Warheart (24 page)

“Hannis Arc is the one who gave Darken Rahl the last box of Orden,” Kahlan said, trying to keep track of it all in her head. “You mean he did that to help start this prophecy to unfold? The prophecy he plays a central part in and that he would benefit from?”

“Exactly. He has been moving the pieces around like pieces on a chessboard in order to bring about the events the scrolls talk about. It's as if he sees prophecy of himself doing these things, and then does them to make the prophecy reality. Mohler said that he was a master chess player, and from what I've learned about the game, much of the thinking in the game carries over to making moves in life.

“He wanted to open this gateway through this spectral fold, because he needed Sulachan's help to conquer the world of life, so he put the boxes in play by giving the third box of Orden to Darken Rahl. He was making moves that had repercussions later on, all down the line. He knew from the scrolls that giving Darken Rahl the last box he needed to put them in play would trigger the events in prophecy. Unlike us, he knew from the scrolls what the power of Orden really was.

“Hannis Arc was moving a pawn, knowing from prophecy that if the boxes were in play, I would defeat Darken Rahl and therefore go on to become the Lord Rahl leading the D'Haran Empire that would then be drawn into the war against the Imperial Order.

“He knew that I would use the power of Orden to end the war with the Imperial Order, which is a part of the larger great war that Sulachan started so long ago. After all, Sulachan created the dream walkers. Emperor Jagang was a descendant of those dream walkers created by Sulachan so that he would start the war that I would end by using the power of Orden that Hannis Arc would then use, once the star shift weakened the veil, to bring Sulachan back from the dead.”

Kahlan pressed her hands to her head. “Dear spirits. And they were using this knowledge of the use of Orden all along?”

Richard nodded. “Hannis Arc had already moved that pawn long ago by giving the box to Darken Rahl to begin the chain of events that would eventually get me to use Orden's power, because he didn't have the key to it, but the scrolls said I would, which would in turn get him what he was ultimately after: to be ruler of the world of life. Which would get Sulachan what he wanted by being able to come back from the world of the dead, which he helped engineer by creating the dream walkers, and so on and so forth.”

“But then he was carrying out prophecy that hadn't happened yet,” she protested. “He was creating prophecy, in effect. He was creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Richard showed her a smile. “Exactly. You see, prophecy is an underworld power–”

“Wait. How can it be an underworld power? You said that before but I don't think that can be right. Prophecy comes from prophets predicting the future. Hannis Arc saw that prophecy and took the actions he did in order to make sure everything was in place for it to happen as in the prophecy.”

“But the prophecy itself came from the underworld in the first place,” Richard said. “Prophecy is an artifact of the world of the dead.”

Kahlan shook her head. “Prophecy is given by prophets in this world, not the world of the dead.”

Richard leaned toward her in a meaningful manner. “So we always thought. And that is the key to it all.”

“I don't follow what you mean.”

Richard gestured to the scrolls. “Prophecy actually originates in the underworld, from the spirits of the dead, and prophets in the world of life are able to channel those prophecies in this world.”

Kahlan took a deep breath to fortify herself against her growing frustration. “I don't understand. How could they originate there, in the world of the dead, from spirits?”

Richard leaned forward again, almost with delight at what he had discovered. “This is where it starts to get complicated.”

“Starts? Richard, I don't–”

He held up a hand. “Hear me out, first, and then the bigger picture will all start to make sense.”

She pressed her lips tight and remained silent so he could go on. She knew Richard, and she knew he didn't go off on pointless tangents.

“The underworld is eternal, which makes it timeless,” he began in a calm voice. “We've always understood that much of it. Time has no meaning in an eternal world because there is no beginning and no end of time there, so there is no way to measure a segment of forever. Right?”

Kahlan conceded the point with a nod. “Right.”

“One day or a thousand years is the same because with no beginning and no end there are no units of measure for time there–no limits to measure a day, a year, a century.”

“So?”

“So, in the underworld, where nothing changes and there is no future as such–because there are no boundaries and no units to measure time–the future is the same as now. There can be no tomorrow, so there can be no future as such.

“The future in the world of the dead takes place in what the scrolls call ‘the eternal now.'”

Kahlan scratched an eyebrow. “The eternal now?”

“That's right–the eternal now. In the underworld there is only ‘now.'” Richard held up a finger to make a point, reminding Kahlan very much of Zedd when he did so. “Time is a concept that only has relevance in this world, where there are beginnings and ends to things–days, years, lives. In the underworld, a soul never dies. It is eternal.

“The underworld does not have those things needed from which to construct the concept of time. There is no yesterday in the underworld because it's eternally the same there, eternally unvarying, eternally changeless, so there can be no such thing as yesterday. By the same token, there can be no tomorrow. Right? The sun does not rise and set there. It's always the same. There are no ‘days' there, nothing to mark time, no end of time. See what I mean? It's all an eternal now.

“Since ‘now' in the underworld is an eternity–the eternal now–there is no future as such there because, in a place with no markers for time, such a thing can't be delineated. This means that what we would think of as happening in the future, here in our world, in the eternity of the underworld actually happens in this homogeneous soup of the eternal now.

“We think of events happening in our future because in our world we have time–a today and a tomorrow–but you can't think of it the same way there.”

Kahlan stared off into the memory. “I remember when I was there, in the underworld. I don't recall any sense of how long. I was only there. Always, forever, unchanging.”

“Exactly,” he said. “In the eternal now of the underworld, those events, which all take place in the eternal now, all happen together and are the purview of a power known as Regula. Regula, you might say, is the sum of everything–everything that can happen, everything that will happen.

