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Goodkind 54: How to Revive a Dead Dick


Myshkin

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7 hours ago, Ded As Ned said:

Seems like one of those assistants Myshkin mentioned showed up here a few years back.  IIRC we were even nice to him/her, but they didn't stick around very long.  

I remember that I think, he gave some super long response to defend the evil chicken.

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Oh yeah, I think I was lurking here / reading the noble recapping works of my predecessors at that time and I remember that dude. Goodomens? He seemed pretty cool -- he was gracious and a good sport about the whole thing. I did see one or two posts by / exchanges with one of Goodkind's other previous Yeardly messengers long before the tv show, Mystar or somesuch, and he was ... not like that. Most zealous and aggressive in defending the honour of his lord.

 

Warheart, Chapters 41-47: A Dick in the Dark, Part 2

 

            As soon as Dick starts walking by himself he feels the spirits gathering around him, whispering the same words in gibber-jabber over and over.  He asks them what they want and they start speaking in Dicktongue instead of jibber-jabber, imploring him for help.  Now that he's alone he can see the filmy shapes of the spirits out of the corner of his eye.  There's a shit-ton of them.  He books it back to his peeps and tells them they "need to get out right now," which was something they new or strongly suspected, as opposed to staying to ask the spirits what they want, which is something about which he knows nothing, which means we're all about to be subject to another chapter's-worth of aimless hall-wandering, sorry guys.

 

            Oh except Terry's bored, thank Christ, so he has Richard notice a wavy line symbol carved into one of the walls that means shepherd, which means the way is marked specifically for him.  They start looking for the symbol at every intersection.  Dick continues to hear the whispering and can feel eyes watching them as they pass each room, but nobody else hears or senses anything.

 

            They reach a long corridor that's totally silent and has no doorways leading off of it.  Beyond it they find tunnels that are carved less carefully, as if the passages they've been traipsing through are "a special place for the dead," whereas these are just plain old tunnels for the living.  These passages also contain rooms, which in turn contain shelves upon shelves of books, which Nicci says are all valuable or dangerous books of magic.  They keep going.  There are rooms with stuff lying around as if they were abandoned suddenly.  There's a forge room with a block and tackle just kind of there.  If this is a gigantic-ass part of the Wizard's Keep that the people who run the place have somehow forgotten about I am going to laugh for a very long time.

 

            Stairs.  Niches with shrouded bodies.  Richard asks Kahlan, the Mother Confessor who -- if this is indeed the Keep as is likely -- iirc used to run this joint, whether she recognizes anything or knows where in the Keep they might be, but no, boss lady's never seen these catacombs before and had no idea they were here.  Richard realizes that, since this area's as old as the war with Cranky Zombie Voldemort, it was probably closed off so CZV couldn't reanimate all the dead in here and use them to attack the Keep above, which still doesn't explain why nobody even new it was here.  I invite you to care about this little bit of worldbuilding vericimilitude to the best of your ability.

 

            Okay so there are like a seriously enormous number of dead people here.  Like as in higher up in the catacombs there are just rooms stacked with piles of "neatly stacked bones, sorted by type." Some rooms just hold skulls.  Richard speculates that these are the bones of the long-dead, which have been moved out of the individual niches to make way for more recent remains.  I am skeptical about the logistics on this one.  A brief hypothetical:

 

            "Oh kind catacomb-keeper, I have come to pay my respects to the remains of my many-times great uncle, the mighty War Wizard Fredicus, in hopes that his soul will guide me and give me strength.  Where is he, pray?"

 

            "Well son, he's in that room, that room, that room, and that room, plus I think his legs are downstairs."

 

            Anyhoozles, they keep going up.  Blah blah blah more dead people, sometimes stacked so high there are ladders leaning against the walls to get at the highest niches.  They reach a big cavern that looks like the hub of the catacombs.  There are nine tunnel entrances leading off of it and each one has a name — the one Dick and friends just came out of is Hall of Souls, another one's Garden of Lilies.  Evidently these names are meant to make people visiting dead loved ones feel better about how Grandma Jane and Grandpa Jimothy's femurs are in one room while their heads and pelvises and so on are in entirely separate ones.  There's a spiral staircase leading up out of this receiving chamber — oh by the gods are we almost out of here? Please tell me it is so!

 

            This is a long-ass staircase, but finally they reach a landing and are confronted not by more stairs, but by a single ginormous stone that blocks further progress.  Off to the side there's a niche containing two more of the shepherd statues that gave them access to Lucy's well in Shitty Cave Town.  Richard twiddles the shepherds and the stone in front of them trembles.  Then the mortar holding the seal together cracks and the stone pivots out of the way.  Holy shit I thought this catacomb sequence would never end.  It's been about twenty pages but I feel like I've aged ten years.  Worst spooky dungeon ever; I award it 0 of a possible 10 balrogs and may we never see it again.

