Richard knew Sang was right. To have the element of surprise, they needed to get there and meet with those who were on his side first to come up with a plan. The longer he considered, the greater the risk grew that the goddess and her horde would arrive in Aydindril first.
Plus, he had no idea how confused he would be upon arriving in that world. He knew that when he came back to the world of life after being in the underworld, it was difficult to again get his bearings. Light and colors and sounds were all overwhelming at first.
But this sounded somehow worse. He found himself immobilized with fear. Not with fear of going into darkness, although if he knew exactly what that meant maybe he would fear it more, but with fear of leaving everyone he loved forever.
It was fear of never again being with Kahlan.
He just didn’t know if he could do such a thing.
It would be a living suicide.
“If you say no,” Sang said, “I would not blame you. I don’t know that I could come here to your world and never be able to go home. But if you are willing to do this to have a chance to save the people of your world, then the time is now upon us when we must act.”
Richard steeled himself. He hooked his bow over one shoulder and his pack over the other. Vika hoisted her pack up over one shoulder.
Finally, Richard reached out with his left hand and put it firmly on Sang’s right shoulder. His skin was cool, soft, and moist, more like the skin of a salamander than that of a person. He looked over at Vika. When their eyes met, each of them placed a hand on the other’s shoulder; then she put her right hand on Sang’s left shoulder.
Sang reached up and laid a claw over each of their shoulders. Once he had, they were all locked together into a circle of three—an important component of the Law of Nines, Richard reminded himself. He hoped that added bit of magic would help him and Vika survive going into darkness.
“Do it,” Richard said. “Call your lifeline.”
52
Almost as soon as he said it, he thought of Kahlan and wished he could call his words back. But at the same time he knew he had to be strong if Kahlan and everyone else in his world were to have a chance to live free of the Glee. Besides, even as he had the thought, it was already too late.
Everything all around him—the stone bridge, the forest, the Wizard’s Keep above them and the city of Aydindril below—all started to look scribbly.
Only Vika and Sang seemed solid. The air itself had streaks of empty darkness slashing through it, as if the fabric of the world of life were shredded apart. The whole world around them was rapidly dissolving into scribbles as holes tore open into voids in the very reality of existence.
Those voids suddenly expanded explosively.
All light, all sound, and everything else that made up the world around him seemed to be sucked out of existence, ripped away, leaving a universe of nothingness. Not even Sang and Vika were there with him.
He was totally alone as he was sucked into that darkness.
It felt in a way like tripping in the darkest night and tumbling off a cliff.
Richard felt himself falling without end.
He kept expecting to hit the bottom, or to hit something. He knew he couldn’t fall this long without soon slamming into something. His muscles tensed and his nerves burned with the agonizing expectation of that sudden, bone-shattering impact.
It was terrifying. An eternity of fear was compressed into every second that he felt himself helplessly falling into darkness.
That fear of hitting the bottom—or of falling forever—became everything.
Richard worked at talking himself out of the panic that was clawing at his emotions. He tried to see his hand but couldn’t. He tried to touch it to his face, but he felt nothing, either from his hand or his face. He felt nothing at all.
He put all his effort into focusing on reasoning out what was happening. As he did, he realized that he wasn’t really falling. Once he concentrated and tried to make sense of what he was feeling, or rather not feeling, he became aware that there was no down, no up, no hot, no cold, no light, and actually no sensation of any kind. It was complete and total suspension of all sensation. There was nothing other than his own, free-floating thoughts.
He couldn’t feel anything that made him feel alive. He couldn’t feel his heartbeat or his breathing or anything that made him feel that he existed at all anymore. In fact, it felt as if he didn’t exist, as if he were merely thinking that he had once existed. It was even becoming hard to remember his world.
Rather than let himself be pulled under by the overwhelming emotion of feeling that he no longer existed, and since he had absolutely no control over what was happening, he let himself relax as he tried not to think.
He lost track of how long it had been, and as he did, it began to feel like something he was all too familiar with: the eternity of the underworld. That place, too, was darker than dark, and it, too, went on forever.
But this was a different kind of darkness. Not only was it a physical darkness, it was also a kind of inner darkness. The totality of it was different from the underworld. This was not a sense of being in the world of the dead, but a void of existence itself. The only thing that seemed to exist was his thoughts.
In the underworld there had at least been constellations of souls and he had been able to will his soul to travel through them. Here, there was nothing to travel through and he was not able to will himself to go anywhere. There was no “there” within this darkness.
Suddenly, it ended.
Existence imploded in on him from all sides.
He felt his own weight, and with that, solid ground under his feet.
He opened his eyes and as scribbles all around him were just vanishing, he saw a strange world of desolation beneath a heavily clouded sky. All the clouds were different shades of dark red, darker and thicker the lower they were. Ruddy rock rose up in towering, otherworldly formations, seemingly shaped by the hot, moist wind that swirled around them. The muddy-reddish clouds that rolled by low overhead looked almost like smoke.
Everything in this world was some shade of sullen red. Richard felt like he was looking out through a piece of red glass that tinted everything.
It made him wonder if his eyes or even his brain had somehow been damaged by the journey from his world and maybe they weren’t working properly, and as a result he could now see things only in shades of red.
He breathed in deeply. The air was damp and warm. So damp that in comparison to his own world it was heavy, humid, and uncomfortable. It felt almost thick. He could see why Sang said that his world was a dry world. This was an oppressively clammy, sticky, and moist world. He already longed for dryness.
They were standing in an area of sand that reminded him very much of the area of white sand in the Garden of Life in the People’s Palace. Although, the sand here looked white only in that it was less red than everything else.
With all the smooth, towering rock formations, it felt almost like an eerie cathedral of stone sculpted by wind and weather. That muggy wind moaned as it moved through the strange, smoothly curved surfaces of the rock.
Vika was still holding his shoulder on one side and Sang on the other. Their arms were all still locked together. It had seemed he was totally alone once he went into darkness, but that wasn’t true. The other two had always been there with him, he just hadn’t been aware of them.