fic: storm born - chapter thirty-eight
Omggggg I'm SO SORRY this took so long. Please blame a really busy Thanksgiving, a horrible cold, and whoever it was that made me start watching that puppet show Farscape.
Title: Storm BornAuthor: Morgen
Summary: It was supposed to be their one chance to be together. Instead it plunged them straight into a nightmare.
Disclaimer: I don't own LOTS or profit from it in any way. Just worship it from afar.
Rating: PG-14
XXXVIII. KEPT
He shuddered into himself like waking from a nightmare in one brutal jolt, his eyes slamming open. Richard quaked and clutched at the place where the sword had skewered his belly. He found only flesh, smooth and unmarred. The blade was gone. Still breathing too hard, his reluctant senses began to focus. He was naked, and his skin felt strangely slick, as if he’d been coated head to toe in oil. The air was thick with a strong, unpleasant odor that reminded him of mold and sweat.
He felt the naked limbs of others pressed heavy against him, and slowly sat up, pushing a stranger’s calf from his chest. All around him were piled bodies in the thousands, each one caught in some unending expression of unbearable anguish. Near him, a man was screaming violently while he clawed at the air with gnarled toes, his head bent back at an angle that should have snapped his neck. Opposite him another sat ripping out his own hair by the handful, and casting the clumps away with a pitiful wail. Even as he did so, fresh hairs sprouted on his pale, green scalp, growing back impossibly fast only to be torn out again. Everywhere Richard looked, it was the same. More souls, more private, brutal pain. Though they were thrown together in a living knot, not one acknowledged his neighbors.
Whatever it was that trapped the others, Richard felt nothing. He realized with dull wonder that the Fatal Grace had worked just as the black book had promised, for he extricated himself from the bodies around him and stood quite easily. He was in the midst of an enormous pit. The light was poor and tinted green; it seemed to seep in from everywhere and nowhere. In the distance he could just make out rough walls of blackened rock rising impossibly high. There was nowhere to step that was not covered with a layer of the writhing dead. Richard picked his way around the bodies as best he could, but they thrashed against him without warning, and he often stepped on an errant foot or hand. Even then, no one reacted. No one came to stop him.
He studied the bodies in the pit as he walked, searching for any sign of Kahlan, but he didn’t truly expect to find her hidden there among the masses. If she were, she was already dead, and that could not be possible. Richard focused on moving faster, forcing his way towards the rocky wall of the cavern. The only way to go was up. Kahlan had entered the Underworld on foot; she had to be closer to the surface than he was.
He began scaling the steep side of the pit as soon as he found a place with a handhold. It was rough going with little purchase, his skin scraping against the unforgiving stone. He almost fell twice, catching himself just in time. The bodies below were growing smaller and smaller whenever he dared to glance down, but he pushed away his fear. Surely he couldn’t die twice.
He was about halfway up when he heard it - a woman’s voice screaming somewhere far above him. It barely sounded human it was so wretched in its misery, so tortured into something primal that every muscle in his body tensed, and he clung to the nearly vertical rock and listened to the woman wail, thrown straight back into his own memories of torture under the blistering pain of the Agiel.
There was an urgency to the screaming, a frantic quality that the souls below had lacked for all their incessant weeping. This sounded like the cry of the dying, not the dead.
“Kahlan…” He mouthed her name, and then he was moving again, reaching up and up and up until his arms burned with the effort, and he could barely see for the sweat in his eyes. He was panting hard when his hand reached the very top of the cliff, and he began the slow, tortuous process of hauling his body over. It felt like the tendons in his body were tearing in two. His muscles burned the way his skin had inside the Fatal Grace.
With a loud groan, he heaved himself up at last onto the ledge and collapsed flat on his back, chest heaving, staring up at the infinite darkness above him. When he could, he got to his knees, and then he could see how very far he’d come. Down below in the mouth of the pit, the dead looked no bigger than nightwisps. Their cries were faint now and hard to hear, but the woman he swore was Kahlan shrieked again, her cry echoing painfully in the cavern. It brought him to his feet, and then he was running wildly towards the sound, shouting her name.
