The First Confessor (Sword of Truth 0)

In a way, she wished he wouldn’t. But she didn’t know how to get beyond what was lost.

It wasn’t fair to Merritt, of course, but she couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t help her feelings.

She felt like one of the spirits of the half people, lost between worlds, not knowing where she belonged.

Naja had understood. She’d said that it was a common problem. Letting go, she’d said, was often hard. She said that people came to her because they had difficulty letting go. Naja seemed to understand Magda’s conflicting emotions better than Magda did, and offered to help with a spirit reading so that her heart could find peace.

Shadow meowed softly as she materialized out of the darkness to rub against Naja’s side. After letting her tail drag across the spirit woman, the cat carefully stepped into Magda’s lap and curled up in a ball, where she promptly started her soft, steady purring.

The black cat seemed at peace among spirits.

“Can you ask him if he is at peace?”

Eyes still closed, Naja smiled. “I don’t need to ask him that. I can feel that he is.”

“He is? How is that possible? I mean, he’s gone, he’s alone . . . he’s without me . . .”

“It’s not that way for the spirits,” Naja said. “The concerns of our world, the concerns of our hearts, are not the same as the concerns of the underworld.”

“Can I talk to him?”

“As I told you before, in a way, and through me, if he will allow it. Ask.”

Magda swallowed. “Baraccus, I miss you so much.”

“He knows, Magda. He knows.”

Magda felt funny trying to talk about such deep, personal feelings through someone other than Baraccus. She knew that she had to try, though, if she wanted to ask him why he would have killed himself. This was her one chance.

“But . . . even though I miss you, it’s not the same anymore. You aren’t here, alive, so I can’t hold on to you in the way I want to.”

“He knows that, too, Magda,” Naja said in her gentle, soft voice.

“But I—”

“I know your heart Magda,” Naja said in a suddenly strange, distant voice.

Magda looked, trying to see, but it seemed to have grown too dark to see the spiritist’s lips moving. Shadows seemed to move in the blackness around them.

“I know your loyalty to me,” the strange voice said. “But who I was, who you loved, no longer exists. I have passed on. In your world, only my memory can exist. Your loyalty to me because of that memory is a part of life, but it can become disloyalty to yourself if you hold it so closely that it crowds out the rest of life.”

“Why did you leave me,” she asked in a halting voice as a tear rolled down her cheek. “I thought you loved me more than anything. Why would you leave me all alone?”

The candles hissed for a time as she waited, not knowing if he would answer. Finally, the strange voice returned.

“I had to do as I did because I love the world of life.”

Magda sucked back a sob. “Please, Baraccus, I don’t understand.”

“There are others who can do what I could do. There are others who can fight in the ways that I could fight. There are others who can serve our cause as I served it. In that way, as remarkable as you may have believed me to be, I wasn’t. I was not essential.

“But you are unique, my rare flower. There has never been anyone exactly like you before, and there can never be anyone exactly like you again. We are each that way. Because of the exact way you are, there are no others who could have done the things you have done, when you did them, in the way you did them. There are no others who have had the particular experiences you’ve had that led you to the choices you made. What you did, and what you have become, no other could have done in your place.

“You were, and you continue to be, on a unique path.

“There were so many paths that would have taken the world into eternal darkness, but there was only one to take it safely through this perilous time. You took the world on that path when it was needed.

“Had I lived, you would not have made the choices that took you down that path.

“At the Temple of the Winds I saw the future. Not merely one future, but many futures. I saw the future as it would be had I returned and lived. I saw the future without you. I saw the future in a thousand different ways, and then another thousand, and then another. I saw all the layers of possibilities and variation, all the choices, all branches and forks in prophecy.

“But I saw one future above all others that gave the world of life the best chance in the face of the approaching dark age. In that future I saw that if I let you go on to walk your own path, you would be what was needed.

