Richard didn’t like the idea of being on a mountain in a storm with such violent lightning, but his need to destroy the device made him ignore the danger and drove him onward. After he destroyed it, they would be forever trapped in this awful, wet world.
After hours of climbing, they finally began to emerge above the cloud cover and into the strange, dry forest of small rock towers. The sun was still obscured by an even higher layer of clouds, but at least it wasn’t raining, and it was brighter. The lightning moved some distance away along with the huge, dark, billowing clouds, but Richard could still see the near-constant flickers of lightning inside those clouds down below them, lighting them with an eerie reddish, firelike glow.
He didn’t know that he would ever be able to get used to this strange world, but he knew that he didn’t really have a choice. It made him wonder if life would be worth living here after he destroyed the device.
As Richard and Vika wove their way through the maze of rock spires that had been carved, shaped, and softened by the weather, they finally reached the cathedral of those stone shapes surrounding and overlooking the device. It sat across the way at the edge of an expanse of white sand.
He could tell that Vika, not usually given to emotion, was feeling as despondent as he was at the prospect of destroying their way back to their own world. But it had to be done.
Richard drew his sword.
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The sound of the blade being drawn from its scabbard rang out, echoing back from the complex shapes of the stone walls all around them. It was the forlorn sound of finality, of all his hopes and dreams ending. That distinctive ringing sound caused the massive crowd of Glee following them, who had seen the sword kill the goddess, pause with concern before backing away. Many moved back among the safety of the standing stones.
In his mind’s eye, Richard could see Kahlan’s smile. He had to force the image from his thoughts lest it be too unbearable or even prevent him from doing what he knew he had to do to protect her and all the people in her world. He hoped that one day his home world would again have a Lord Rahl, one who cared about his people: his son. One day it would also have a new Confessor to help protect them: his daughter.
For now, though, Richard was the only protection for that world, and to protect it, he had to destroy the device that allowed the Glee to go there. None of his people would ever know what he had done to save their world, and one day the Glee would only be a terrible memory. New generations would likely not even know anything about them or the horrors they had brought to the world.
He looked up overhead when he noticed that it was getting brighter. He saw that the clouds had parted enough to give them a rare glimpse of the sky. The sun itself wasn’t in view, but the sky was a bright reddish orange. Because it was still late in the day, he thought it likely that it was near sunset. He couldn’t yet see the stars, but if he could, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to recognize them from a strange world he didn’t want to be in.
So far, since he had arrived, the sky was rarely visible. The continual, heavy, rolling, boiling clouds seemed to make this world all that much gloomier. He didn’t know if it was simply a seasonal weather pattern, or a habitual one.
Kahlan was out there, somewhere, among stars he couldn’t yet see. He wondered if in her world, when she looked up, she might one day look toward the forsaken place in the sky where he would be forever stranded.
His joy at having a glimpse of the reddish sky instead of the continual overcast vista was short-lived when his gaze reluctantly settled on the device waiting for him across the sand.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Vika whispered from close behind him. “Once you do, there is no going back.”
He looked over his shoulder into her blue eyes. She questioned his choices and decisions quite often, sometimes in the form of a cutting remark, but he knew that it was her way of testing his confidence in a course of action, a way to get him to reaffirm his decisions within his own mind. When it came down to it, he knew that she had complete confidence in him.
This time, it was a critical, consequential question.
“What choice do I have?”
Vika’s face said it all as she nodded slightly.
“None, I guess.”
Richard could feel the power of the sword storming through every fiber of his being. That power pulled and tugged at him, wanting his anger to join with that power. But this time, he knew that venting his anger on the device that would forever separate him from Kahlan seemed out of place. This was an instance more of solemn duty than rage.
Besides, Richard couldn’t seem to bring forth any anger of his own to join with that of the sword, or at least none he dared unleash.
Finally he decided that it was best to simply get it over with and not dwell on it, so that he could at last rest easy in the knowledge that it was done and that Kahlan and their children would not have to live in fear of Glee coming to slaughter them. So many had already died a horrific and senseless death. He couldn’t realistically do anything for them, but he could at least see to it that the ones still alive would be spared the terror the Glee could bring.
As he crossed the expanse, with the tip of the sword dragging through the sand behind him, he was reminded again of the round area of white sand in the Garden of Life at the People’s Palace. That was a place of great significance. So much had started there, and ended there, and now it was all ending in a similar circular area of white sand in a world far away.
As Richard got closer, something about the symbols on the stone device made him pause for a moment, staring. He moved closer then to have a better look, to see if his initial thought could actually be possible.
When he realized that he was right, he sheathed his sword.
Vika looked suddenly concerned. “What’s wrong?”
