He believed that he had a chance—a slim chance, but a chance—to capture Kahlan’s spirit in time and let it return to the world of life, to her healed body.
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.