 

            Except, uh-oh, outside the catacombs there be alarm bells ringin'! The action never stops in Terryland!

 

            The Dicksquad pops out of the catacombs ready to rock, ...  which makes this the perfect time for Goodkind to spend a paragraph describing the pretty fluted columns that mark the entrance to the catacombs.  Moving on with our lives, Kahlan rushes out of the alcove framed by the aforementioned nice columns and exclaims that she knows this place; they are indeed in the Wizard's Keep.  Actually no, no I'm sorry, we can't move on with our lives quite yet: The entrance to the catacombs is specifically described as very obvious — "magnificent" columns, statues of dead people, shit of that nature — and as soon as Kahlan steps out she immediately recognizes where they are.  How did she not guess they might be trapped beyond this giant-ass maximally obtrusive sealed door? HOOOOOOWWW? "Oh right! That super obvious stone slab marked by the pillars right in the middle of the Keep I spent a huge chunk of my life in! Who could have imagined we were trapped in there?" She LIVED here!

 

            But this book doesn't respect us enough for it to be in any sense worth getting worked up over this kind of monkey business, so fuck it: They're in a super tall chamber deep in the Wizard's Keep, and there are people clustered around them.  These people are bigtime surprised, so maybe the alarm bells weren't ringing because CZV and his shun-tuk are attacking the Keep, as I assumed, but because the Dicksquad breached the seal on the catacombs.  One of the watchers rushes forward to greet Richard.  It's Chase, Richard's big woodsman buddy from back in the Shire oops I mean Emmond's Field oops I mean the Westlands, who I was sure was dead but checking the Wizard's First Rule wiki I see that's wrong.  Prelate Verna, the old Amyrlin I mean leader of the Aes Sedai I mean leader of the Sisters of the Light, is also here, so that's those names ticked off the obligatory series finale cameo list, so that's a relief.  Chase has a daughter named Rachel.  I have no memory of this person.  They are all pleased to see Dick and his peeps.  There is hugging.  Richard's happy to see them too, but he's got no time for this shit, so he "it's a long story"s them.

 

            Richard sees two more shepherd statues, grabs Em, and the stone door to the catacombs swings shut.  Apparently the door ceals with not so much as a crack in the stone, so nobody knew it could open, which, yeah, sure, oki-doki.  The alarm bells also stop ringing, so okay yep that was what those were about, so no undead ass-wooping at this time, sorry.  He admonishes Chase and Verna not to let anyone go in the catacombs, and Verna asks why anyone would and indeed how they could, because so far as she knows this MASSIVE ALCOVE WITH PILLARS AND STATUES is "simply a small place to sit on a bench and have a rest." Oh man these people.

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Rachel isn't Chase's real daughter. She was Princess Violet's (she of the kicked jaw) torture companion. She was eventually given to Chase because Dick ain't got time for no kids.

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6 hours ago, Myshkin said:

The Anders were a metaphor for OPPRESSIVE PC CULTURE and the Haken were a metaphor for decent white folk who are the REAL victims of racism. 

Nicci did have consensual sex at one point, but she didn't enjoy it, and was only doing it to make Kahlan think Dick was cheating on her. And IIRC it was only borderline consensual anyway, because dude was brutish and rapey despite receiving consent.

Thats the one were Al Gore saves the world by fucking Hilary Clinton right?

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Wow, goddamn but I've forgotten -- or never knew -- a lot about the earlier legends of Dick. Thanks for adding context / background! The Al Gore one sounds terrifying.

 

Warheart, Chapters 48-51: Dick-All, Part 1

 

            Fair warning: This is the Crossroads of Twilight-esque section of the recap in which fuckall happens at great length.  It's no excuse, but I got lulled into Terry's numbing uneventful rhythm and just started writing down every tiny stupid thing.  Sorry.

 

            Chase and Verna keep asking questions, but the party refuses to answer any of them, asking for quick food and immediate access to the sliph.  Richard doesn't want to talk about all his secret doings while all the Sisters of the Light he doesn't know and people who've been brought up from the city of Aydindril to help in the Keep are around, so he has Chase gently tell them all to fuck off.  Sidenote: I feel like Aydindril was the place where Richard got attacked by the mriswith lizard people and tangled with the Children of the Light I mean the Blood of the Fold back in the day and where some of the series' grossest and stupidest almost-rape plots happened, good times, good times, or, well, okay, not good times but certainly times of some kind.

