Into Darkness

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.

He finally released Vika’s shoulder, and she his as they straightened. He could tell by the look on her face that she had experienced the same thing he had coming to this brooding, reddish, windswept world. He let his hand drop away from Sang.

He leaned toward Vika and whispered, “What colors do you see?”

She looked around. “Everything looks red. At least my outfit fits right in.”

Richard nodded. “That it does.”

As he looked around, he could see from the clouds between the reddish rock formations that they were someplace high. Over the edge, down below them, the ground was obscured by the rolling, roiling clouds drifting swiftly by the high place where they were.

“Come,” Sang said to them. “We must get away from this dry place before the others come.”

He turned and made his way between some of the surrounding rock formations. They were striated in layers of different colors of dark brownish reds and looked like the wind had eroded the soft rock, making smooth, round depressions and curving edges. It was disorienting to look at.

Richard could see by the clouds down lower that they were high up in some kind of desolate, mountainous terrain. There was absolutely no vegetation. He remembered Sang saying that it was a dry place. The wind carried a lot of moisture and made a ghostly moaning sound through the strangely shaped rock formations. Apparently, the air, as damp as it was, was not damp enough for the Glee.

Trying to focus his eyes in this reddish world was giving him a headache. The sand he and Vika were on was the least red thing he could see.

“This is my home world,” Sang said as he waved an arm, urging them on, “the home world of the Glee. We have arrived safely. Now we need to get down out of this place.”