“If I had lived, you would have been at my side. You would have had no reason to do more, to be more. The forks in prophecy would not have presented themselves in the same way. Doorways would have remained closed. Without you seeking out truth as you have done, our cause would have been lost because you would have never become a Confessor.

“There is so much more that I saw when I was there that brought me to my choice. Lothain lied. He did get into the Temple. He lied to hide his treason. Once in the Temple, he reinforced the damage done by his traitors on the Temple team, altered important things there, and damaged important elements flowing toward the world of life.

“Lothain choked off the gift from the world of life so that fewer and fewer will be born gifted, and since the Temple is in the world of the dead, he was especially successful at choking off Subtractive Magic. That was why the moon turned red. It turned red in warning because of the damage caused by Lothain.”

Magda was not merely astonished to hear this, she was horrified. “You mean Lothain managed to break the Grace and end magic in this world?”

“Not entirely,” Naja answered in the strange voice. “He tried, and while he did not succeed completely, he managed to do vast damage. He has doomed the world to begin down the path that Emperor Sulachan envisions, the path toward a world without magic. While he set the world on that path, I was at least able to keep it from being a certainty.

“That was my greatest purpose, what I could do that no other would have been able to do. But I was only able to do so much. I was able to get enough of the gift to flow along the lines of the Grace to ensure that, even as the gift in mankind dwindles, one day a pebble in the pond will be born with what is required to complete the restoration of the world of life, if he, too, makes the right choices at the right times.

“You remember the book I brought back and the mission I sent you on upon my return?”

Magda nodded. “Yes, you asked me to take the book, through the sliph, to your secret, private library. When I was gone, you killed yourself. How could I forget such a thing?”

“That journey you undertook was a portion of the part I was able to play in setting the future on a course that gives the world of life a chance in that future that you have now made possible because you took your path. Had you not undertaken that task for me, the world would have been doomed. Now, if the right choices are made by the right people for the right reasons at the right time, then mankind still has a chance to escape the fate that Sulachan and Lothain tried to impose.

“But until those others can be born, I had to let you save what we have. I could see that the only part I could play if I lived would be to keep you from blossoming. I saw that I had to die in order for you to undertake the journey you took to search for answers, fight the dream walkers, take up the oath, seek me in the underworld through a spiritist so that you could discover that the dead down in the catacombs were serving evil, then

choose to find Merritt, help him find what he needed to create the key, and in the end come to understand why you would choose on your own to be altered to become a Confessor who was able to unmask the corruption in a way that all could see it.

“Had I lived, none of that would have happened. I had to let you take the path that would save the world for now. That allows you and others to live to fight another day.

“My death gave you the drive to find out why I sacrificed my life, which in turn opened your own truth. In that search for truth, you would expose what I could not, in a way I could not, to accomplish what I could not.

“You think of me as a great man, Magda. In your eyes I may be, but I was just a man. I had faults, I had weaknesses, I had limits. I couldn’t do everything. But I like to think I had a noble mind, and with that reasoning mind what I saw when I was at the Temple was that what needed to be done, I could not do.

“But I also saw that you could.

“Merritt is similar to you in that he has a unique chance. There is no one else who has the knowledge, creativity, and skills that he has. No other ever envisioned what he first envisioned. No other ever would have. Only Merritt could have envisioned and created the Sword of Truth, and only Merritt could have envisioned and created a Confessor.

“The world needed you to be there to be that Confessor at that moment, and in moments to come.

“I know, Magda, your heart, and your loyalty to your love for me. But don’t let that be the end of your ability to love. That love wouldn’t harm me, or diminish me, or change what we had. It can only add to you and who you are. You need to embrace the reality of what is, not what was.

“What you and Merritt have is different from what you and I had. It can be more.

“You share more with Merritt than I could ever share with you. You share an understanding, a partnership of souls, in a way that you and I never could. You share the Sword of Truth with him, and you share the new beginning of becoming a Confessor with him. You have been reborn into that new life. Merritt made that possible.