 

            They head up stairs along the wall of this giant narrow room they're in, toward a balcony and the small windows that let daylight and fresh mountain air into the lower bits of the Keep.  Richard misses Zed and is happy to be back in "civilization" — the Dark Lands are sucktopia, recall, and don't count as civilized — and reflects that, given how long he's spent dead and travelling and generally out of it, he has no idea how long it's been since Sean Hannity and CZV marched out of the Third Kingdom.

 

            Verna sends peeps off for some food for our heroes, and Chase asks what else they can do to help.  Richard breaks it down in Cliff's notes form, all the while repeating that he hasn't got time to explain everything even as he begins to do so and generally being a huge cock about the whole thing.  And ...  oh no, no, no God why? What have I done to deserve this? Terry's trying to talk magic talk again!

 

            Cranky Zombie Voldemort, Richard says, uses "occult power," which is the opposite of magic, a kind of dark mirror that is very definitely not magic.  This despite the fact that the phrase "occult magic" appears in the text of this very book multiple times, so Goodkind must have changed his mind or forgotten.  Anyway, CZV used magic and this occult power nonsense together and was thus a super extra special wizard with pickles, and with these combined powers he made people into weapons.  He created the dream walkers, who descended in long line to Emperor Jagang, the previous villain who is dead and does not matter, but gets a namecheck here so that readers who think this word salad is clever can exclaim about how intricately connected everything in the series is, and he created the half-people because since they have no souls and don't decay they last effectively forever, so would be waiting for CZV to muster an army of them when he returned from death.  The half-people went insane without their souls and started munching on living people to extract the souls of the said living people by eating them, and oh okay now Terry's just rehearsing the whole history of how the half-people were locked away in the Third Kingdom again to burn more pages, skip skip skip.

 

            Chase and Verna are dismayed, but they have confidence in Richard's ability to show this situation who's boss, which demonstrates that they are good right-minded people who've got their heads on straight.  Before they reach the sliph's well, Richard tells Verna that he has an important message for her from Warren.  Who the fuck is Warren? He's Verna's spouse and he's dead, apparently, since the message is that he will love her for all eternity and is at peace and etc, and oh yep now that I check he does get a one-word cameo in the Underworld section when all the dead people showed up to help Richard.  This understandably raises questions about how Dick can speak to the dead, which the Dicksquad rushes their way through.

 

            They hurry through the Keep, which is full of broad hallways and comfortable reading rooms and magical business.  Venison is provided.  Dick and Klan and Nicci eat just enough to keep their strength up, declining any more on the grounds that they have graver concerns on their minds, but the Mord-Sith scarf down everything that's left because they are adults who actually have to work for a living guarding these dumb protagonist assholes and so they know how to eat when the opportunity arises.

 

            They finally arrive at the round tower where the sliph's well apparently is at.  It's a dump.  There's rain water running down the walls and draining into a dark pool in the centre of the floor.  They head across the tower and through the blasted, melted wall that leads into the well room — this place got busted up way back when in Temple of the Winds or whenever Richard originally found the sliph and nobody's bothered to fix it yet.  Hasn't it been, like, years? Apparently Richard found the remains of an old wizard in here, a guy named Kolo who was guarding the sliph when the room got blocked off.  Nobody ever dug him out so he starved there.  Sucks to be him.  Goddamn but the wizards who own this place are forgetful motherfuckers; any hugely important room or wing of their keep that gets sealed off is just out of sight out of mind for them.

 

            Anyway, the sliph's well is big like a swimming pool, thirty feet across. She's right there ready for them and she is super happy to see her some Dick.  She calls him "master" and asks him if he wishes to travel, and when he says yes her voice grows "intimate" and she says that he will be "pleased." Then Kahlan mentions that they have come to the Keep by way of Stroyza and that they were transported by Lucy, seemingly more or less just to troll the sliph, and the sliph gets jealous and asks Richard whether Lucy "pleased" him more.  The uncomfortable quotient of all this is surpassed only by how stupid it is.  Richard tells the sliph that travelling "in" Lucy was super shitty, but that they had to do it because they were trapped in Stroyza and needed to get back here, to her, who they like much better, "so that we could be pleased." Kahlan is clearly unhappy that Richard is engaging in this borderline sex talk with the silver liquid water creature.  Goodkind is really doubling down here.

 

            The sliph accepts this answer, but now there's another complication because Richard needs to convince the sliph that the Sword of Truth can come with him now, because he has death in him, even though he can't usually travel her ways with it on him, so he has to have the same stupid conversation he had with Lucy over again with the sliph.  The sliph reiterates that travelling with the sword will further drain Richard's hit points.  She says it will fill his death meter almost all the way and cost him most of his remaining time.  Kahlan insists he leave it behind, and, wow, he actually does.  He's been carrying it around for most of the book, constantly drawing it and pulling it an inch out of its scabbard to show it to people and putting his hand on it like somebody who's not insecure about anything nope not at all, but he's leaving it here.