It seemed too great a gift to find her now after searching so long and desperately, but the closer he got to the screaming, the more certain he became. That voice could only be Kahlan’s. And then he caught sight of her through the gloom, a crumpled figure lying defeated on the ground. Pacing an endless circle around her was the spirit of his brother.
“Get away from her,” he roared though Rahl in fact stood several paces back, and he had no way to enforce his words. Still, Rahl paused and looked up, astonishment flashing across his face as Richard came running at him.
A moment later, his surprise gave way to a twisted smirk, and Rahl waved his hand. Immediately fire erupted from the ground, and Richard stopped short, green flames rising before him. They stretched as far as he could see in either direction; there was no way around them. And when he looked up, he could see the tongues of flames licking the very roof of the cavern. Kahlan’s screams still filtered through, but he could not catch so much as a glimpse of her through the wall of dancing flame. He remembered the scholar’s words in the black book; the fires of the Underworld could not harm him. He had no option either way. He was already dead.
Bracing himself, Richard stepped forward, drawing near to the flames. He felt nothing; no warmth, no pain. And then he kept going until he was wreathed in flame of brightest green. One step, then another, and then he was through. The astonishment on Rahl’s face doubled. Richard ignored him, rushing towards Kahlan and dropping to his knees beside her. Her eyes were open, but she seemed not to see him. There was no color left in her face, and the bottom half of her dress was drenched in blood. She clutched and clawed violently at the rocks, the skin on her fingertips shredded like red ribbons. He realized then by the way she shook and groaned that she was in labor.
“Kahlan,” he cried, but it was as if she didn’t hear him at all. She kept screaming. He glared over his shoulder at his brother. “What are you doing to her?”
Rahl chuckled. “She does this to herself.”
And then he was closer than before, though Richard couldn’t recall seeing him move. Rahl knelt down beside him in his red velvet robes, and slipped an arm around him, pulling him back. His hands were too strong and too cold, his voice a velvety whisper of ‘Come with me, come with me.’
Everything before him faded away in a slow roll, gray and gone and he was all alone. Richard staggered to his feet. For a moment, he saw Kahlan standing upright, whole and no longer with child, but slim and strong once more. She was weeping and calling his name, but when he shouted back that he was here, he was right here, she ignored him. He ran to her, and she disappeared, the swath of gray nothing coming back.
He searched the void a long time, walking here and there until his feet bled, calling for her in every corner of the mist. She appeared again as suddenly as she had vanished, this time right before him. She lay at his feet, naked and weeping while Rahl writhed on top of her, pinning her down and pressing rough, unwelcome kisses to the slender curve of her neck. Fury and horror filled him, but when he bent down to pull Rahl off her, his hands closed tight around nothing. The gray had rolled in again, and she was gone.
He wandered another day, another lifetime. Richard could not say with any certainty which it was; time had ceased to have any meaning. All he knew was that he must find her. Every frantic heartbeat was one spent searching until he glimpsed her dark hair like a flag in the distance. She’d been dropped into the pit of writhing bodies where he’d first awoken, but the men had been shaken from their private nightmares to torment her. They came upon her in a mob, tugging on her hair and her dress, forcing her legs apart while she twisted and shrieked and screamed his name, always his name. He ran for her through the crowded, reeking pit, shoving men bodily out of the way. But for every step he took, she moved forward twice as much, passed from man to man, and still he could not reach her.
Eventually her screams faded and she fell still, fighting no longer as man after man had his way with her. He remembered when she’d done the same beneath him, and he felt ill.
He could not relive that nightmare again. The thought hit him hard like a slap, and Richard froze. A nightmare. He could not explain to himself how he knew, just that he did. This was a nightmare, and he had to wake up. Though there was still a man on top of Kahlan, he turned his back on her. Heart pounding wildly, he started for the gray mists.
