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“Just as wizards of old had Additive Magic as well as Subtractive Magic, the gifted back then, the ones who wrote these scrolls, had abilities beyond what you or I can fathom. They had not only regular Additive and Subtractive Magic, but it was combined with the opposite of occult magic. They wielded power in both worlds. They drew from a world where time exists, and from where it doesn’t.
“Cerulean, meaning ‘celestial,’ also refers to the star shift, which is this spectral fold initiated by the use of the power of Orden. I’m the one who initiated its spark.”
“You mean it’s kind of like starting a campfire to keep you warm and cook your dinner, and that much is good, but then a big gust of wind comes up and blows sparks everywhere and catches the entire forest around you on fire, so what started off good turns into something very bad.”
Richard grimaced a little. “That’s one way to put it. But in this instance, the entire world is on fire.”
Kahlan pressed her hands to the sides of her head. “This is giving me a headache.”
Richard grunted a brief chuckle. “You don’t know the half of it. I’ve only scratched the surface. It’s a lot more complex than I’m making it sound, and so far I’ve only given you a few of the meaningful highlights.”
Kahlan lowered her hands and stared at him. “You mean to say that there’s more?”
“I’m afraid so,” Richard said. “And it gets worse.”
CHAPTER
29
“You see,” Richard said, “Hannis Arc knew all this. He apparently got his hands on some of these scrolls long ago and read in them about initiating the power of Orden to create this spectral fold. He collected more of these scrolls over time and has been using what he was able to learn in them to start shaping events to his own objectives. He saw from what he read that this was his opportunity to bring Sulachan back.”
“Hannis Arc is the one who gave Darken Rahl the last box of Orden,” Kahlan said, trying to keep track of it all in her head. “You mean he did that to help start this prophecy to unfold? The prophecy he plays a central part in and that he would benefit from?”
“Exactly. He has been moving the pieces around like pieces on a chessboard in order to bring about the events the scrolls talk about. It’s as if he sees prophecy of himself doing these things, and then does them to make the prophecy reality. Mohler said that he was a master chess player, and from what I’ve learned about the game, much of the thinking in the game carries over to making moves in life.
“He wanted to open this gateway through this spectral fold, because he needed Sulachan’s help to conquer the world of life, so he put the boxes in play by giving the third box of Orden to Darken Rahl. He was making moves that had repercussions later on, all down the line. He knew from the scrolls that giving Darken Rahl the last box he needed to put them in play would trigger the events in prophecy. Unlike us, he knew from the scrolls what the power of Orden really was.
“Hannis Arc was moving a pawn, knowing from prophecy that if the boxes were in play, I would defeat Darken Rahl and therefore go on to become the Lord Rahl leading the D’Haran Empire that would then be drawn into the war against the Imperial Order.
“He knew that I would use the power of Orden to end the war with the Imperial Order, which is a part of the larger great war that Sulachan started so long ago. After all, Sulachan created the dream walkers. Emperor Jagang was a descendant of those dream walkers created by Sulachan so that he would start the war that I would end by using the power of Orden that Hannis Arc would then use, once the star shift weakened the veil, to bring Sulachan back from the dead.”
Kahlan pressed her hands to her head. “Dear spirits. And they were using this knowledge of the use of Orden all along?”
Richard nodded. “Hannis Arc had already moved that pawn long ago by giving the box to Darken Rahl to begin the chain of events that would eventually get me to use Orden’s power, because he didn’t have the key to it, but the scrolls said I would, which would in turn get him what he was ultimately after: to be ruler of the world of life. Which would get Sulachan what he wanted by being able to come back from the world of the dead, which he helped engineer by creating the dream walkers, and so on and so forth.”
“But then he was carrying out prophecy that hadn’t happened yet,” she protested. “He was creating prophecy, in effect. He was creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Richard showed her a smile. “Exactly. You see, prophecy is an underworld power–”
“Wait. How can it be an underworld power? You said that before but I don’t think that can be right. Prophecy comes from prophets predicting the future. Hannis Arc saw that prophecy and took the actions he did in order to make sure everything was in place for it to happen as in the prophecy.”
“But the prophecy itself came from the underworld in the first place,” Richard said. “Prophecy is an artifact of the world of the dead.”
Kahlan shook her head. “Prophecy is given by prophets in this world, not the world of the dead.”
Richard leaned toward her in a meaningful manner. “So we always thought. And that is the key to it all.”
“I don’t follow what you mean.”
Richard gestured to the scrolls. “Prophecy actually originates in the underworld, from the spirits of the dead, and prophets in the world of life are able to channel those prophecies in this world.”
Kahlan took a deep breath to fortify herself against her growing frustration. “I don’t understand. How could they originate there, in the world of the dead, from spirits?”
Richard leaned forward again, almost with delight at what he had discovered. “This is where it starts to get complicated.”
“Starts? Richard, I don’t–”
He held up a hand. “Hear me out, first, and then the bigger picture will all start to make sense.”
She pressed her lips tight and remained silent so he could go on. She knew Richard, and she knew he didn’t go off on pointless tangents.
“The underworld is eternal, which makes it timeless,” he began in a calm voice. “We’ve always understood that much of it. Time has no meaning in an eternal world because there is no beginning and no end of time there, so there is no way to measure a segment of forever. Right?”
Kahlan conceded the point with a nod. “Right.”
“One day or a thousand years is the same because with no beginning and no end there are no units of measure for time there–no limits to measure a day, a year, a century.”
“So?”
“So, in the underworld, where nothing changes and there is no future as such–because there are no boundaries and no units to measure time–the future is the same as now. There can be no tomorrow, so there can be no future as such.
“The future in the world of the dead takes place in what the scrolls call ‘the eternal now.’”
Kahlan scratched an eyebrow. “The eternal now?”
“That’s right–the eternal now. In the underworld there is only ‘now.’” Richard held up a finger to make a point, reminding Kahlan very much of Zedd when he did so. “Time is a concept that only has relevance in this world, where there are beginnings and ends to things–days, years, lives. In the underworld, a soul never dies. It is eternal.
“The underworld does not have those things needed from which to construct the concept of time. There is no yesterday in the underworld because it’s eternally the same there, eternally unvarying, eternally changeless, so there can be no such thing as yesterday. By the same token, there can be no tomorrow. Right? The sun does not rise and set there. It’s always the same. There are no ‘days’ there, nothing to mark time, no end of time. See what I mean? It’s all an eternal now.
“Since ‘now’ in the underworld is an eternity–the eternal now–there is no future as such there because, in a place with no markers for time, such a thing can’t be delineated. This means that what we would think of as happening in the future, here in our world, in the eternity of the underworld actually happens in this homogeneous soup of the eternal now.
“We think of events happening in our future because in our world we have time–a today and a tomorrow–but you can’t think of it the same way there.”
Kahlan stared off into the memory. “I remember when I was there, in the underworld. I don’t recall any sense of how long. I was only there. Always, forever, unchanging.”
“Exactly,” he said. “In the eternal now of the underworld, those events, which all take place in the eternal now, all happen together and are the purview of a power known as Regula. Regula, you might say, is the sum of everything–everything that can happen, everything that will happen.
