“Richard,” Zedd said in a rising tone of warning, “what do you think you’re doing?”
Richard ignored his grandfather. He instead gazed into Kahlan’s eyes.
“Are you with me, Kahlan?”
She stepped to within a few paces of him.
“I have always been with you, Richard. I love you, and I know you love me.”
Richard’s eyes closed for a moment.
He had no choice.
He turned to the boxes of Orden and closed his eyes as he lifted the blade to touch his forehead.
“Blade,” he whispered, “be true this day.”
He brought the Sword of Truth down and drew it across the inside of his arm, letting blood run down until it dripped off the tip.
He placed the blade on top of the box on the right, the one that Sister Ulicia had opened.
The blade turned as black as the box itself.
He withdrew the blade and it returned to its shiny state.
He placed the sword on the box on the left. Again, it turned as black as the underworld itself.
He withdrew it, letting it return to its normal state.
Richard took a deep breath, and then laid the flat of the blade on the center box. He thought about all the innocent people who simply wanted to live their lives. He thought about all those like Cara and the other Mord-Sith who had been driven mad until they would serve a tyrant. He thought about Nicci, indoctrinated her whole life with hate, driven to a miserable life of sacrificing herself to twisted beliefs. He thought about Bruce, his left wing man, who, when he saw strength without hate, was drawn to it.
He thought about Denna.
When he opened his eyes, the blade had turned white. The box beneath it was just as white.
Gripping the hilt in both hands, Richard lifted the point of the Sword of Truth high over the white box…and with the killing thrust from the dance with death, drove it down, pinning the box to the altar.
The Garden of Life went white. The entire world of life went white. Time stopped.
In that moment, Richard stood in the center of a white world with nothing around him. He looked around, but there was no one there, and at the same time everyone was there with him—every individual in the world of life was there with him.
He understood. This was in many ways the opposite of the last journey he had taken in this room when he went into the world of darkness and in a way every soul there had been with him.
In this place, in this state, he had the conscious awareness of every living person. In this moment, in this place, they all waited for what the man who commanded the power of Orden would say, and what he would do. This was Orden, the power of life itself.
“Every person makes choices as to how they will live,” Richard began.
“Evil does not exist independent of man. Men do evil by choice. Choice involves the requirement to think, even if ineffectually. The most basic choice you can make is to think or not to think, to let others do the thinking and tell you what to do, even if they tell you to do evil.
“Wise choices require more, they require rational thinking. Refusal to think rationally affords one the ability to maintain the illusion of knowledge, wisdom, even sanctity while committing evil. If you follow the teaching of others who do your thinking for you and who have you do evil, the innocent victims are harmed just the same as if you choose to harm them yourself.
“Dead is dead. Their life is over.
“Teachings that defy reason defy reality; what defies reality defies life. Defying life is embracing death.
“Celebrating faith over reason is merely a way of denying what is, in favor of embracing any whim that strikes your fancy.
“The followers of the Fellowship of Order have decided how they wish to live their lives. If it stopped there, none of us who value our individual liberty would care how they choose to live, but they have made the choice—made a conscious choice—that they will not allow others to live their own lives as they wish.
“It is that choice, made of their own free will, which we cannot abide. We will not allow them to impose their evil choice on us. It ends here, now.
“I give them their wish for a world in which they can live as they have chosen. I grant them the thing they want most in life—the life they choose.
“I could condemn them to no worse fate.
“From this moment on there are now two worlds, twins in most ways. This world will remain as it is.
“The power of Orden has just duplicated, in many ways, this world, giving them a world of their own. Their world will be theirs.
“They may not ever come to realize the foolishness of their choice, but they will certainly suffer for it. They will have the lives of misery they so fervently cling to. They will have the lives of suffering they piously embrace. They will have the lives of hopeless dread and fear they have chosen to impose on themselves by refusing to use their own minds to think rationally.
“They have chosen to throw their lives into the caldron of all-consuming hatred. I grant them their wish. It is the last time wishing will ever bring them anything. They will live out their existence wishing and hoping, endlessly lost in the darkness they have imposed on their own minds—in their own self-loathing. But they will never be able to harm us again.
“They believe that those who are free cause all of their hardship. They blame us for their woes. They attack us, saying we are the root of evil because we exist, because we are prosperous, because we are happy. They wish to destroy us so that they may have the world be the way they wish it.”
Richard turned his attention to the followers of the Order already in that other world, already at the other end of the gateway that was open. Those in his world could hear as well.
“I grant you your wish.
“You now have what you always claimed to want, a world in which your beliefs rule. A world without magic, without free men and free minds. You can believe as you wish, live as you wish.
“But you will not have us as the excuse for the misery you create for yourselves. You will not have us as an excuse to fuel your hate.