They seemed to stretch forever, but almost immediately they began to grow thinner, and he saw a faint glimmer of green. He raced towards it, only to find himself still kneeling beside Rahl, and staring stupidly down at the ground. Kahlan lay before him, still swollen with child, as oblivious to his presence as she was to the horrors he’d just witnessed.
Richard looked at his brother, and though Rahl tried to hide it, he could tell he wasn’t supposed to have been able to escape the visions. “Let go of me,” he snarled, wrenching his arm free.
Rahl lifted his shoulder in a delicate shrug. “Go to her then. It makes no difference. Whatever spell you’re using will not last long down here. Nothing does.”
Richard tried not to think of how true that was. When dawn came, he would die in earnest. He would be of no more help to Kahlan than the thousands of dead souls caught in the Keeper’s pits. He wondered how much time he’d wasted drifting through the nightmares Rahl had sent him.
He clambered forward on his knees, desperate to reach her at last. Still, he slowed when he neared her, unsure of what would happen when the dead tried to touch the living, but his fingers found the soft skin of her cheek easily enough. Kahlan blinked, her eyes rolling his way for the first time, and she seemed to finally register his presence. Her mouth gaped as if she meant to speak, but no words came out.
“It’s all right,” he soothed, leaning closer. “I’m here.”
“Richard?” Her voice was a tiny, tremulous thing. “Are you real?”
“Yes, yes, I’m real,” he soothed, easing her into his arms. “Shhh, I’m here. It’s me.”
She pressed her face against him and let out a wretched sob. “You came,” she whispered, so soft he barely heard it.
“Always.” He smoothed back her sweat soaked hair, pressing his hand to her brow. Her skin was cold as ice to the touch; her eyes were glassy. Tears pricked his eyes as he realized she was dying. “I have to get you out of here,” he said, trying to slide an arm beneath her. He had to get her back to Zedd.
“No,” she choked out. “Too late.”
He hesitated at her words, looking up through the green gloom. He saw no path to the world above.
“Kahlan’s quite right,” said Rahl, smiling down at them. “There’s no longer any way out. I’ve seen to that. She will die soon, but you can spare her soul the fate you saw if you deliver the child.”
At his words, Kahlan thrashed and cried out. She tried to speak, but a grunt turned into an anguished wail, and she clutched at her belly, her shoulders curling off the ground. Her nostrils flared from breathing wild and irregular.
“Even now, she’s trying to push out the child, but she’s too weak. The effort is killing her.” Rahl seated himself on a nearby rock, smoothing out the folds in his red robes. “Help her, and you can have her,” he said with a shrug. “The Keeper only wants the child. Once she is born, I will open up the rift, and Kahlan can be carried back up if you prefer. Perhaps it will even be in time to spare her life.”
Richard trusted nothing Rahl told him, but he nodded as if considering his words. It was obvious Kahlan’s labor was far advanced. He wondered if their daughter was stuck in the birth channel, with Kahlan left to bleed and labor to no end.
He rested a hand on her taut belly. If the child was stuck, he didn’t understand why Rahl had done nothing to force it out. Surely if he could touch Kahlan despite being dead, then so could his brother, and yet Rahl hung back. It made no sense.
Kahlan was looking up at him with panicked eyes. It would be too much for her even to stand. He hadn’t realized how hopeless it truly was until now. Their only chance would be in somehow convincing Rahl to reopen the rift. He leaned closer; he would have to make him think he was playing along.
“Kahlan,” he urged. “Talk to me. How’s the baby?”
Kahlan shook her head. Slowly she reached for him with a trembling hand. Her fingers found his cheek and pressed against it, skin sliding against skin. Her whole body never for a moment ceased trembling. Her eyes pooled with tears, and she opened her mouth twice before she managed a sound. Her voice was a hoarse, forgotten little thing. “Forgive me.”
“What?” Richard blinked. “Why?” Her hand moved in answer, slipping down his face until her fingers wrapped around his throat. And then all he could see was her blue eyes going black, opening up like an abyss below him. A resounding crack filled the air, as if all his bones were splintering. Her hand on his throat pulled him down into the rushing blackness of the Mother Confessor’s eyes, and he could not help but fall in.