 

            Dick and friends climb up onto the half-wall around the well.  Verna tries to comfort Richard, telling him that, while she hopes he manages to stop CZV, even if he doesn't the Grace will carry them all into the afterlife, where they will be together always, but Richard shoots her down, explaining that no everything in both the living world and the Underworld will just cease to exist, and with that uplifting bit of team building they step into the sliph.

 

            I have an announcement, friends: We've now got just under one-hundred pages to go! The road is long and our steps grow weary, but we're really making progress here.  Courage, Reader; it is not far now.

 

An uneventful section, I know, sorry. Snazzy prophet in the house next time!

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3 hours ago, Maester Llama said:

Anyway, the sliph's well is big like a swimming pool, thirty feet across. She's right there ready for them and she is super happy to see her some Dick.  She calls him "master" and asks him if he wishes to travel, and when he says yes her voice grows "intimate" and she says that he will be "pleased." Then Kahlan mentions that they have come to the Keep by way of Stroyza and that they were transported by Lucy, seemingly more or less just to troll the sliph, and the sliph gets jealous and asks Richard whether Lucy "pleased" him more.  The uncomfortable quotient of all this is surpassed only by how stupid it is.  Richard tells the sliph that travelling "in" Lucy was super shitty, but that they had to do it because they were trapped in Stroyza and needed to get back here, to her, who they like much better, "so that we could be pleased." Kahlan is clearly unhappy that Richard is engaging in this borderline sex talk with the silver liquid water creature.  Goodkind is really doubling down here.

Wuuuuuuuuuuuutttttt...

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For the Greatest Wizard in History, he's generally pretty useless without his sword. Even with the sword I guess he really only is victorious through Capitalist Reasoning.

 

Also him and Klan have been together for about 30 books and still no kids????? Can Richard only make 'his thing rise' by kicking children in the jaw?

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20 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

I thought they couldn't make the babies because of some prophecy bullshit.

Quick! To the Dickverse wiki! Questions must be answered! Things must be risen!

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Don't be assholes; Big Dick Rahl could easily pump a baby into Kahlan if he so wanted. Problem is that if they spawned a child together it would be a male Confessor, and so would have to be killed. Thems the rules.

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Re Myshkin's point about the narrative structure: Yeah, I mean, ... there really is very little narrative momentum here. As you point out, it feels like we should just now be settling into the meat of a long second act section where Dick conducts a war against Hannity and Suchi, commanding armies from the People's Palace or some shit, prior to a climax, but Terry's skipped over almost all of the part where our boy actually, like, contends with his enemies. It feels like he just can't be bothered with all the moving parts of an epic war / resistance plot, so went with the lead characters standing around in rooms talking about magic bullshit for most of the book instead to take up space.

 

Re Lacuna's astonishment about the exchange with the sliph: You speak for all of us.

 

Warheart, Chapters 48-51: Dick-All, Part 2

 

            Richard finds travelling through the sliph peaceful and trippy, but not so peaceful and trippy that he can't use this enforced break time to brood in a nonspecific unhelpful way about being the "bringer of death" and what he has to do when they reach the People's Palace.  Soon enough, however, he gets spat out in another well.  Richard boosts Kahlan out over the wall of the well and then a hand reaches down to help him climb out as well.  Oh hey it's Nate Dog! Hi, Nate Dog! Also there's a Mord-Sith named Rikka here waiting for them as well; I'm sure she was important at some point.  So the number of sexy leather-clad nigh-interchangeable women guarding Dick is now back up to three as is customary, or oops no what I meant to say of course was that I'm sure she has a unique, dynamic character that Terry will explore with his usual nuanced powers of observation as the story continues.  So Nathan the Prophet and this Rikka person haul Richard out of the well.  He's in rough shape; Nicci and the two Mord-Sith have already clambered out on their own.

 

            Update on the hair sitch: Way back at the start of Warheart I bet that each of the Mord-Sith would turn out to have different-coloured hair, because having, like, one blonde person, one brunette person, and one ginger person following Dick around struck me as the sort of subtextual objectification in which Goodkind would indulge.  The ensuing text has been surprisingly uninformative on this point, but in this scene Vale slides her hand down her braid to make sure it hasn't got any of the silver sliph-juice left on it and I was wrong; there are in fact two blond Mord-Sith!