Richard hardly heard her as he dropped to his knees in front of the stone and reached out to run his fingertips lightly over the symbols on the smooth surface.
“Lord Rahl, what is it?”
He could hardly believe what he was seeing.
“These symbols are in the language of Creation. It’s not precisely the same as the symbols I’ve seen before, but they’re awfully close. I can tell right off that most of them are substantially the same. There are some differences, but they’re close enough that I think I might be able to translate them.”
Vika rushed up and fell to her knees beside him. “Really? What does it say?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Well, if you can recognize it as the language of Creation, and you understand that language, then it only makes sense that it must be something you can read, right?”
“Yes, I think I can. Some of it, anyway. From the parts I am able to read, what it says is incredibly complicated.”
“What do you mean by complicated?”
“Well, in many ways, it reminds me of a complex constructed spell.”
“A constructed spell?” She leaned closer to him with an astonished look. “You mean magic?”
Richard nodded as he tried to decipher one of the symbols having to do with intersecting lines of power.
“Yes. Like magic.”
Vika let out a sigh as she sat back on her heels. “I’m afraid that I can’t help you there. But are you sure? How could magic possibly be involved with this device?”
“Magic is involved with all the devices I’ve seen before.”
“You would know a lot more about that than I would,” she said. “I try to avoid anything having to do with magic. You seem to always be involved with it in one way or another.”
He nodded, not really hearing her as he leaned in and frowned. “It’s saying something about a ring.”
Vika stared at him. “A ring? What kind of ring?”
Richard ran his fingers over the symbols, trying to understand what he was reading out of order and out of context. Doing so always made translations much more difficult. The language of Creation was not ea
sy to read as it was, but a lot of it had to be read in context to be understood.
He searched for the beginning to try to read it from where the description started. The problem was, he wasn’t entirely sure, yet, exactly where that starting point was.
He read several of the symbols looking for the beginning when he recognized something. He looked to the sand at the sides of the stone.
“It’s talking about a ring beginning and ending here.”
“What could that mean?”
“I’m not sure.” He pointed beside the stone. “Dig in the sand, right there, and see if there is a ring of some kind.”
As Vika did as he asked, Richard went to the other side and started digging with his hands.
“I found something,” Vika called over to him.
As he dug, his fingers touched something hard and smooth. “Me too.”
He started clearing away the sand, exposing what was buried there. He brushed sand away to expose more of it. Vika was doing the same. In a few moments they each had uncovered gleaming metal. It was the color of gold and perfectly round, about as thick as his forearm. It was not cold to the touch like some metals. It felt more like real gold.
As he and Vika both followed it along, uncovered more and more, they began to see that it went out in both directions from the stone, and by the way it curved as it moved away from that square stone, it soon became obvious that it was a gold ring that, from what they had so far uncovered, looked like it encompassed most of the round area of sand.
“What should we do?” Vika asked.
Richard was using his hands to sweep away sand from the top of the ring. “It’s not buried very deep. Let’s uncover it all and confirm if it really does go all the way around in a ring.”
They worked with urgency to solve the mystery. They both felt driven by the discovery, wanting to excavate it to see if it told them anything important. Richard couldn’t imagine, though, what use it could be to them. After all, the whole thing would soon be destroyed.
The hundreds of Glee watching them from around the whole area and back in among the stone formations didn’t say anything or try to interfere, but it was clear that they were as astonished as Richard and Vika. They had lived with and used this device all their lives, and yet they had never known that the ring was right there, connected to it, just under the surface of the sand.
In a short time Richard and Vika had uncovered the entire ring. Both of them stood and stepped back to look at it.
Richard thought that it was either made of or covered with gold. The golden ring went in a full circle, interrupted only by the stone sitting at one side of the sand. The ring was polished and so perfectly smooth that Richard could see his distorted reflection in it. It was simply a smooth, polished golden surface. It had no writing or symbols on it.
Richard looked over at the stone. It had a massive amount of writing on it.
He rushed across the white sand to see if he could tell if the writing on the stone might reveal something about the purpose of the golden ring.
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“Anything?” Vika sounded impatient. “You’ve been looking at it long enough that you must be able to read at least some of it. You should be able to tell something from the symbols, right? So, what does what you’ve translated so far say?”
Richard sat back on his heels and looked over at her. “The Glee are wrong in calling it a device.”
“Really? Why? What is it called?”
“It’s called a gateway.”
Vika stared at him a long moment. “A gateway?”
“That’s what it says.”
Vika gestured at the stone. “You mean … like a gateway to other worlds?”
Richard nodded. “It would seem so.”
She frowned as she considered. “I guess that makes sense. But it seems like an awful lot of writing just to say that it’s called the gateway. Does it really take all of that to say it’s called the gateway?”
