About the Gates...

[Cybertoy00]

When Hinjo and Roy are discussing the Soon's Gate, Roy suggests moving it to keep the impending battle away from Azure City. Hinjo states that the Gate cannot be moved, as doing so would undo the seal. http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0411.html

So, What does this mean for The Plan? According to Redcloak, the ritual is to give the Dark One the ability to change where the Rift is, and let him transport it into the Upper Realms of the Gods. With the upper paragraph in mind, what now?

[Gift Jeraff]

Hinjo is talking about the gem, which was extra magical reinforcement added by Soon (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showpost.php?p=11686931&postcount=83). The Gate/Rift cannot be moved at all without the Ritual.

[Evazan]

The gem reinforces the Gate; the gem is NOT the Gate, and the Gate is not the seal, and the seal is not the rift. The gem is the deadbolt, not the lock, or the door, or the doorway. The "door" is a complex spell that is not actually visible but is what Dorukan and Lirian are casting in the first panel of the second page of #276. The "lock" is the Gate, a tiny magical object that later had a throne crafted around it; it's about the size of a raisin in the case of Azure City. The "doorway" is the rift itself, and it is not really inside the gemstone, it's just that the gem (and Gate) are translucent and we can see through it (because it's a visual medium and it made it easier to understand). The gemstone is an enchanted object that further seals and reinforces the Gate; thus, the "deadbolt."

When Soon hands over the Sapphire to Shojo's father, he is essentially giving the last piece of the Gate's security system over so that it might be put into place. Think of the Sapphire as an additional seal that Soon and his followers came up with. The Sapphire does not NEED to be in the same place as the Gate in order to seal it, because it's magic, but moving it around is risky. There's a chance that it will just fail and the Gate will swing open. Before the panel shown, Soon likely kept it somewhere else safe, but chose as he was dying to consolidate the protections (because that's where he was going to be hanging out as a ghost-martyr). I guess the magic might have been stronger being in the same spot as the Gate, too.

So, no, the Gate or the rift could not have been physically moved. The Sapphire could be moved, and Xykon would have been obligated to track it down and undo its magic before he could perform his ritual, but there would be a risk in doing so, and it wouldn't really have stopped Xykon from sieging the city at that point (because he still would have needed the immovable Gate).

The use of Redcloak's magic ritual to shift the Gate into another plane is entirely unrelated, and in fact can only shift a Gate to another plane—not to another place in THIS plane. Think of it like moving a Bag of Holding from the Prime to an Outer Plane: you've moved the entranceway to an extradimensional space, but opening it still leads to the same interior.

Hopefully, that clears the issue up.

(Emphasis added)

Does that clear it up?