“You will be without any enemy but your miserable selves. Your world will be yours to rule as you see fit, to crumble around you as you wallow in your own hate.
“Your children, witness to the senseless cruelty of your willfully ignorant beliefs, will in time hopefully change your world for the better, will make their own adult lives worthwhile and joyful. But that will be entirely up to them. They will have to choose for themselves to use reason rather than force to deal with each other. Like anyone else, they will have to make choices as to how they will live their only life.
“This world will be ours.
“This will be a world without the teachings of the Imperial Order. Without those who wish to use force to impose those beliefs on us. Without those who would murder us for wanting to choose how to live our own lives.
“This world will be a world with all the imperfections and uncertainty of life, with all the consequences of poor choices, with all the hardships and failures that life presents, but it will be a world in which we have a chance to make what we will of our lives, a world in which our lives are our own and our achievements are our own, a world in which man can learn, create, accomplish, and keep the products of his mind and labors. This will be a world of liberty, a world in which people have the right to live their life as they wish, to believe as they wish, as long as they follow reasoned laws and do not use force to impose their will on others.
“Not everyone in this world will succeed, or be happy, or even understand how to make a moral life for themselves. For now, though, for those of us who are living, it will be a world without the followers of the Order.
“This is a world of life. Life is what we make of it. We may fail. But for the time being, we will have the freedom to succeed or to fail. How we honor that freedom will be up to each of us.
“Perhaps our children will throw all this away, wanting to s
ink back into the misery of faith, of wishing, of force, but that, too, will be the world they create anew for themselves. That will be their choice, their life. They, too, will have to suffer the consequences if they fail to mind the lessons learned through our struggle. That is their responsibility to themselves, to their own lives.
“But for now, for those of us actually alive, those of us who exist now, this will be a world where reason is free to allow us to live our lives, lives without the beliefs of the Imperial Order to blight us.
“Despite the harm those in that newly distant world have inflicted on us, I will not kill them. I don’t need to kill them. My responsibility to myself and those I love is to remove the threat so that we may live. I have done that.
“Our revenge will be to live lives filled with love, laughter, and joy.
“We will turn our attention and precious lives to the meaningful matters of life, to those we love and care about, to our future.
“Those of you in the newly distant world can look forward to what you would have brought us: a thousand years of darkness.
“I expect that you shall forever worship that to which you no longer will have any connection, or any possibility of a connection, that you will forever pray for an afterlife with the Creator in the spirit world, but you will be forever cut off from any world but your own. In that distant world you will have your own lives, and after you die you will be dead. Your spirits will no longer exist. Your souls will extinguish along with your lives.
“You will have your lives, and if you waste them by continuing to worship other worlds, wishing for invented visions of eternal salvation, wanting an escape from the reality of existence, you will reap only the emptiness of death after enduring lives unlived. You will have a chance at life; it will be up to you to value those precious lives or to cast them away for nothing.
“You wanted a new dawn of mankind. You wanted a world of life in which pining for other realms invented in your minds alone was the righteous cause of mankind. I grant you your wish. Now you must live with it.
“We will be free of you.
“Your world will be yours. You can never return to this world, for there will be no way back. Once this gateway closes, there will be no underworld for you as a conduit back, no other world for you but your own. There will be no means to get to this world and what ever worlds layer it.
“Those of us who remain behind will continue in our world as it has been, with what ever other realms have always existed around this world, the world of life.
“Your world will be surrounded by no other realms. It will be an island of life. Eternity will separate you from everything here. That means that you will be cut off from the underworld, the world of the dead.
“Your existence in your world is finite. You will have your lives, but when you die your souls will cease to exist. You have only one existence—in your world of life. If you continue to waste it, if you fail to use your minds to properly grasp the reality of your world, your singular existence, you will lose out on the priceless value of your only life.
“You have life. You now have your own world. You can never return to this one. You can never again harm us. I give you what you have wanted: a world without dragons…and without all that goes with magic. You will forever be left longing for what you no longer can have.
“I am sure that every new day will bring us challenges to overcome, but the beliefs of the Order will not be one of them. As Nicci said, you are irrelevant.”
CHAPTER 63
In the pure white void, his sister, Jennsen, stepped into view. Tom was with her, his arm reassuringly resting around her shoulders. Anson, Owen, and Marilee were there as well. Except for Tom, they were all pristinely ungifted—pillars of Creation.
“Richard,” Jennsen said, “we want to go to that new world.”
A tear rolled down Richard’s cheek. He knew that every one of those like her was listening, and they were all in agreement.
“You all have every right to stay and live free here.”
“I know,” she said for them all.
