Thornton
The air was cool, and Khel-hârad stretched into infinity.
All around them were shifting shades, and it was difficult for Thornton to tell what was real and what was simply his mind playing tricks on him—or if the two were one and the same. He felt the strange tingling down his spine that he had felt during his brief stay in the Otherworld and knew that he was standing in its twin: a remnant of creation, another plane of existence.
Just as the Shaper ruled the Otherworld, so did the Holder rule the Land of the Dead. He was in here somewhere, waiting—waiting to be anchored to a Vessel in the same way that the Traveler had been. The thought made Thornton shudder.
He knew the Traveler would be able to get him to the threshold of the Otherworld to find Miera, but he didn’t know how he could get in. He felt the weight of his hammer, still strapped to his back, and wondered if it might still be the key. The Hammer of the Worldforge had, along with the power of the Shaper, sealed the Otherworld. Perhaps it could unseal it. Regardless, the Traveler was the one in control now.
Thornton looked at the body of Rathma, now inhabited by a god. The god smiled.
“Getting in to Khel-hârad,” he said, “is the easy part.”
He began to walk, motioning for Thornton to follow.
“Everything that follows is a bit more . . . difficult.”
***
Khel-hârad was unlike anything Thornton had ever imagined, and the intransitive nature of the world was making his head hurt.
For being called the Land of the Dead, Khel-hârad felt very much alive: everywhere Thornton looked there were jutting mountains and rolling hills, teeming forests and dying deserts. But the one thing that made him uneasy—and the one thing that truly made him realize the scale of this place—was that, no matter how far he could see, he never saw a horizon. Everything just . . . kept . . . going.
Even in Derenar, the land had an end. Once, when he was a boy, his father had taken him east to the Tashkar Sea, where he had looked out onto the water and had been sure that it went on forever. But even the water came to an end, somewhere out there on the horizon, where it looked like the world just stopped.
Nothing like that existed in this place; there was never an end in sight. Thornton couldn’t wrap his mind around it, and after a while he had given up trying.
***
“It was you mortals that made it this way, you know,” the Traveler said.
Thornton closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. “What way?”
“Like this,” the Traveler said, indicating the scenery with a grand wave of his hand. The two of them had been walking for quite some time, but had not spoken. “The trees and the light and the life. All of your dead were the ones that brought life here, ironically. When this place was first created, it was barren and empty.”
With a humorless laugh, he added, “I should know.”
The path that they trod was lined with grass and strangely colored flowers. In fact, Thornton had noticed that everything in this place was almost like an imitation of things that existed in Derenar. There were trees, but they had oddly colored leaves or unusually shaped branches; there were plants, but he recognized none of them; there was a sky, but something about it seemed . . . off.
“What happened that changed it?” Thornton asked.
“When the first of your dead came here,” the Traveler responded, “all that they had were their spirits, but within those spirits lived sparks of power. Some of the dead clung to the lives they were forced from, refusing to let go, thus bringing a bit of the world of the living with them. Whenever that would happen,” he said with a dramatic snap of his fingers, “the power manifested itself in creation.”
Thornton felt a breeze blow by, warm yet chilling, as if it was a breeze that did not quite understand what being a breeze meant.
“All of this is because of the spirits of the dead?” Thornton asked. He looked to his right, to a great forest that stretched out before them, curving away from them like a waterfall made of trees. There was a river in the middle that snaked away as well, never seeming to get any thinner despite flowing into the distance. The sky above was a strange shade of blue, and the few, sparse clouds that he saw never seemed to move.
It all just . . . kept . . . going! Thornton had to rub his eyes when his mind started trying to make sense of it: the scale, the impossible perspectives—it made him dizzy, and he had to look away, focusing back on the path in front of them.
“No one spirit was responsible for what you see here,” the Traveler went on. “It is the collective longing of countless generations, brought into being by the very ones who left the shadows of themselves behind in your world.”
Thornton knew all about having to let go of something that he’d never intended to leave. “They were torn from their lives,” Thornton said absently, “so they tried to bring their lives with them.”
He had said the words aloud but had not really meant to—only, now, it all made sense to him. He knew why this place was the way that it was.
When he looked at the strange representations of everything around him, he felt as though he was trying to remember a dream after just being awakened. In the dream, everything would have seemed so crisp and clear and real; but when he awoke and tried to remember what he’d been dreaming, it always came out twisted and distant: faces were blurred, words were indistinct, colors were uncertain. It was like reaching for a hand just beyond his grasp.
This world, he now realized, was just that: a dead man’s dream of a life once lost.
Thornton looked again over the forest that stretched out into forever, and frowned.
He had no intention of being stuck in someone else’s dream any longer than he had to be.
The Traveler kept walking, and Thornton Woods followed closely behind.