 

            Richard thanks the sliph and asks her to hang out in case he needs to travel again.  Kahlan asks Nathan what he's doing here and he gets all theatrical, saying that he came to greet them because he knew they were coming.  He has a "hawk-like glare," we are informed, which reminds me to check something ...  wow, this is the first hawk-like glare in the entire book and it belongs to Nathan, not Richard.  And there was only the one "raptor gaze." Terry's diversifying his heroic signifiers.

 

            They bullshit for a bit: Rikka asks Cassia and Vale where they've been like someone who expects an answer, so I guess she's the boss Mord-Sith, and is saddened to hear of Cara's death, though she is of course pleased that Cara died protecting Dick.  The Mord-Sith agree that it's good Cassia and Vale have returned to Mord-Sith central to help protect Lord Rahl and the Mother Confessor as part of the larger team, since they need so much protecting and would die immediately without the Mord-Sith around, even though Cassia and Vale have spent most of Warheart being one-hundred percent useless and Richard's saved them more than they've saved him, because he is the best, and also because Goodkind's books love to talk big about competent women but are often oddly reluctant to show us the money, funny how that works.

 

            Meanwhile, Nate Dog says he's been bombarded with prophecy lately, which is how he knew to come and meet them down here in the well room.  Nate Dog is snappily dressed by the way, with a ruffled shirt and a stylish green vest.  There are First File soldiers waiting outside.  Their boss Commander Zimmer expresses relief that Lord Rahl has returned safely, says that they had expected Richard to ride back overland with General Benjington, and asks where all his other peeps are.  Richard runs through the list of everybody who's dead again and Nate Dog smugs it up about how he was right about the Dicksquad returning through the sliph.  Dick makes Zimmer the new General and Nate pats himself on the back about having prophesied that too.  Richard catches everybody up on how the dudes coming to besiege the People's Palace can reanimate the dead and they are all like oh shit, but they've got these special arrows with red fletchings that might stop the undead — why these arrows are in any way out of the ordinary other than their colour is totally unclear to me, but finding out would involve Goodkind throwing down a bunch of word salad about additive magic and subtractive magic and occult power again so I really hope we don't get an explanation. Also minor spoiler: These arrows are never mentioned again in any way, so you may put them from your mind. Maybe Terry forgot?

 

            Nate Dog's got something to show Dick: The stone of some of his ancestors' tombs is melting.  Apparently this has happened before and Zed had the master of the crypts seal the melting section up with white stone from the Quarry of the Prophets — the prophets have a quarry, it seems — to prevent the whole palace from melting; I've got no idea whether this is a retcon or something that actually happened in a previous book.  According to Nate Dog it's smoking hot down there now, much like himself, and they've just been occasionally throwing water on the melting section, but of course it isn't doing squat, probably mostly because Richard hasn't been here and so nothing of consequence is allowed to happen; I am really not sure how shit functions day by day in this universe when my dude is not around.  Richard borrows a sword from one of the First File and Nathan leads off.

 

            Okay, so now I'm confused, because having introduced the fact that he had something to show Richard and then conveyed the disturbing news that ZOMG THE PALACE IS MELTING, Nate Dog has not led them to the tombs of the previous Lords Rahl, which, again, are fucking melting, but has instead brought them up onto the battlements, where the thing he wanted to show Richard actually is.  So I guess the thing about how the palace is melting was just an "oh by the way," like a conversational tangent? Oh, I bet Cranky Zombie Voldemort's army is already outside and Terry didn't have Nate mention it right away just to dick us around.  Oh my god they fucking are too: Nate Dog cautions Richard to approach the ramparts carefully so those below don't see him.  He pokes his head cautiously through a crenelation, and, behold, the plains below are "covered with half naked people." But are these half naked people merely in the midst of some kind of rave or mass orgy? No no, Terry hastily clarifies, these are half people, more half people than Richard has ever imagined existed, all right here looking up at the massive city and People's Palace on the plateau above.

 

            The half people are just standing there, dead quiet.  They stink.  Most of them are wearing pants, though, Goodkind tells us, so hey, at least there's that.  This is the first time they've been quiet since they arrived, apparently, and Richard is sure it's because they know he's up here.  Dick looks for CZV and Sean Hannity, but they don't seem to be around.  He asks Nate Dog if there are similar gobs of half people distributed round the other sides of the palace and our boy, forthcoming with his information now that Goodkind's done the big theatrical reveal, confirms that yes there are, and prophecy tells him they are gonna make it in here even though the People's Palace has sick defenses.  They've been here for a few days, ever since the tombs started melting.