Title: Storm BornAuthor: Morgen
Summary: It was supposed to be their one chance to be together. Instead it plunged them straight into a nightmare.
Disclaimer: I don't own LOTS or profit from it in any way. Just worship it from afar.
Rating: PG-14
XXXVIII. KEPT
He shuddered into himself like waking from a nightmare in one brutal jolt, his eyes slamming open. Richard quaked and clutched at the place where the sword had skewered his belly. He found only flesh, smooth and unmarred. The blade was gone. Still breathing too hard, his reluctant senses began to focus. He was naked, and his skin felt strangely slick, as if he’d been coated head to toe in oil. The air was thick with a strong, unpleasant odor that reminded him of mold and sweat.
He felt the naked limbs of others pressed heavy against him, and slowly sat up, pushing a stranger’s calf from his chest. All around him were piled bodies in the thousands, each one caught in some unending expression of unbearable anguish. Near him, a man was screaming violently while he clawed at the air with gnarled toes, his head bent back at an angle that should have snapped his neck. Opposite him another sat ripping out his own hair by the handful, and casting the clumps away with a pitiful wail. Even as he did so, fresh hairs sprouted on his pale, green scalp, growing back impossibly fast only to be torn out again. Everywhere Richard looked, it was the same. More souls, more private, brutal pain. Though they were thrown together in a living knot, not one acknowledged his neighbors.
Whatever it was that trapped the others, Richard felt nothing. He realized with dull wonder that the Fatal Grace had worked just as the black book had promised, for he extricated himself from the bodies around him and stood quite easily. He was in the midst of an enormous pit. The light was poor and tinted green; it seemed to seep in from everywhere and nowhere. In the distance he could just make out rough walls of blackened rock rising impossibly high. There was nowhere to step that was not covered with a layer of the writhing dead. Richard picked his way around the bodies as best he could, but they thrashed against him without warning, and he often stepped on an errant foot or hand. Even then, no one reacted. No one came to stop him.
He studied the bodies in the pit as he walked, searching for any sign of Kahlan, but he didn’t truly expect to find her hidden there among the masses. If she were, she was already dead, and that could not be possible. Richard focused on moving faster, forcing his way towards the rocky wall of the cavern. The only way to go was up. Kahlan had entered the Underworld on foot; she had to be closer to the surface than he was.
He began scaling the steep side of the pit as soon as he found a place with a handhold. It was rough going with little purchase, his skin scraping against the unforgiving stone. He almost fell twice, catching himself just in time. The bodies below were growing smaller and smaller whenever he dared to glance down, but he pushed away his fear. Surely he couldn’t die twice.
He was about halfway up when he heard it - a woman’s voice screaming somewhere far above him. It barely sounded human it was so wretched in its misery, so tortured into something primal that every muscle in his body tensed, and he clung to the nearly vertical rock and listened to the woman wail, thrown straight back into his own memories of torture under the blistering pain of the Agiel.
There was an urgency to the screaming, a frantic quality that the souls below had lacked for all their incessant weeping. This sounded like the cry of the dying, not the dead.
“Kahlan…” He mouthed her name, and then he was moving again, reaching up and up and up until his arms burned with the effort, and he could barely see for the sweat in his eyes. He was panting hard when his hand reached the very top of the cliff, and he began the slow, tortuous process of hauling his body over. It felt like the tendons in his body were tearing in two. His muscles burned the way his skin had inside the Fatal Grace.
With a loud groan, he heaved himself up at last onto the ledge and collapsed flat on his back, chest heaving, staring up at the infinite darkness above him. When he could, he got to his knees, and then he could see how very far he’d come. Down below in the mouth of the pit, the dead looked no bigger than nightwisps. Their cries were faint now and hard to hear, but the woman he swore was Kahlan shrieked again, her cry echoing painfully in the cavern. It brought him to his feet, and then he was running wildly towards the sound, shouting her name.