Richard let out a deep sigh as he looked back at the stone. He gently ran his fingers over the symbols as he considered them.
“No, that’s only a small amount of what this says. There’s a lot more to it. The symbols are similar to those in our world, and many are the same, but not all are and there are key differences from any I’ve seen before. Some of the more complex symbols are meant to convey concepts by using underlying elements, but not all of those use the same elements as the ones I’m familiar with. Even though it’s in many ways different, it’s still hauntingly similar to what was once a common form of writing in our world.”
“You mean it’s the same as the writing all over that witch woman, Niska, back in our world? The one in the swamp by Agaden Reach where we caught up with the Mother Confessor.”
“The very same. And it’s close to the same as in a lot of other places in our world. It predates everything else. All other writing, which involves words rather than pictorial elements and concepts, came after the language of Creation.”
Vika gave him a blank look. “So … what, exactly, are you trying to say?”
Richard shook his head with a sigh as he looked back at the stone. “I don’t know. I’m just saying that this has to be very old. But more than that, don’t you think that it’s more than strange for the language of Creation to be on this stone in another world besides ours?”
“It has been here for a very long time,” Sang said from back beyond the sand, trying to sound helpful. He had stepped a little closer, away from the others watching. Richard had forgotten that the Glee packed in among the stone spires were listening. “Maybe that is what you mean? That it has been here for a very long time?”
Richard knew that Sang didn’t grasp the significance of what he had discovered. There was no way he could. He wasn’t in the mood to give lessons, though, so he kept it simple.
“Longer than that.”
All of the Glee looked to be confused as they whispered among themselves. They clearly had a hard time grasping anything Richard was saying. The language of Creation, after all, had no meaning for them.
Vika slapped a hand onto the stone. “But it could be that this thing, this gateway, may have once come to our world and given us the language of Creation, don’t you suppose? Much like it came to this world?”
Richard shook his head. “I have absolutely no idea, Vika. That seems like it could be true, but I don’t think that’s the case. I simply have no way of saying for sure. What I do know is that these symbols are instructions.”
Vika withdrew her hand from the stone as she leaned close to him. “Instructions?” she whispered. “Instructions for what?”
Richard leaned in toward the stone again to put his fingers on the symbols. “I’m not ready to say, yet. I need to read some more so I can try to piece it all together.”
Vika stood to leave him to it. She walked the perimeter just beyond the gold ring. Richard thought she looked like she might be making sure the Glee stayed back out of the way. The more he read, the more he thought that might be a very good idea.
On one of her rounds, as she went past him, she bent close. “Anything useful, yet?”
Richard looked up at her. “Tell Sang I’d like him to come over here. I want to ask him something. Be casual about it. I don’t want the others to hear me.”
When she strolled back with the tall, nearly black Glee, Richard stood.
“What is it?” Sang asked. “Why are you not destroying the device? I thought that was why you were—”
“How did you use this device to come to my world? You came a number of times. How did you do it? How did you make the device work for you?”
Sang was taken off-guard by the question. He thought about it briefly, and then looked over at the device.
“There is a place on the top, on the other side, that I used to make the device work so that I could go into darkness. That is how I reached your world.”
“Show me,” Richard said.
Sang nodded and then led them
around the square block of stone to stand just outside of the ring, facing the slanted top. Richard came around with him and watched.
Sang spread his right claws to extend just the first one, much as a person would extend their first finger to point.
“When I wished to go to your world, I would put one claw into this place, here.”
Sang used the claw to tap the sloped top of the stone. There was a slot right next to where he tapped. It looked like he would be able to fit the single claw all the way down into the slot. That was what Richard had thought from what he had read so far. But he knew that there had to be a lot more to it.
“How did you know where to go? When you went into darkness, it didn’t just spit you out somewhere at random. How did it allow you to come to our world?”
“In the beginning, long before we all came alive, it is said that Glee would sometimes try putting their claw into that place. They were never seen again. No one knew what happened to them. So maybe, as you say, the device sent them someplace where they died. Or maybe it sent them nowhere at all and they long ago simply vanished into darkness.
“The Golden Goddess, besides being bigger than other Glee, was also smarter. She was the first to learn that she could ask the device to send her to other worlds where she could survive. I believe that was the key. The device then picked places like that.
“She learned right at first that she could return by what we now call the lifeline. She would travel to other worlds and then come back and tell others what she had discovered. As she found worlds for them to raid, they came to call her the collector of worlds.
“After she found a world she liked, she would then insert one claw, and think of the place she wished to go back to, and the device would send her into darkness until she arrived at that world. They began to call her a goddess, much like they thought of the ones who had left the device as gods. Because she alone knew how it worked, she began to gain followers who called her goddess, and then the Golden Goddess. She liked having followers who worshipped her.
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