Stone 46

**Chapter 46**

*“She plunged into a void, a wasteland of brutal blackness bereft of all sense of time or awareness of place. She was lost to the world. The dark deprivation was beyond understanding, or comfort.”*

As near as I can tell, the above is a description of Kahlan sleeping.

Kahlan wakes up. She has a headache and is not at all rested, but her mindrape power has recharged. Tossy and Ryan are there, and we learn that Chandelier and Prim are leading another attack on the Order army. Kahlan has apparently decided to actually *complete* her save-the-world quest after all. Yay. She tells Tossy that as soon as Chandelier and Prim get back, they're leaving for Aydindril. Ryan leaves some men to stand guard, and Kahlan falls back into her weird and disturbing sleep.

She awakens later, still groggy, and goes stumbling outside. She trips over the corpse of one of her guards; his throat has been cut. As Kahlan sees that all of her Galean guards are dead and is trying to put this together, some Order soldiers come wandering up, lead by General Riggs. They are ambushed by Orsk, who has finally somehow found Kahlan and not been slaughtered by the Army of Children (who, it appears, are *all* attacking the Order).

After a desultory fight scene, Orsk massacres the Order soldiers as Riggs chases down and grabs Kahlan. He exposits that *“He said you can't use your power, now.”* Kahlan proves this mysterious “he” wrong by mindraping Riggs, but before he can tell her who “he” is, Prim appears and shoots him to death with an arrow.

Orsk shows up. Prim goes to shoot him, and Kahlan orders Orsk to flee, which he does. Kahlan asks why Prim chased Orsk away, and he says it's so they can be alone *“before they chop your head off.”*

OH SNAP! 0\_0

Chandelier and Tossy pop up and Prim manages to club Chandelier in the head with a branch, stunning him. He then tells Tossy that Chandelier has gone mad and stabs in the chest while he's distracted. Finally he poisons two arrows with ten-step poison (he hadn't given Kahlan all of his poison, that bastard) and shoots first Chandelier, then Kahlan.

I could actually forgive the death of Chandelier if it meant the end of Kahlan. But no, it turns out that Prim used just the right amount of the ultra-deadly, kill-you-in-a-matter-of-seconds poison to render Kahlan helpless without actually killing her.

Prim gropes now-helpless Kahlan's ass, then drags her back into her tent as she realizes that he's a Satanist. Because...that's the only explanation. He's not possessed by evil spirits, or just plain crazy, or something else. Being a Satanist is the only possible explanation.

Prim orders Kahlan to strip: *“I wish to...be aroused by the sight of you.”* \~/ What an oddly stilted turn of phrase. He explains that he intends to rape her, then behead her. He makes the surprisingly sympathetic comment that *“You brought your hateful magic to my people, your hateful ways!”* Which, yeah, I can't really argue with.

Kahlan is apparently paralyzed. Prim, despite repeatedly ordering her to strip and then threatening to strip her himself, illogically takes off his own shirt and then literally jumps on top of her. I'm thinking no one ever taught him about the birds and the bees. SOMEHOW, this kills him.

Yes, seriously. \~/ This will be explained soon, not that it will make much sense.

So Kahlan is now paralyzed with a dead Satanist and would-be rapist on top of her, and she can feel the poison advancing through her body. And the chapter ends.

Arrgh...what is the deal with rape? It's come up several times and it's never handled at all well. Terry Goodkind apparently thinks it's important, or significant, or something, or else he wouldn't keep using it as a plot device.

I am starting a Rape Count to track each time someone is raped, or threatened with rape. So far we have three from Book 1 (Kahlan, by Princess Violet's guards; Kahlan, by Denim Nascar; and Richard, by Denna). I'm letting the whole “Richard's mother was raped” thing go, since it's in the distant past. We now have six from in this book (Queen Cyrilla; the Mud Women, by the Jocopo; all the women in Ebinissia; Du Chaillu; Kahlan, by General Riggs & Co; and now Kahlan, by Prim).

I'm not counting mindrape, the rape of the English language, or all the time this series has raped my sense of decency, because there isn't a number high enough.

Drinks: 5

Rape Count: 6

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