It seemed too great a gift to find her now after searching so long and desperately, but the closer he got to the screaming, the more certain he became. That voice could only be Kahlan’s. And then he caught sight of her through the gloom, a crumpled figure lying defeated on the ground. Pacing an endless circle around her was the spirit of his brother.
“Get away from her,” he roared though Rahl in fact stood several paces back, and he had no way to enforce his words. Still, Rahl paused and looked up, astonishment flashing across his face as Richard came running at him.
A moment later, his surprise gave way to a twisted smirk, and Rahl waved his hand. Immediately fire erupted from the ground, and Richard stopped short, green flames rising before him. They stretched as far as he could see in either direction; there was no way around them. And when he looked up, he could see the tongues of flames licking the very roof of the cavern. Kahlan’s screams still filtered through, but he could not catch so much as a glimpse of her through the wall of dancing flame. He remembered the scholar’s words in the black book; the fires of the Underworld could not harm him. He had no option either way. He was already dead.
Bracing himself, Richard stepped forward, drawing near to the flames. He felt nothing; no warmth, no pain. And then he kept going until he was wreathed in flame of brightest green. One step, then another, and then he was through. The astonishment on Rahl’s face doubled. Richard ignored him, rushing towards Kahlan and dropping to his knees beside her. Her eyes were open, but she seemed not to see him. There was no color left in her face, and the bottom half of her dress was drenched in blood. She clutched and clawed violently at the rocks, the skin on her fingertips shredded like red ribbons. He realized then by the way she shook and groaned that she was in labor.
“Kahlan,” he cried, but it was as if she didn’t hear him at all. She kept screaming. He glared over his shoulder at his brother. “What are you doing to her?”
Rahl chuckled. “She does this to herself.”
And then he was closer than before, though Richard couldn’t recall seeing him move. Rahl knelt down beside him in his red velvet robes, and slipped an arm around him, pulling him back. His hands were too strong and too cold, his voice a velvety whisper of ‘Come with me, come with me.’
Everything before him faded away in a slow roll, gray and gone and he was all alone. Richard staggered to his feet. For a moment, he saw Kahlan standing upright, whole and no longer with child, but slim and strong once more. She was weeping and calling his name, but when he shouted back that he was here, he was right here, she ignored him. He ran to her, and she disappeared, the swath of gray nothing coming back.
He searched the void a long time, walking here and there until his feet bled, calling for her in every corner of the mist. She appeared again as suddenly as she had vanished, this time right before him. She lay at his feet, naked and weeping while Rahl writhed on top of her, pinning her down and pressing rough, unwelcome kisses to the slender curve of her neck. Fury and horror filled him, but when he bent down to pull Rahl off her, his hands closed tight around nothing. The gray had rolled in again, and she was gone.
He wandered another day, another lifetime. Richard could not say with any certainty which it was; time had ceased to have any meaning. All he knew was that he must find her. Every frantic heartbeat was one spent searching until he glimpsed her dark hair like a flag in the distance. She’d been dropped into the pit of writhing bodies where he’d first awoken, but the men had been shaken from their private nightmares to torment her. They came upon her in a mob, tugging on her hair and her dress, forcing her legs apart while she twisted and shrieked and screamed his name, always his name. He ran for her through the crowded, reeking pit, shoving men bodily out of the way. But for every step he took, she moved forward twice as much, passed from man to man, and still he could not reach her.
Eventually her screams faded and she fell still, fighting no longer as man after man had his way with her. He remembered when she’d done the same beneath him, and he felt ill.
He could not relive that nightmare again. The thought hit him hard like a slap, and Richard froze. A nightmare. He could not explain to himself how he knew, just that he did. This was a nightmare, and he had to wake up. Though there was still a man on top of Kahlan, he turned his back on her. Heart pounding wildly, he started for the gray mists.
They seemed to stretch forever, but almost immediately they began to grow thinner, and he saw a faint glimmer of green. He raced towards it, only to find himself still kneeling beside Rahl, and staring stupidly down at the ground. Kahlan lay before him, still swollen with child, as oblivious to his presence as she was to the horrors he’d just witnessed.
