Into Darkness

76

The air within the gold ring that had been glowing with a roar abruptly began to flare with points of light packed together so tightly that it almost looked like the air itself was burning white hot. All of those sparkling points of light gave off a crackling sound that replaced the roar but was just as loud.

Richard hugged the stone with all his might as he gripped Vika’s hand as hard as he could. He dared not lose his grip on her hand. He thought he might be hurting her, but she was squeezing back just as hard.

He closed his eyes, trying to empty his mind of all the thousand worries questioning everything he had just done. No one had taught him these procedures. He had learned them from the gateway itself through its verification web. In essence, the gateway had shown him what it needed at each step.

His grandfather Zedd had taught him that many dangerous things of magic had fail-safes that prevented anyone who wasn’t supposed to from using them. He worried that maybe the things the gateway had revealed it needed to function and reset might be one of those fail-safe traps to not only prevent him from successfully using something that he was not meant to use but kill him in the process.

Many fail-safes were, after all, lethal.

He mentally ran through everything he had done, trying to make sure he hadn’t overlooked anything. He knew he had done a thorough analysis and as a result he had disarmed all the fail-safe sequences he had found from the interior perspective of the verification web. He tried to think if it was possible there had been any that he could have missed. But if there were, it was too late now.

He knew he needed to focus, so he finally put those concerns from his mind.

He called the target.

He tried as hard as he could not to let any other thoughts but that target enter his mind. Around the fringes of his awareness, though, a continual stream of little things nagged and nibbled, calling to him, trying to pull him away to think about each of them. He redoubled his effort to put them from his mind.

As he did when he shot his bow, he saw the target in his mind, centered on it, and pulled it toward him.

He didn’t feel anything trying to force him from the stone, or Vika from his grip, but he dared not loosen his hold on either. He had to remind himself what mattered and put both of those thoughts from his mind as he concentrated on calling the target.

He stole a quick peek. It was hard to see anything through the sparkling points of light, but he could detect the windswept stone all around them rapidly getting increasingly wavy. He thought it might be that his eyes were watering, so he blinked and returned to concentrating on calling the target.

He had done everything to the best of his ability. He knew he could no longer dare to spare the mental effort to worry about any of it. Now, he simply focused on calling the target. That was all that mattered. It was everything that mattered.

Suddenly there was a thunderous rumbling sound, low, intense, powerful. Even with his eyes closed, he could see the flash of light that had caused it.

The next thing he was aware of, before he could begin to understand what had just happened, was darkness beyond dark.

Abruptly, there was no longer any sound at all. The profound silence rang in his ears until it hurt, and then even that sensation was gone.

Richard felt nothing. It was a complete lack of any sights or sounds or sensations. He couldn’t tell up from down.

He couldn’t feel if he still had hold of Vika’s hand or if he was still holding the stone. He desperately hoped that he was. If he wasn’t, then it had all been for nothing and he would go forever into darkness until even his thoughts gradually disintegrated into nothing and became part of the void.

He had absolutely no sense of time. He didn’t know if it had been minutes, hours, or even days since the silent darkness had abruptly collapsed in on him. Even that sensation of falling and the awful expectation of hitting the bottom left him. Having done this before made it easier to do again. He told himself that this was no different than it had been last time.

But somehow, in some indescribable way, this was different.

Very different. Profoundly different.

Despite having done this before, it was a sensation of no sensation that left him feeling hollow and lost.

Since he had done this before, it was relatively easy to talk himself out of any panic. He knew that eventually it had to end—in one way or the other—so he tried his best to disregard the sensation, or rather, the lack of sensation, and focus only on calling the target. That was his only job, now.

To keep his mind from wandering into disturbing places even as he concentrated on calling the target, he thought of Kahlan in the background behind the target.

He pictured her face in his mind.

He smiled when she smiled.