 

            Dick tells everybody he needs to get to the Garden of Life where Regula the Omen Machine is at.  They can see its glass roof from here on the battlements.  Kahlan flips her shit and insists that he first go to the containment field so that Nicci can draw the poison out of him.  Because Goodkind never shows an emotion he can tell us about instead Kahlan has been obsessed with this containment field to the point of near-parody for the last hundred pages; I haven't counted because I'm not that hardcore, but I bet at least ten percent of her lines of dialogue reference it directly.  Also, Nicci points out that in order to make Regula work Richard would have to go to the Temple of the Winds, which is where the instruction manual apparently is — I forget whether we knew this.  Oh Terry, I beg you, I have mocked and I have carped, but here at the last I beg you to have mercy on me: not another dumbass fetch quest where the characters just walk from A to B and say inane crap and spin their wheels until you feel like you've burned enough pages; please Terry I don't have it in me, I can't do it man.

 

            Oh wait, ...  phew, Richard blows Nicci off, saying that the instruction manual in the Temple of the Winds is a fake, that "I don't even need to see it to tell you it's full of misinformation." Dick knows this because Zed taught him that a lot of written magic and magical research is bullshit meant to mislead people, to send them off down blind alleys and trick them into thinking they know how something works.  I feel like this is how anti-vaxers think.  When his peeps quite reasonably demand to know how Richard knows that the Regula readme falls into that category, he explains that it's because he already knows how Regula works, because he's read the Warheart scroll — the one he found among the cerulean scrolls in the Citadel, you will remember? during the big research jam that was one of the absolute most boring bits? — and he knows the Warheart Scroll to be an authoritative source unlike all the others because fuck you.  So you shouldn't trust book learning or expertise, because they're meant to trick you, except there's always one authoritative truthful source out there and when you find that one you should adhere to it without question.  Got that?

 

            Kahlan continues to be super into the Richard-goes-to-the-containment-field plan, because the poison is advancing.  Richard says sure, but Regula's on the way, so they'll stop there first, to which she agrees.

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Nate Dog! I was also very pleased to see him again. Thanks for giving him his true name!

 

Warheart, Chapters 52-55: A Dick At Work, Part 1

 

            Okay, so last time we had the long-ass boring episode in which even less than usual happened.  This one's where shit starts to go down.  Still in the most boring, most half-hearted way imaginable, but things do occur.  That's as close as I'm coming to an endorsement: I acknowledge that the collection of words on these pages definitely includes an account of fictional events happening.

 

            The room containing the Omen Machine is illuminated by things called "proximity spheres." Regula itself is big and blocky, with heavy metal siding.  In each corner of the room there are stacks of metal strips that can be fed through the Omen Machine so it can inscribe prophecy directly onto them.  It's all very early computer chic, like Terry had to write his own programs on pin-cards in university and did not enjoy it much.  Dick checks the machine's output tray, but there's nothing there, so it hasn't pooped out any prophecy in his absence.  He places his hands on the machine and it wakes up with a rumble that shakes the palace, projecting a symbol in the Language of Creation onto the ceiling.  Nate Dog says he's been down here tons and the machine hasn't stirred, but Richard has death in him and Regula is a thing of the Underworld, so it responds to his touch.

 

            The machine poops out a prophecy.  It says that the machine has missed him, so oh, okay, it can kind of talk and has feelings?  Dick tells everyone else to fuck off so he and Regula can talk alone, which grinds Kahlan's gears, but he is the Lord Rahl so away they go.  Regula tells Dick that it knows he is not here for prophecy.  It asks if it is going to die and what it is like to be surprised.  He explains what it is to be human, to be uncertain.  He feels bad for the machine.  Emotions all up in here. It asks him why it's here, and he tells it that its purpose is to help him, while he in turn will help it go back to the Underworld where it belongs.  Then suddenly the strips of metal it spits out become hot, which means that Sean Hannity and CZV have taken control of the machine.  They basically say comin' atcha motherfucker.

 

            Having accomplished diddly squat here, they head off for the containment field — though Dick thinks to himself that he needs to distract everyone from the Omen Machine, so presumably his heart-to-heart with it has produced some kind of result that will be revealed later in a way that's supposed to be clever.  Dick says the dead are on their way and sends Nate Dog to coordinate the defenses.  In the partially-collapsed Garden of Life they see the Boxes of Orden, which Dick's just left lying around for years since he kicked Darken Rahl's ass in here for some reason.  He is glad they're still here, so that'll matter I guess.  Zimmer and a bunch of his First File are hanging out outside the doors to the Garden of Life and Richard wants to get rid of them, so he sends them off with Nate Dog.

