Phantom: Chainfire Trilogy Part 2

When that happened Denna would be right there to put her mouth over his, forcefully breathing her life into him. She had not only controlled his life, she had controlled his death. She had taken everything. Not even his own death belonged to him; it belonged to her.

She watched him now. Her silver face came close, waiting to see what he would do. He wondered if he would be granted death, or if she would again put her mouth over his and…

"Breathe."

Richard puzzled at her. Denna didn't look at all like a silver statue. "You must breathe," the silken voice told him. "If you do not, you will die."

Richard blinked at the beautiful face softly lit by the cold moonlight. He tried to pull a little more air into his lungs.

He squeezed his eyes shut. "Hurts," he whispered with the entirety of that shallow breath.

"You must. It is life."

Life. Richard didn't know if he wanted life. He was so tired, so exhausted. Death seemed so inviting. No more struggle. No more pain. No more despair. No more loneliness. No more tears. No more agony of missing Kahlan.

Kahlan.

"Breathe."

If he died, who would help her?

He drew a deeper breath, forcing it past the scalding agony it pulled down into his lungs. He thought of Kahlan's smile, instead of the pain.

He drew another breath. Deeper yet.

A silver hand gently glided over the back of his shoulder, as if to comfort him in his agony of struggling to hold on to life. The face looked sadly sympathetic as it watched his struggle.

"Breathe."

Richard nodded as he tightened his fists and gasped in the cold fire of the night air.

He coughed up thin red fluid and clots of blood that tasted metallic. He pulled in another breath, giving him the power to cough out more of the liquid burning his lungs. For a time he lay on his side, alternating between gasping in air and coughing out fluid.

When he was breathing again, if raggedly, he flopped onto his back, hoping to make the spinning stop. He closed his eyes, but that only made it worse, adding a kind of tilting, rolling movement to the spinning. His stomach roiled, on the brink of upheaval.

He opened his eyes and in the darkness stared up at the leaves above him. He saw mostly maple leaves in the canopy of tree limbs above him. Looking at leaves — talismans of the familiar — felt good. In the moonlight, he saw other kinds of trees as well. To take his mind off the pain and nausea, he made himself identify all the trees that he could make out. There were a smattering of heart-shaped linden leaves and, towering farther above, a bough or two of what looked to be white pine. There were some clusters of oak in the distance to the sides, along with spruce and balsam. Close by, though, there were mostly maples. With every breath of breeze he could hear the distinctive, soft rattle of cottonwood leaves.

Beside the pain associated with the difficulty of breathing, Richard clearly recognized that there was something wrong within himself. Something far more basic, more elemental.

It wasn't an injury, in the conventional sense, but he knew that there was something dreadfully wrong. He tried to identify the perception, but he couldn't pinpoint it. It was a hollow, empty, desolate feeling unrelated to the familiar emotions of his life, things like his need to find Kahlan, or what he had done with setting the D'Haran army loose on the Old World. He considered the troubling things Shota had told him, but that wasn't it, either.

It was more a sense of a disturbing void within himself that he knew he had never felt before. That's why he had so much trouble identifying it: it was a completely unfamiliar condition. There had been something there, some sense of himself, that he realized he had never thought about, never identified as a distinct element, a discrete part of his makeup, that was now missing.

Richard felt as if he was no longer himself.

The story Shota had told him of Baraccus and the book he had written, Secrets of a War Wizard's Power, came to mind. Richard wondered if his inner voice was trying to suggest that such a book might help him in just such a situation. He had to admit that the problem did feel connected in some way to his gift.

Thinking about that book caused his mind to wander to what Shota had told him about his mother, that she had not died alone in that fire. Zedd was insistent that he'd looked through the charred remains of the house and he had found no other bones. How could that be? Either Zedd or Shota had to be wrong. For some reason, he could not believe that either of them were.

Somewhere deep in the back of his mind the answer ticked at him. Try as he might, though, he could not coax it out.

Richard felt a pang of loneliness for his mother, a feeling that had visited him from time to time throughout his life. He wondered what she would have to say about all that had happened to him. She'd never had a chance to see him grow up, to see him as a man. She'd only known him as a boy.