“Once the power of Regula was sent to this world, imprisoned in that case buried in the People's Palace, it compressed the future–what we know as prophecy because it hasn't happened yet–into the now, our present, because to Regula there is no future, no past.

“Regula, being an underworld power, can't differentiate between today and tomorrow, or today and a year from today. It only knows everything that will happen, the totality of events, but since it's an underworld power it has no real concept of time, so it doesn't know when those things will happen, or which one of them will happen for that matter, because everything is in a state of constant flux.

“So, to Regula, when it says the ceiling will fall in, that event has already happened. It's not predicting, it's reporting.”

Kahlan folded her arms, squinting, trying to reconcile it in her mind. “That doesn't make any sense. I don't understand.”

“Prophecy is a compression of the future into the present. Everything that takes place continually alters the totality of what Regula knows. It contains events without the quality of time. Without time there is no ‘future' so it is all happening now.

“That's the specific power that Regula controls: the eternal now.”

Kahlan gave him a look from under her brow. “And that is what the scrolls call it? The ‘eternal now'?”

“Yes. Here it gets more complex, so you need to let me get through this part and then you'll see how it all fits together.”

Kahlan nodded for him to go on, making an earnest effort to listen with an open mind.

“The underworld is timeless, with everything there in the eternal now, right? But here in this world, where there is time, if you reveal the future, then there really is no future as such. You are pulling the future backward to right now. This is an aspect of the underworld, not the world of life. Prophecy compresses what will happen into what we know right now, into the eternal now. But that is an underworld quality and it doesn't belong here.”

Richard could apparently see by the look on her face that she was lost, so he came at it a little differently. “In prophecy the future is revealed to us now, right? If we read a prophecy about an event in the future–say a queen having a child–then that future event is pulled backward from its rightful place of where it will happen in the future, back to today. See what I mean? So now, when you read the prophecy, you are reading what will happen, so that future has in a way become real right now. That's why it's called the eternal now.

“Without time in the underworld it's all one long eternal now. Here, though, it's a perversion of the nature of time in our world. It's a corrupting element. An underworld element. Here, in this world, future events aren't supposed to happen now. That is an underworld contamination leaking into our world.

“That's why I've always instinctively hated prophecy–because prophecy is actually a component of the underworld. Prophecy is an element that in its natural state does not contain an element of time. It belongs in the world of the dead where it came from, where there is no time. It is part of death itself. I've always instinctively recognized prophecy as carrying death within it.

“The reason I instinctively recognized that, is because I'm the one.”

Kahlan tilted her head toward him. “The one. You mean, the pebble in the pond?”

“Yes. The balance to prophecy is free will. Now we can understand for the first time exactly why. Acting on free will preempts that eternal now by pulling the future away from the eternal now, pulling timelessness away from it by canceling the prediction with the use of free will–human choice.

“Free choice is the counter to prophecy. It's a living aspect, the balance to the dead aspect of prophecy. Prophecy is an element of the world of the dead, while free will is an element of the world of life.

“The wrinkle in this spectral fold was created by events long ago, but in the underworld those thousands of years are in the eternal now. So, the spectral fold–the star shift–initiated by my igniting the power of Orden does not simply ripple through space with the spectral folds, it ripples through time.”

Kahlan gestured to the desk. “But all those things you did to trigger these events were predicted in prophecy and written in these scrolls.”

Richard gave her a cunning smile. “Of course they were. Sulachan sent the prophecy to this world, through prophets in this world, so that they would write it in the scrolls, so that Hannis Arc would read it and initiate it all by putting the boxes of Orden in play. It is all part of Sulachan's grand plan. He began laying the groundwork for it when he was still alive.

“You see, at some point long past, before Sulachan ever came along, the good spirits in the underworld, knowing the danger, wanted to protect the power of Regula from being misused, so they sent the power to this world and hid it for safekeeping–or so they thought.

“But because Regula is part of the eternal now, and exists in that eternal now, there is no accurate way of telling exactly when Regula actually appeared here in this world. What those spirits didn't know when they sent it here was that this power created a breach between worlds, allowing prophecy to cross over through it from that world. Without Regula being there in the underworld to contain it, prophecy continued to leak through the veil along the lines of the Grace.”

“So then,” she said, “those good spirits didn't actually do the good thing they thought. By sending Regula here they created a terrible problem.”

Richard shrugged. “They exist in the eternal now, where all possible futures exist. Perhaps they saw a future gaining strength that was more terrible and more dangerous than we can imagine, so they hid Regula in this world to choke off that terrible future. For all we know, had they not done so, maybe the world of life would have ended thousands and thousands of years ago.

“Anyway, for whatever reasons those good spirits had at the time, Regula was sent here to this world. Because of it being part of the eternal now, it doesn't behave the way we would expect something here to behave so there is no way of knowing precisely when it actually came into being in this world.

“What is known, though, is that sometime later, after it was already rooted here in this world, Sulachan found out about it and he sparked its power, using it to ignite a firestorm of prophecy flooding into this world. All the thousands of books of prophecy written since the great war that we've found in libraries are the flames of that conflagration, a hidden, smoldering part of Sulachan's plan. This is how he brought the House of Rahl and then Hannis Arc into his web to help him in his struggle.

“Wizards came along–prophets–who tapped into this stream of prophecy flowing along the lines of the Grace and, thinking they were doing good, channeled these predictions which unbeknownst to them were flooding through the veil from the underworld. Without knowing it, they were tapping into the eternal now and poisoning our world with underworld power.

“As long as Regula is in this world, as long as it lives, it will continue to poison this world with prophecy.”