 

            The Dicksquad heads downstairs into the lower levels of the palace.  Dick hugs Kahlan as they walk, his death-riddled frame needing to feel her warmth and life like some sort of cursed vampire, and she "gives him her special smile" — Special Smile of Sharing, people! At last they reach the library with the containment field in it, but oh oops, Richard's forgotten something and needs to go take care of it.  He even snaps his fingers; he is obviously bullshitting.  He takes Cassia with him, hustling away as Kahlan and Nicci object.  As soon as he gets around the corner he starts booking it.  He tells Cassia that he has to do "something crazy" to save them all and asks if she's with him, and of course she says yes immediately.  As they keep running, he says that CZV and the half people will be getting into the palace any time, and the "twilight count is nearly done," which I guess he knows somehow, and that he couldn't tell Kahlan what he's about to do because he'll probably die doing it, but he needs to try this crazy plan in order to save all living beings; pick whatever heroic canard you like, he pretty much runs through all of 'em.

 

            He runs them back to the sliph chamber and tells her they need to travel.  He also asks her not to tell anyone where they've gone.  She assures him "with a coy smile" that "you know I never reveal anything about my clients to anyone." Terry seems to be going for "magical prostitute" here; it feels scuzzy, for sure, but also just flat out odd.  Like ...  why? Whatever though; the sun is close to setting on our journey and my will to gaze deep into the Yeard and contemplate its mysteries is fading fast.  They jump in the well and are gone.

 

            Updated note: I wrote the above before learning from those in this thread more knowledgeable about the lore of the Dickverse than I that the sliph was a prostitute in life, before she was a magical construct made out of silver liquid.  So I guess her profession in life is informing her personality in death. So that's rage-inducingly retrograde and disgusting. Oh Terry. You always be Terryin'.

 

            Hours later, back in the library, Kahlan paces the shelves, worried about where Richard is.  General Zimmer runs in and reports that there's no sign of him.  Kahlan's shit quivers on the edge of complete displacement as she remembers what it was like the last time Richard was gone.  Nicci suggests he may have been lying to them about why he was stopping to check on Regula, but why she thinks this she can't really say.  Kahlan remembers Zimmer's skill in the war long ago, how he would go out at night and bring her back strings of enemy ears.  She commands him to hunt Richard down, only presumably without the ear chopping, and he shoots off like a good soldier.

 

            Kahlan figures out that Dick could have fucked off using the sliph, so Kahlan, Nicci, and the Mord-Sith head off that way.  The palace is crawling with soldiers searching for Dick.  They are all sure that Dick would die before abandoning them, and Kahlan is afraid that this is in fact what has happened, which, hey, is true at least in intent, it sounds like.  When they arrive at her chamber the sliph rises out of the well in a big mound of silvery goop, confirms that Richard and Cassia travelled through her, but refuses to tell Kahlan where.  Kahlan plays "I'm his wife," which doesn't work, and follows that up by playing "he'll die if you don't tell me," which saddens the sliph but does not convince her.  The sliph asks if they want to travel and Kahlan says yes, they want to go wherever she took Dick and Cassia.  The sliph's having none of that sneakiness, though; she tells them she'll be happy to take them somewhere if they name a destination, then sinks sassily back down into the well.

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Warheart, Chapters 52-55: A Dick At Work, Part 2

 

            Kahlan etc are just starting to cogitate on why Richard might have taken the sliph out of the palace when kablam, they start hearing wizard's fire up above.  The invasion has begun, unless that is it's some other goddamn thing, because Goodkind seems determined to put off the big fight for as long as possible.  They book it up some service stairs and out into the upper levels of the palace, where they are instantly ambushed by half people who have gotten in, probably through some tunnel the First File neglected to guard while they were looking for Dick in every crevice.  One of them leaps at Kahlan with its mouth agape, but General Zimmer swoops in out of nowhere and decapitates it.  There's like a dozen of the dirty foreigners but it's nbd, because Zimmer has a bunch of First File with him and they kill the shit out of them.

 

            Zimmer says the half people came up through the melting tombs — I dunno how because we know they're not immune to heat, but whatever —, and then another group flanked his guys from behind while they were trying to contain the first bunch.  Nate Dog owned some of the half people with wizard's fire and he and the First File have now fallen back to a defensible location.  Nicci rushes off to help.

 

            Far away, Dick and Cassia ...  have fucking come back to the Wizard's Keep! If he's come back to get the Sword of Truth, which he left here on purpose, I am going to cry.  Oh my god, yes he has.  Chase has been sitting sentinel outside the tower room where Richard left the sword and he's fallen asleep.  He's surprised to see Dick.  Dick tells him he's in a hurry, which, well, no shit, and says he needs to get back down to the— No! No, no, no! Fuck you TG, fuck you, I don't wanna go back to boring ghost dungeon! Aw come on Terry, I thought we was bros, I can't go back down there man, anywhere, anywhere: Boring Scroll Room, Dark Boring Dark Underworld of Darkness, Birmingham, Shitty Cave Town, anywhere you want my dude just not Boring Ghost Dungeon, I can't do it no for serious man the boredom is still too real, IT's TOO REAL! NO! NOOOOOOOO!

