the words which might have captured it had never been forged. It was woven of beauty, joy, sorrow, celebration-of tears and terror, of memories lost and dreams never forgotten. It was freighted with welcome and burnished with farewell, and wrapped about it, flowing through it, were peace and completion.
Leeana never remembered moving, but suddenly she was on her feet, standing at Gayrfressa’s shoulder, left hand raised against the mare’s warm, chestnut coat, and the woman smiled at them both.
“Lady,” Leeana heard her own voice say, and inclined her head, for she knew the woman before her now.
Isvaria Orfressa, firstborn of Orr and Kontifrio, goddess of death, completion, and memory and second only to Tomanak himself among Orr’s children in power. A quiet terror rippled through Leeana Hanathafressa as she found herself face-to-face with the very personification of death in a quiet, sunny pine wood she knew now was somehow outside the world in which she’d always lived. Yet there was no dread in that terror, no fear, only the awareness that she gazed upon the ending which must come to every living thing.
“I haven’t come for you, Leeana,” that awesome, indescribable voice said gently. It sang in Leeana’s blood and bone, murmured from the roots of mountains and sent endless, quiet echoes rolling across the heavens. “Nor for you, Gayrfressa.” Isvaria smiled at both of them. “Not yet, not today. Someday I will, and gather you to me as I gather all my worthy dead, and, oh, but the two of you will be worthy when that day comes! I’ll know you, and I’ll come for you, and you will find a place prepared for you at my table.”
Leeana inhaled deeply, feeling the power of life racing through her with the air filling her lungs, the blood pumping through her veins, and knew that in some strange way she had never been as alive as in this moment when she stood face-to-face with death Herself and saw in Isvaria’s face not terror or despair but only… welcome.
“But that day is not today,” Isvaria told them. “No, today I’ve come for another purpose entirely.”
“Another purpose, Lady?” Leeana was astounded by the levelness of her own tone, and Isvaria shook her head, her smile broader and warmer.
“You’re very like your husband, Leeana-and you like your brother, Gayrfressa. In this universe, or in any other, all any of you will ever ask is to meet whatever comes upon your feet.”
“I don’t know about that, Lady,” Leeana replied, more aware in that moment of how young she truly was than she’d been in years.
“Perhaps not, but I do- we do,” Isvaria told her. Then her smile faded, and she reached out and touched Leeana’s cheek ever so gently. That touch was as light as spider silk, gentle as a breeze, yet Leeana felt the power to shatter worlds in the cool, smooth fingers touching her skin so lightly. “We know, just as we know you, and we’ve waited for you as long as we have for Bahzell and Walsharno.”
“I don’t understand,” Leeana said, and felt Gayrfressa with her in her mind.
“Of course you don’t.” Isvaria cocked her head, those bottomless eyes studying Leeana’s face. “And I’m sure it’s a bit overwhelming, even for someone as redoubtable as you and Gayrfressa, to encounter so many deities in such a brief period of time.” She smiled again. “Time is a mortal concept, you know-one we’ve been forced to come to know and share…and abide by, but one that would never have occurred to us, left to our own devices. In that respect, you mortals are mightier than any god or goddess. And in the end, just as you created time, you’ll transcend it, and in the transcending you’ll heal or damn us all.”
Leeana swallowed, and Isvaria shook her head quickly.
“I haven’t come to lay the burden of all eternity upon you and demand you take it up today, Leeana!”
“Then may I ask why you have come, Lady?”
“Yes, very like Bahzell,” Isvaria murmured. Then she stood back slightly, folded her arms, and looked at the two of them levelly.
“My daughters, both of you have roles to play in a struggle which began before time itself. Has Bahzell told you what my brother Tomanak explained to him about the nature of time and the war between Light and Dark?”
“He’s…tried, Lady,” Leeana said after a moment. “He said there are many universes, each of them as real as our own yet separate. Some are very like ours, others are very different, but Light and Dark are at war in all of them. He said that everyone- all of us-exist in all those universes, or many of them at least, and that we’re the ones who determine who finally wins in each of them. And that, in the end, the final confrontation between Light and Dark will be settled by how many of those universes each side controls when the last one falls.”