Richard looked at his brother, and though Rahl tried to hide it, he could tell he wasn’t supposed to have been able to escape the visions. “Let go of me,” he snarled, wrenching his arm free.
Rahl lifted his shoulder in a delicate shrug. “Go to her then. It makes no difference. Whatever spell you’re using will not last long down here. Nothing does.”
Richard tried not to think of how true that was. When dawn came, he would die in earnest. He would be of no more help to Kahlan than the thousands of dead souls caught in the Keeper’s pits. He wondered how much time he’d wasted drifting through the nightmares Rahl had sent him.
He clambered forward on his knees, desperate to reach her at last. Still, he slowed when he neared her, unsure of what would happen when the dead tried to touch the living, but his fingers found the soft skin of her cheek easily enough. Kahlan blinked, her eyes rolling his way for the first time, and she seemed to finally register his presence. Her mouth gaped as if she meant to speak, but no words came out.
“It’s all right,” he soothed, leaning closer. “I’m here.”
“Richard?” Her voice was a tiny, tremulous thing. “Are you real?”
“Yes, yes, I’m real,” he soothed, easing her into his arms. “Shhh, I’m here. It’s me.”
She pressed her face against him and let out a wretched sob. “You came,” she whispered, so soft he barely heard it.
“Always.” He smoothed back her sweat soaked hair, pressing his hand to her brow. Her skin was cold as ice to the touch; her eyes were glassy. Tears pricked his eyes as he realized she was dying. “I have to get you out of here,” he said, trying to slide an arm beneath her. He had to get her back to Zedd.
“No,” she choked out. “Too late.”
He hesitated at her words, looking up through the green gloom. He saw no path to the world above.
“Kahlan’s quite right,” said Rahl, smiling down at them. “There’s no longer any way out. I’ve seen to that. She will die soon, but you can spare her soul the fate you saw if you deliver the child.”
At his words, Kahlan thrashed and cried out. She tried to speak, but a grunt turned into an anguished wail, and she clutched at her belly, her shoulders curling off the ground. Her nostrils flared from breathing wild and irregular.
“Even now, she’s trying to push out the child, but she’s too weak. The effort is killing her.” Rahl seated himself on a nearby rock, smoothing out the folds in his red robes. “Help her, and you can have her,” he said with a shrug. “The Keeper only wants the child. Once she is born, I will open up the rift, and Kahlan can be carried back up if you prefer. Perhaps it will even be in time to spare her life.”
Richard trusted nothing Rahl told him, but he nodded as if considering his words. It was obvious Kahlan’s labor was far advanced. He wondered if their daughter was stuck in the birth channel, with Kahlan left to bleed and labor to no end.
He rested a hand on her taut belly. If the child was stuck, he didn’t understand why Rahl had done nothing to force it out. Surely if he could touch Kahlan despite being dead, then so could his brother, and yet Rahl hung back. It made no sense.
Kahlan was looking up at him with panicked eyes. It would be too much for her even to stand. He hadn’t realized how hopeless it truly was until now. Their only chance would be in somehow convincing Rahl to reopen the rift. He leaned closer; he would have to make him think he was playing along.
“Kahlan,” he urged. “Talk to me. How’s the baby?”
Kahlan shook her head. Slowly she reached for him with a trembling hand. Her fingers found his cheek and pressed against it, skin sliding against skin. Her whole body never for a moment ceased trembling. Her eyes pooled with tears, and she opened her mouth twice before she managed a sound. Her voice was a hoarse, forgotten little thing. “Forgive me.”
“What?” Richard blinked. “Why?” Her hand moved in answer, slipping down his face until her fingers wrapped around his throat. And then all he could see was her blue eyes going black, opening up like an abyss below him. A resounding crack filled the air, as if all his bones were splintering. Her hand on his throat pulled him down into the rushing blackness of the Mother Confessor’s eyes, and he could not help but fall in.