Faith of the Fallen   ::   Goodkind Terry

Then, all of a sudden, as the people shuffled around and past, Kahlan beheld the white marble figures rising up before her. The sight took her breath in a gasp. The rays of dawn lit them as if the sun itself had risen just to caress the lustrous forms in all their glory.

Cara gripped Kahlan's arm, her fingers digging in painfully as she, too, was taken by the sight. The statue of the man and woman seized Kahlan's imagination with their nobility of spirit.

She felt tears run down her cheeks, and then she was weeping openly, like the people around her, at the majesty, the dignity, the beauty, of what stood before her. It was everything the carvings on the walls all around were not. It offered freely everything they denied.

LIFE, it said at the base.

Kahlan had to gasp through her tears to draw breath. She clutched at Cara's arm, and Cara clutched at hers, the two of them holding on to each other for support as the crowd swept them along in a current of shared emotion. The man in the statue was not Richard, but there was much of Richard in it. The woman was not Kahlan, but there was enough of her form in it that Kahlan felt her face flushing at others seeing it.

"Please look and move along so that others may view it too," the men at the sides kept calling. They weren't wearing uniforms; they were as tattered-looking as everyone else. They appeared to be ordinary citizens who had just stepped in to help.

The woman who had offered the bread fell to her knees in wailing. Arms respectfully lifted her and helped her to move on. The woman, living in the Old World, had probably never seen a thing of such beauty.

As Kahlan shuffled around the statue, unable to take her eyes from it, she reached out to touch it, as did everyone else. As she was carried past, her fingers met the smooth flesh in stone, knowing it was also where Richard's fingers had been. She wept all the harder.

As she moved past, Kahlan saw then that the curve of the sundial had words on the back:

"Your life is yours alone. Rise up and live it."

The words were visible on the lips of many who saw them.

The crowd kept coming up the steps, forcing the people around the statue to move on. Men at the rear guided people between the columns, out through the rear of the partially built palace, and out of the way so that others could come up to view the statue.

"I wish Benjamin could see this," Cara said, her blue eyes brimming with tears.

Kahlan was overcome with a burble of laughter. "I was going to say, `I wish Richard could see it.