 

            My pleas fall unheard into the void, because sure enough Richard tells Chase he needs to get back into the catacombs and down to Boring Ghost Dungeon.  Chase takes them the shortest route, and Dick deigns to allow him to tag along on their journey downward.  Dick spouts off some dark hints about swords being no good where they're going, but refuses to tell them more because "it isn't good to know how you might die," and also because "I'm not even sure I can do this" — ah, even Dick gets performance anxiety.

 

            The Keep's slitted windows reveal that it's night time, so the half people are already inside the palace fucking shit up back in D'Harra, presumably.  Dick, Chase, and Cassia hustle.  down the hidden stairs to the central chamber, and then back into the tunnel marked Garden of Souls, the one the Dicksquad came out of.  Bones, bones, dead people.  Chase is wigged out.  Dick retraces their steps all the way down to the Sanctuary of Souls.  Dick starts expositing about how spirits become trapped in the sanctuary, drawn here by some of the symbols but prevented by others from moving elsewhere in the Keep.  So there's this enormous supply of souls floating around down here unable to do much or go anywhere, and some of them have asked him for help before.  Some of them are pretty pissy about being continuously torn away from the Grace and brought back here.  Oh hey, I think he's gonna somehow give these souls to the half people so they'll stop trying to munch the living.

 

            Dick heads into the Sanctuary and starts tearing down all the cloth hangings and handing them to Cassia, telling her to hold them with the warding symbols facing inward so they can't be seen.  He walks to a central hall and a great congregation of all the spirits gathers, sparkling and shining.  He draws his sword and it makes its badass wringing noise; it sounds "almost divine." He invites the spirits to "come home with me," and the spirits all get absorbed into the sword.  Dick says okay, job done, and they head back up out of the catacombs.  Huh, okay, that was quick and painless.

 

            After getting them around all the magic shields Richard can't bypass because his Lord Rahl mojo's not working and to the entrance of the catacombs Chase has contributed to this adventure in no way whatsoever by the way, beyond occasionally asking questions that Richard blows off, and Cassia, hardcore deadly ninja warrior, has mostly been here to hold cloths, so I have up until now not been quite sure why Richard didn't fly solo on this one, but here it comes: Dick's sickness has him in very rough shape now.  He thinks of Kahlan and everybody else back at the People's Palace and all the dying that'll happen if he doesn't make it back and just keeps swimming, but he finally collapses just outside the catacombs and tells Cassia that this is why he brought her: she has to help him reach the sliph and get back to the palace.  She and Chase lift him, Chase taking much of the load.  When they reach the sliph, she again says Dick must not take the sword, but reluctantly admits that he will make it back to the palace with the blade, though he will die shortly thereafter.  Dick bids farewell to Chase, who can't travel because he is but a simple woodsman with no magical goodness, and he and Cassia dive into the sliph.

 

            Will Dick somehow triumph against all odds? Will one more token named character who isn't too important die? Will everybody who isn't Dick continue to be totally useless? Will Sean Hannity and Cranky Zombie Voldemort come within a hair's-breadth of achieving their dastardly goals and then be defeated by our morally-upright Dickie-boy and the powers of life and truth? Will Kahlan and Richard share any more special smiles? Will we finally get a jaw-kick or a rising angry thing? — come on Terry, just one, hook me up dude; it's the last book my man, come on, one for the road.

 

            Fifty pages to go, my friends! Less than fifty! I am proud, I am moved, that we have come so far, that we have walked so daringly upon the very edge of the abyss that is the Yeard and gazed so long into its depths.  There have, perhaps, been moments when you have questioned our course, when you have wondered whether it was folly to walk so brazenly over the precipice, one after the other like lemmings over a cliff, to spiral down into the nigh-incomprehensible vortex of the Dickverse.  You may have asked yourself whether in doing so you have lost all perspective, all reference points for subtle, thoughtful writing, for plot and character, for sane conduct, for all that is good and true and real in fiction and in humankind.  I know that I have asked these questions of myself.  But this journey truly is not endless: there is another shore, my friends, and we are almost there; our escape is close at hand.  It is not far now.  I can see the light.

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I think a righteous thing of anger will rise within Dick and that will allow Dick to triumph over death and deathchoosers.

 

(Aren't Sean Hannity and Cranky Zombie Voldemort even more bringer-of-death-ish than Dick, by the way?)

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