“But you have taught me the value of life, and of respecting the lives of others. This is a world with magic. We don’t want our lives to be at the expense of this world, or of lives here whose existence depends on magic. We are pillars of Creation. We need to grow and build, to create our own world, a world without magic. This is your world. That distant world is ours.”
Richard cupped her cheek. “As much as I would want you to stay, I understand.”
More than understanding, he had known that they would want to go to that other world.
Richard smiled at how beautiful she truly was, at how good a person she truly was. “I think you will find a safe home for yourself and your friends.”
“Do you think we will be safe, Lord Rahl?” Tom asked. “I mean, considering the nature of the people you sent to inhabit that distant world?”
Richard nodded. “Movements like the Order, which only degrades and destroys the lives of its believers, needs an enemy to divert attention from the profound misery it produces. A great demon gives them an excuse for their misery. Such an enemy, as we have been, is the glue that binds their flailing suffering together. Without the excuse of a powerful evil enemy to blame, their ideas, even if they burn out of control for a thousand years, eventually collapse in on themselves. Simple tyranny usually rises up from those ashes to spring back to smoldering flame over and over throughout history in endless cycles of blaming people in the past.
“The pristinely ungifted will be far too small an enemy for the Order to be aware of, or to notice, or to blame. You will simply be too small and insignificant in numbers to be a worthy excuse.”
“We will be safe,” Jennsen said, answering the concern still in Richard’s eyes. “Without an enemy like they had here to blame, to battle, to conquer, the people of the Order will turn their hatred inward. They will prey on their own. We will see to it that we don’t bring too much attention to ourselves. We will be fine.”
Richard nodded. “If you get in their way, in their sight, they will crush you, but I’m hoping that you and your people can find a place—perhaps in the area there that is known as Bandakar here in this world. You can live your own lives, there. I wish it were otherwise, but I know it must be this way.
“I have sent the Chainfire spell to that distant, new world,” he told her. “It will work its way through all the people there, erasing the memory of this world, of what you have left behind. I must leave it infected with the chimes to insure that any magic carried into that distant world will be destroyed.
“Along with magic, memories of this place will be destroyed.
“I have no idea how the voids in the memories of people will be filled in—what they will eventually substitute for their real history, their real memories. Those created memories will by definition be more tenacious than the reality of what once was, of what was here. Those created memories will link together in the mind of man through the Chainfire spell, becoming a common conviction, a shared certainty. Those beliefs will hold sway over future generations despite all else. Any memory of us will eventually be lost in that distant world.
“But I can’t count on the Chainfire spell and the contamination destroying all magic the way I believe it will. I simply can’t count on those who will still have magic there for a time not finding a way around it.”
Richard laid a hand on Jennsen’s shoulder. “You, and those like you, will be the insurance for the future of your world, insurance that magic will forever be erased from existence in that world, from future generations. Once your descendants eventually touch everyone born, there will be no more magic in that distant world, even if some try to preserve it, secret it away for their own despotic ambitions. Time, and all those pillars of Creation who are born, will spread your trait of having no spark of the gift so that in the future, no one in that world can ever again be born with any spark of the gift, none will ever be able to bring back magic
. But it will live on here.
“I know that you will remember me, Jennsen, but I also know that after time, that memory, along with all of this world, all that was in it, will slip away and come to be nothing more than legend.”
Richard turned to Tom, the big, blond-headed D’Haran. “You are not pristinely ungifted.”
Tom nodded. “I know, but I love Jennsen and wish to be with her more than anything in life. Wherever we are together is wonderful, and we will have a wonderful life together. I’m rather excited about the prospect of helping to build a world for us, a world where Jennsen and all the other ungifted will not be different, but simply people.
“I ask, Lord Rahl, that you release me from service to you so that I may devote my life to loving and protecting your sister, as well as our people there in our new world.”
Richard smiled as he clasped hands with the man. “There is no need for me to release you, Tom. You have always served me by your own grace. I will be eternally thankful that you have made Jennsen happy.”
Tom saluted with a fist to his heart, then, grinning, embraced Richard briefly. Owen, Anson, and Marilee, also grinning with the excitement of their lives ahead, clasped hands with Richard, thanking him for teaching them to embrace life.
“I love you,” Jennsen whispered as she gave him a tight hug. “Thank you, Richard, for helping me love life. Even if I forget you, you will always be in my heart.”
As she stepped away, she and the others began to slip away into the white void of the gateway.
All alone in the white void, Richard gripped the Sword of Truth to withdraw it from the box of Orden, to pull the key from the gateway. He could only think that even if everything had worked as he had planned, the one thing he had hoped for the most for himself had failed.
The sterile field he had needed to allow the power of Orden to succeed had been tainted. Kahlan had known that he loved her.
“You are a rare person, Richard Rahl,” came the most beautiful voice in the world.