Burn(75)

She collapsed into the snow, spent. She laughed ruefully to herself: The world below was safe for a while because the destroyer that had arrived to claim it needed a little rest.

It was as she was drifting off to sleep that she finally put it all together. The super-accelerated healing, the pregnancy and super-accelerated birth, the refusal of her monumental body to countenance one little sliver of her remaining humanity. Even her missing finger, now a missing claw. She’d always suspected it, all those years as a human, those fiery images in her head, her ability to lead others in the Believer cause, to restore them to the days when they stole prophecies and sacred artifacts, though they seemed to have no idea what to do with those things until she showed them. All part of her abilities that finally led even dragons to do her bidding.

She’d accepted it as only natural that she’d arrived in a world that couldn’t contain her in human form. Though that didn’t explain why the blue dragon was down there walking on two legs.

No. This was the realization, and when she thought it, she felt the truth of it ring through her, surge like the earlier energy had.

She was more than dragon. She was the first dragon. She was the Creator of them all.

She was their Goddess. And they had contained her in human shape to control her power.

“Not anymore,” she said, an anger bubbling deep within her. “Not anymore.”

Tomorrow would be an eventful day for this world, when the Goddess awoke.





Twenty-Three


“IT IS ODD she has not come,” Kazimir said, as night fell on the Dewhurst farm.

“Hard to see that as a bad thing,” Sarah said. They were out in the cold, looking over the snowy fields. “We have no plan and she destroys entire towns.”

“We will stop her,” Kazimir said.

“I don’t know why you think that.”

His eye still scanned the fading landscape, no snow falling, just an increasingly bitter cold. Sarah wondered if this winter would ever actually end. “You were prophesied to do so,” he finally said. “She believed it so much, she sent an assassin after you.”

“I’m just a girl.”

“It is tragic how well you have been taught to say that with sadness rather than triumph.”

“I would have thought all bets were off when we came to a whole other world. Things are different here.”

“Not so very different,” Kazimir said.

“You’re a human, my mom is alive, I’m not, and Jason barely knows me.”

“Yes. Fair points all, but we are still the same, Sarah Dewhurst. In our inmost selves, we are still the same, and we will still accomplish this.”

She had no response to that, so instead, she asked, “What are these runes you’ve been writing? Where do they disappear to?”

He pursed his lips, thoughtfully. “May I confess something to you?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “Please don’t let it be terrible.”

“It may be. But it may not. It may just be what always was and all that ever shall be.”

“Because that doesn’t sound terrible at all.” She didn’t continue with the sarcasm, though, as she saw the worried look on his face.

“You want to know what I was writing and where the runes go. The first answer is simple. I was recording the story of what has happened, how we got where we are, and so forth. We are scholars, blues. We always have been.”

He took a thoughtful breath. “As to where they go, that is harder. I do not like what I think is the answer. I assumed I was writing about the fulfilment of a prophecy, but as I wrote with the ancient claw of a Goddess who had only seemed to lose her finger just before coming to this world, I began to dread that it wasn’t fulfilment I was documenting.” He looked in her eyes now. “I fear I may have been writing the prophecy itself.”

“What?”

“The one that talked about a girl in the other world. The one that led to all that war and loss.” Sarah was so astonished to see tears in his eye that she couldn’t respond. “I fear I may have caused this. Will cause it. Have always caused it.”

“How is that even possible?” she found herself whispering.

“All the different worlds,” he said. “All the different possibilities. I told you we believe everything happens again and again. It’s called recurrence. Dragons know that what affects one world can seep into the next. We know that very well, Sarah Dewhurst. And so I ask myself, did a Kazimir in another world write a prophecy for ours? Did I write one for another? For this one, perhaps? Have I always done this, in every world?”

“But the time frame is so different—”

“The runes go into the accumulated knowledge of all blues. Does that reflect across worlds? Across times? Did what I write, will what I’ve written, be interpreted and reinterpreted over the millennia until it becomes as vague and dangerous as any prophecy, bringing me to a place where I will write it again after it has happened? Or is there now a clearer version in another world where this story has yet to unfold, waiting to do so because I have ‘foreseen’ it?”

“Kazimir—”

“Dragon magic is about the realization of unrealizable possibility. That’s why it’s magic. It subsumes reality, subsumes what is real, while all the time worlds spring up again and again, playing out infinite choices in infinite varieties. Am I the thread in that variety that has caused this to happen?”