Page 257 of Hunters and Prey

“I don’t understand,” I said.

At the silence that fell over the group, I hesitated, glancing around the fire at all of their faces, seeing every eye in that circle focused on me.

I was even more bewildered when I noted the awe, shock and near-reverence on a number of their faces, mostly in the faces of seers I didn’t know.

I cleared my throat.

“I don’t understand,” I repeated, falling into my clinician’s voice, which Black had pointed out more than once was something I did when I was nervous. “I thought Dragon was the significant being here,” I said. “A good chunk of that religion my Uncle Charles follows is centered on Dragon, isn’t it? I was told he was called ‘The One True God’…”

Zarat clicked softly.

The sound contained a faint rebuke.

“That cult is based in violence,” she said, her voice holding the same rebuke. “It eschews the female principle for that reason. They pretend this is a distillation of the power of Dragon… but in truth, it is a perversion of it. It is a means of making it sick, even insane, by ripping it from its other half, a half it needs. More than any other dyad among the Pantheon, the Dragon and Tortoise are interdependent, functionally-speaking. They literally cannot function without the other. Which is perhaps why this aspect of each of you remained more or less dormant until you took one another as mates.”

Seeing the puzzled look on my face, she smiled.

Her eyes and words remained serious.

“We have seen what this looks like in Dragon,” she said. “Ask your brother Revik… or your sister Alyson. Dragon without Tortoise is an insanely powerful, yet unpredictable, chaotic, dark, and highly destructive force. Dragon without Tortoise cannot be anything but that. He simply cannot function in his creative capacity without the Great Architect. He needs the Tortoise. He will do almost anything to find it.”

I frowned.

Something was nagging at me, poking at the back edges of my brain.

I couldn’t tease it out, so eventually I let it go.

“What does that mean, exactly, in terms of us?” I said. “The people part of this, I mean. Me and Black, not the forces we represent. What does that have to do with me jumping all over creation? If Black is on Earth… meaning my Earth… his Earth… why do I keep leaving?”

Zarat’s expression grew even more serious.

“We have a theory as to the reason for this, too, beloved sister,” she said, her voice cautious. Glancing at Black with a frown, then back at me, she said, “You remember I told you just now that Dragon is scattered? That his essence is fractured?”

I nodded, wary.

“Yes, well…”

She glanced at Black, who was frowning, and who I suddenly realized hadn’t said a word, not to any of this.

“Well,” Zarat said, looking back at me. Her voice grew apologetic. “We believe you are jumping to those places that contain one of those fragments of Dragon. We do not know why. We can only guess that it is to reunite these pieces in some way. Or perhaps to connect them to one another… using your own light as a conduit.”

I stared at her.

I found myself remembering the different versions of Earth I’d already seen.

The one with the bleeding trees.

There was one that seemed to be one large ocean, filled with jellyfish.

In one, I got thrown in jail, within minutes of arriving.

There was one with massive skyscrapers and the transparent sidewalks…

…and one with humans in loincloths who attacked me with spears.

Thinking about all of these, I felt myself pale.

In every one of them, I’d felt pulled somewhere. I’d felt the need to find something… or someone. I’d known I’d gone there for that reason.

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