“Not a bad explanation, at all,” Isvaria told her. “But not quite complete. Did he tell you not even a goddess can know exactly what future, what chain of events and decisions, any single mortal in any single one of those universes will experience?”
Leeana nodded, and Isvaria nodded back very seriously.
“That, my daughters, is where mortals’ freedom to choose-and ability to fail-enters the equation. In the end, it all depends upon you and your choices. Oh, chance can play its role, as well, but over the entire spectrum of universes, chance cancels out and choice and courage and fear and greed and love and selfishness and cruelty and mercy-all those things which make you mortals what you are-come into their own.
“Yet the great pattern, the warp and woof of reality- those we deities can see clearly. Those are what guide and draw our own efforts to protect this strand as it works its way through the loom of history, or to snip that one short. It’s there, at those moments, that our champions-and those who love them, Leeana Hanathafressa and Gayrfressa, daughter of Mathygan and Yorthandro-take their stands in the very teeth of evil to fight-and all too often to die-in defense of the Light. And no being, no mortal and no god, can know for certain whether they’ll triumph or fail before that very moment. My daughters, I know no better than you whether or not this world in which you live, this universe which is all you know, will stand or fall at the end of time. That decision rests in your hands. Not in mine, not in my brothers’ or my sisters’-in yours.”
Leeana swallowed, and Isvaria touched her face once more.
“You’re fit to carry that burden, Leeana, whether you realize it or not…and you will. In every universe, in every time, when the moment arrives, you will. And if the Dark triumphs, it will never be because you failed the Light in that moment of need. But I tell you this, as well-if the Light triumphs in this universe of yours, it will triumph through you and Bahzell.”
Leeana’s eyes went huge, and the fingers touching her face cupped her cheek gently.
“Power and possibilities, outcomes and events, swirl so thickly about you that even a goddess can see only dimly. And we can take advantage of that dimness, we deities, and…manipulate it so that our enemies are even blinder than we. Not always, not in all places. We must choose our times, pick those events where it becomes most crucial for our enemies to guess rather than to know. Your life, and Bahzell’s, are one of those times. We can’t tell you what will happen, or even what you must do, because by the very act of telling you we would affect the outcome. But in every future I see, you come to me, Leeana. And you, Gayrfressa. You come to my table, in all your thousands of choices, and I welcome you. You come through pain, and you come through sorrow, and you come through loss, and you do not always come in triumph. But you come to me unbroken and as you are now, upon your feet and never your knees, and the light of you shines, my daughters.”
Leeana stared into the eyes of the Goddess of Death, and those eyes touched something inside her. There was a…flicker. A dancing current or a flaring candle flame. She couldn’t put a name to the sensation, not really, yet she knew it would always be there. She might lose it, from time to time, and it would be no armor against fear, uncertainty, doubt…but it would always return to her, as well, and under that fear and uncertainty and doubt there would be this assurance, this promise, from the power to which all life returned in the fullness of time.
“I know it’s a heavy weight to bear,” Isvaria told her, “but you’re fit to bear it, both of you, and love will take you to places the Dark can never come. I do not name you my champions, but I do name you the daughters I’ve called you- my daughters. Whether you come to me early, or you come to me late, I will be waiting for you, and I will gather you as my own.”
Leeana stood gazing into those eyes, feeling the iron fidelity of that promise, for an eternity. It lasted forever…and took no longer than the flicker between the beats of a hummingbird’s wings.
And then the pine woods were empty once again, except for her and Gayrfressa.
She blinked, shaking her head, feeling as if she were awakening from a dream and yet with every memory perfectly formed, and felt Gayrfressa’s matching bemusement. Perhaps it had been only a dream, she thought, but then she felt something in her hand and looked down.
It was a sprig of periwinkle, its stem wrought of silver, its tiny flowers exquisitely formed in chips of sapphire.
