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“This is her choice,” Nicci said as if reading Kahlan’s mind. “She is doing what she must, and doing it of her own free will.”
CHAPTER
20
Richard opened his eyes as he gasped in a breath.
The world of life seemed to explode into existence.
Out of nothingness, bright light, shapes, and colors began to materialize all around him. At first he sensed only gossamer traces of something more; then tangible matter began to solidify into shape and substance, as if it had always been in the same place at the same time as the void where he seemed to have been for so long. It felt confusing to not have realized what had been there all along.
He began to recognize walls, a ceiling, a floor. There were now limits to the space around him where there had been none. He blinked at candlelight that was too bright, the colors too vivid. The air felt heavy and thick, but he breathed it in greedily, letting it fill his lungs in a heady rush.
With each breath he drew and then let out, he felt himself exhaling an alien void, breaking the connection to that other world. With every breath he let out, that void dissipated, dissolving away as life came back to take its place.
This was where he belonged. He could smell the nearly infinite variety of the world of life, he could taste it. Some of the smells were sweet perfume he recognized and he relished, while some was a repulsive stench. It all mixed together into the diversity that was the world of life.
The air filling his lungs felt luxurious, intoxicating. He couldn’t get enough of it. It was wonderful. It felt as if he had needed to get his breath forever. At last it was coming freely. He could feel his pulse moving through him with every deep breath he drew. Even so, to an extent it was still an unfamiliar effort to breathe.
“Richard!”
Richard smiled, then, at the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life. Kahlan was leaning in over him. She was the sweet bouquet he had smelled.
“Are you all right?” she asked, tears running down her cheeks, her voice a mix of panic and expectant joy, as if she was too afraid to believe he was really with her, and afraid he might unexpectedly leave again.
“I was with the dead.”
She nodded, half laughing, half crying as tears continued to overflow from her beautiful green eyes.
“I know.” She grasped his face in her hands a moment, as if unable to believe it was really him. She looked back then and seized Nicci’s hand. She pulled the sorceress forward. “Nicci went to the underworld to find a way to bring you back.”
Richard put a hand to his forehead as he saw it all again, but this time in his mind’s eye. “The dark ones. I remember them.” Gooseflesh tingled down his arms. “They were all around me.”
Nicci nodded. “I know. I saw them.”
Richard looked up into Kahlan’s beautiful eyes, eyes that also revealed the inner beauty of her soul. “Zedd was there, Kahlan. He was somehow meant to be there to help me, to help free me from the grasp of Sulachan’s dark ones. He let me know that it was all to a purpose, that his time in this world had come to its end, and he had needed to move on to be where he could help me.”
A woman with strange red hair standing behind Nicci was nodding. “It was all part of the flow of time. It was all meant to be.” Her gray dress seemed to be moving as if in a light breeze, even though the air in the room was still. “Events happened as they must in order for you to return. You were not yet meant to be finished with this world. Prophecy yet lives.”
Though no one said it, he knew that this was a witch woman. “I must end prophecy if we all are to live.”
She smiled in a most peculiar manner. “Prophecy helped place events in order so that you might be returned to us. The flow of time revealed that the one closest to you by blood was the one who had to be there to help you, or you would have been lost forever. He was meant to be there, first, waiting for you.”
Richard didn’t know if that was true or not. As far as he was concerned, prophecy had always been a source of trouble.
Kahlan began gently turning to someone between them, someone else close to him.
Still trying to put all the sights around him into order, Richard realized, then, that the reason he was having some difficulty breathing was because there was something heavy lying over his chest and left arm. He saw blond hair and red leather. Icy realization flashed through him. Even without seeing her, he knew who it was.
Kahlan gently rolled Cara off to his side, laying her back as if she were a sleeping child.
He knew the instant he saw her, though, that she was not asleep. In horrified dread, he realized what had just happened. He remembered the warnings that one must die for him to return. He reached up and felt the Agiel now hanging around his neck.
“Cara no,” he said under his breath as panicked fear welled up through him. “Don’t do this for me. Please don’t do this.”
Even as he said it, he knew that it was too late. She had already done it. It was already finished and beyond redemption. She had made the sacrifice she had always sworn she would make for him. She had always said it would be her life before his.
Kahlan swallowed as she cupped a tender hand to his face, wiping away a tear with her thumb.
“She’s with Ben, now, Richard.”
Richard put his arms around Cara, pulling her cold, limp, and lifeless form up to hold her head to his shoulder as he tipped his head against hers and wept with agony for the woman.
“I didn’t want this. Dear spirits, I didn’t want this. I didn’t want anyone to do this for me.”
Nicci laid a hand on his arm. “But she did, Richard. She wanted to be the one to be the bridge back, and she wanted to cross over that bridge to be with Ben.”
Richard stared up at the sorceress and finally nodded, too choked up to speak. He knew how much she missed Ben. He understood that kind of pain of being left behind. Richard had given up his own life, after all, to go to the underworld to be with Kahlan. Even so, and even though he knew how much she wanted to be the one, Richard didn’t want someone else–didn’t want Cara–to die so that he could come back.
But he understood it.
He couldn’t stand the thought of life without Kahlan, of living in a world empty of her soul. Cara had waited her whole life for love like that, and then she had lost it. Now, she was with him and the other good spirits. Richard couldn’t stand losing her, and yet he understood why she had done it.
“Make her sacrifice worth it, Richard,” Kahlan whispered to him. “Make it mean something.”
He nodded as he rolled her to the side and carefully laid her back. He could see the soft glow of the spirit that was still within her, a spirit, a sister of the Agiel, who had come to be with her to help her do what had to be done, and then to help guide her to that other world and Ben’s waiting spirit.
Richard closed her blue eyes and then kissed her cheek.
“Thank you, Cara. Please take care of her, Denna.”
As if in answer, the glow of the spirit vanished then back to the world where she belonged, where she, too, was at peace.
So many good spirits had helped him. He knew that they rarely did so, but this time it was a spirit from their world–Sulachan–who was the cause of the trouble
. If the spirit king had his way he would not only destroy the world of life, he would destroy the peace of that world as well. This was a struggle for the fate of both worlds.
When Richard sat up and put his hand around the hilt of the sword, the rage responded instantly with eager intensity. The storm of fury sprang to life, joining with his own anger at the thought of all that was at risk because of Sulachan and the man who had helped bring him back into the world of life, Hannis Arc.
Richard could hear shouts outside in the hall, as well as the unmistakable sounds of weapons being used in anger. Men yelled orders. Others cried out with the fury of their effort. Yet others screamed in pain.
It was a call Richard knew all too well.
Others had given their lives that he might live, that he might fight for life. They knew that he was the one born to stop what was happening. They knew that by helping him they were helping in that fight.
His purpose had never felt so clear to him before. Prophecy or not, this was the battle he was born to fight. Emperor Sulachan had started this war three thousand years before, and had come back to the world of life to finish it. Richard had been born to be the one to oppose him.
It no longer mattered that prophecy had seemed to meddle with his life or had tried to preordain what he would do. All that mattered now was that he was the one to see this struggle to the end.
All things had to be in balance. In this conflict, Richard was the balance to Sulachan and his accomplice Hannis Arc. That inexorable pull toward balance in the battle for life didn’t say which side would win, only that in the grand struggle they both were drawn in as balance to each other.
Though he was only just back from the world of the dead, and he knew that he had been gone for quite a while, it was beginning to feel like he had been gone for only an instant. It was the timeless element of the underworld, he knew, that made him feel that way. He had been to the underworld several times before and he recognized that sensation of life interrupted.
