Rhianna picked a dozen berries, carried them in her palm for a ways.
It wasn’t until they stopped that night in a rocky grotto, shielded on three sides by rocks and from above by a huge pine tree, that Fallion came up with a theory for his fatigue.
They plunged into the blackness of the grotto, a place that would be decidedly easy to defend from strengi- saats. Jaz threw down his pack, dropped onto a bed of pine needles, and said dramatically, “I’m dead.”
Fallion brushed some twigs off of a mossy bed. A firefly flew up out of a nearby bush, then others began to shine, turning into lights that danced and weaved among the trees.
Rhianna laid her light-berries down, but Fallion saw that they were fading.
That’s when the realization struck. “Of course you’re dead,” Fallion told Jaz. “And so am I, and Rhianna.”
Rhianna halted, peered at him in the shadows, as did Talon. “All three of us are dead-at least we were on this world.”
“What do you mean?” Talon asked, standing above him like a hulk.
“Talon, you said that humans were almost gone from this shadow world. How many are left?” Fallion asked.
“Thirty-eight thousand.”
“Yet on our world, there were millions,” Fallion said. “Talon I’ve been wondering why you joined with your shadow self, but we didn’t. Now I understand. We have no shadow selves here.”
The others peered at him, and Fallion talked in a rush, thinking aloud. “We were hunted as children, Jaz and I, from before our birth. Rhianna was, too. On this world, our other selves failed to survive. That’s why we feel so…dead.”
There was a long silence. “You’re scaring me,” Rhianna said. She sat down on unsteady legs, nearly collapsing from exhaustion.
“If we died on this world, wouldn’t we remember at least some of our lives?” Jaz asked. “Shouldn’t we remember being children?”
“Does dust remember?” Talon asked.
There was a drawn-out silence as Fallion considered the implications. He wondered if he even had a history on this world. Had he died, or had it been one of his ancestors? Perhaps he’d never been born here.
“Fallion,” Rhianna asked with rising concern. “You came on this quest because you want to heal the world, bind the shadow worlds into one perfect world. But have you considered the possibility that in that world, perhaps none of us would exist?”
“We feel half-dead now,” Jaz said. “Would we die if all the worlds were bound?”
Fallion had no idea.
If I bind the worlds, heal them, Fallion wondered, is it possible that I would be doing it for others, and not for myself?
And what about those unfortunate souls like me? Would I doom them to oblivion? Or would we all live, filling a single world to the breaking point?
He had no answers. But suddenly he realized that he had to stop his quest to mend the worlds. For years now he had felt driven. But now he needed some answers before he could proceed.
“Talon,” he asked. “In the city of Luciare, is there an Earth Warden, a wizard that we can talk to?”
Talon thought for a moment, then nodded. “Sisel is his name. Our warriors are strong, but I think that it is by his powers more than any other that the city has been preserved.”
“Then I must talk to him when we reach the city,” Fallion said.
The party laid down then, Rhianna cuddling up at Fallion’s side. Talon took the first watch. Everyone seemed to be lost in their own private thoughts for a long time, and soon Fallion heard Jaz begin to snore while Rhianna fell into a fitful sleep.
Fallion laid abed that night, under the gloom of the trees, the brief flashing of fireflies nearly the only source of light.
A few stars shone between the branches of the trees. His mother had taught him that stars were only distant suns, and that worlds like his drifted around them. He wondered what the worlds that circled these suns were like, and he wondered if somewhere up there one of his shadow selves might be looking down upon his own world.
Fallion kept an eye on Talon, who merely rested with her back to the rock. There was little chance of them being discovered by wyrmlings, but Fallion had to worry about strengi-saats, and perhaps beasts that he’d never even imagined.
“Tell me stories,” Fallion asked Talon when the others were all asleep, “about your life in the castle, about your father.” He wanted to keep her awake as much as he wanted to hear stories.
“I…don’t remember much,” Talon said softly. “It’s all like a dream, one that you’ve forgotten and then struggle to recall in the morning. I remember things, but they’re so…disjointed.”
“Then tell me what you remember the best.”
And she did.
On this world, Borenson had married a woman, but not Myrrima. She was a woman of the warrior clans, a fit mate, and Borenson had dutifully sired seven children upon her.
Talon had been raised in a creche with the other warrior children, trained to fight. She had been taught her duties as a warrior, and saw breeding as one of those duties. Her father’s rank was so high that she was greatly desired by other men, but few were considered suitable mates. Her father had been consulting the genealogies, trying to decide which man would win her as the prize.
Hers had been a grim life, and narrow, Fallion thought. There were no happy childhood memories, unless one counted a score of victories in mock combat-or the slaughter of her first wyrmling at the age of fourteen-as happy memories.
The news saddened Fallion. He had hoped that life on other shadow worlds might be happier than life on his own. At the worst, he thought it would be a distorted reflection, but a reflection nonetheless.
He had to look hard to see any similarities between the worlds. The land wasn’t the same. The low hills of Coorm were mountains here, and much else had changed. The warrior clans of Shadow, as he decided to call the other world, hardly looked human.
But the more he considered, the more that he saw that the worlds were alike. There were pine trees and bears on both of the worlds, harts and hares.
He asked about reavers in the underworld, and Talon assured him that they existed. “But the wyrmlings went to war with them a century ago. They don’t pose a threat. Not like they did on our world.”
Perhaps, Fallion thought, but he could not be sure.
“And yet…” Fallion mused. “In both worlds, the plight of mankind is great. My father used his Earth Powers to save millions. If not for him, our world would have been destroyed, as this one has been destroyed.”
Fallion fell silent for a long time.
“So the worlds really are reflections of each other,” Talon mused.
“No,” Fallion said. “I think that they are not reflections so much as distortions, distortions of the One True World. I think a great war is going on there, and few are left among mankind.”
The thought had never occurred to him before, but it felt right. It was said that the Queen of the Loci had tried to seize control of the Great Seals in ages past, and during a battle she had rent them, breaking them.
Fallion had always imagined that the story ended there. But the battle for control still goes on, he thought, upon countless shadow worlds.
Rhianna called out softly in her sleep, “Fallion?”
He glanced back at her, lying beneath the shadows of the pine. She rolled over in her sleep, using her arms as a pillow.
“Fallion,” Talon whispered, “what happened to all of the people on our world? Are they all still alive? Did you bring them all with us?”
Fallion had been worrying about this very thought through much of the evening.
“I believe so,” Fallion said. “Jaz, Rhianna, and I are all half-alive. The folk in Coorm too, though some of the older ones, it seems, could not endure the shock.”
“You don’t sound certain.”
“The problem is,” Fallion said, “in both worlds, this area was a wilderness. There might be millions of people
