and yellow flowers. She turned her head.
Jonathan stood on the sandy shore of a lake fifty paces to her right, stripped of his shirt. The water before him stretched north, as far as she could see, brilliant aqua shimmering under the colorful sky. Trees lined the hills—the same acacias Jonathan had called the “tree of life.”
Jonathan’s eyes flashed with daring. He held out his hand, palm up, inviting her.
“Do you want to dive deep, Jordin?”
She spun to face him and tore toward the lake, breathless with desire.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THE INTERIOR of the tower was dark, the windows an eye into the night. Below, two thousand torches glowed against a mile-deep swath of newly cleared land surrounding the perimeter of the Citadel wall. The rubble had been pushed into giant berms high enough to obscure many of the shorter buildings beyond it, a great barricade that opened in only one direction: south. Within the cleared battlefield, no less than fifteen rings of Dark Bloods, staring outward like one great black iris around the Citadel, fifteen thousand mounted, sixty-five thousand on foot, eighty thousand in all.
Clouds had gathered, thick and black, over the city. Restless, low, and volatile.
Feyn turned from the view that had been her preoccupation for the last several hours. She’d berated the servant when he’d brought food and sent him to wait outside the door. On a nearby table, a goblet of wine stood untouched. In the center of the room, Rom stood silent and still as a pillar, clad in silent misery.
“What keeps them?”
When he didn’t respond, she crossed to him, took his chin in her hand, and turned his gaze directly to her. “Roland knows no fear. He has every reason to come at me with everything he has.” She shoved his face away. “And so here I wait,” she muttered.
She stalked to the other side of the tower, scratching at the inside of her forearm, just above the wrist. The vein beneath would give her no peace. It had always prickled, like nettles in her blood, but in the last day it positively burned.
It’s the virus. It’s killing you now.
“How long was the incubation period on this virus?”
“Three days,” he said quietly. “It was an estimate.”
She lowered her arms and faced the window again. Roland would come from the south. Through the city. It was the way of greatest resistance. The least logical, and therefore the most expected. His bravado would demand he be seen.
She laughed, the sound brittle as shards in the tower room. “What a pair we might have made, he and I. Now there, I tell you, is a man worthy of Dark Blood.”
Outside, the torches burned like so many amber beads on a deadly gown of velvet.
“This is the way it always should have been. You see? Nothing has changed.”
Except the final outcome.
They would all die. Zealot Wars would reshape the world again. But where were they? Was it possible she’d misjudged him? That he’d led his people into the wasteland to die?
No. They might move like ghosts, but Roland would leave his indelible mark before becoming one. He would have his Immortality one way or another. Nor would she be deprived.
She’d given the command for her guards to throw open the great southern gate, for her Dark Bloods to thicken their formation before that gate. The glut of them before that entrance would be irresistible to his ego.
Then where was he? If she looked carefully enough, she could just perceive the subtle movements of her warriors, shifting where they stood, glancing up every so often at the sky roiling overhead. Twice she thought she’d heard one of the commanders bark an order to hold. Their movements had quieted for a time after she’d given the command to open the gate, only to become restless again.
They were spoiling for a fight. Three hours ago she’d stood on the rampart of the wall and delivered news of the virus. That the Immortals would come against them in one last, desperate stand. That to outlive her would be treason…. but to outlive any Immortal, victory.
She willed the anxiety that had crept up her spine back to submission. Told herself that it mattered for something, this last theater of blood—if only to prove to Roland that he was vanquished, utterly, before he died.
And then what?
Born once into life, we are blessed. Let us please the Maker through a life of diligent Order.
The words of the old liturgy sprang to mind unbidden. Words without meaning, meant to control the fearful.
She knew now that Bliss did not await her.
So there is only this.
She crossed back to the southward window.
“I’m glad he hasn’t come yet,” she said, eyes fixed toward the city. She didn’t finish the thought aloud: that when it was over and the Immortals lay slain alongside any number of her Dark Bloods…. she would have accomplished nothing.
Rom shifted behind her. “My liege.”
“What?”
“Surely you know that none of this will save you. Only Jordin can save you now.”
She whirled around. “Well, there’s no chance of that now, is there! You’ve failed in your useless attempts to save anyone. What has your life gained you but the death of everyone you have ever loved? Avra. Jonathan. Now me.”
A tear spilled over the rim of his eye. The sight of it enraged her.
“Spare me your pathetic sadness! Isn’t this what you wanted?” She strode toward him, grabbed him by his tunic, and heaved him toward the window so hard that he had to put up his hands to keep from crashing through it. “Look out there! Order and the Corpses who cling to it are all that will survive us. The aftermath of your efforts, your manipula
tions, your schemes! All in the name of what?”
“Love,” he rasped.
“The Maker, if there is one, spits at the curse of your love. There”—she grabbed him by the hair, shoved his cheek against the glass, and pointed—“there is love, the only kind that there is! Loyalty—blind and deadly….”
Her rancor fell away; something had caught her eye. There, to the south. She let him go, laid her hands against the sill, and leaned forward. A spark of light. It vanished, and as she stared down the length of the darkened street, she wondered for a moment if she had imagined it, if it were an effect of the virus, burning the back of her retina. But no—there, emerging past the distant silhouette of that basilica. And there, another, traveling even with it—and two more, speeding through the black city toward the Citadel.
Her arms prickled.
The Immortals had come.
Two more, and then two more. She pushed Rom aside, seized a long looking glass from the table, knocking over the goblet of wine in the process. She raised the glass to her eye. Now she could see that they held torches, traveling as fast as a horse could run. Evenly spaced—every third or fourth rider. Every fifth. A glowing worm of light rushing down the wide street.
An order, shouted from below, sounded muted through the window glass. They’d been sighted. The distant street was by now ablaze with light, the flames of the torches trailing behind their riders. She sucked in a breath as the first of them came within blocks of the barricade.
The black of their hoods and cloaks was gone. Flames shone on bare skin, off the hard panes of chest and corded muscle of shoulder. Roland was showing his gall.
She focused on the front of the line, the rider to the left seemingly carved of white marble, quiver and bow slung over his back, sword belted around his waist. His arms were veined with tattoos that shot out like the barbs of an arrow toward his shoulder.
To his right, a rider as white, with his chest smeared in red, as though having killed already. His hair was unbound, glinting in the light of his torch. A long red sash trailed from his bicep and no less than fifteen knives were belted around his waist. He rode hard, seemingly without effort except for the deadly intent on his face.