The woman seemed unaware of their presence, her attention concentrated on the mountain lynx stretched across her lap. It lay on its back, totally limp, all four paws in the air as she rubbed its belly and smiled down at it. A helmet sat beside her, and her hair-a darker and even more glorious red than Leeana’s-was bound with a diadem of woven gold and silver badged with more of those amethyst-leaved blossoms of periwinkle.
Courser and rider stood motionless, frozen, trying to understand why the world about them seemed so different, and then the woman looked up, and Leeana’s throat tightened as midnight-blue eyes looked straight into her soul.
The woman gazed at them for several endless seconds, then clucked her tongue gently at the lynx across her lap. The cat-it was enormous, probably close to seventy pounds-yawned and stretched, then gave itself a shake, rolled off her lap, and stood. It looked up at her, then butted her right vambrace gently and affectionately before it glanced at Leeana. It regarded her for a moment, supremely unimpressed by her or even by Gayrfressa, then gathered its haunches under it, leapt lightly away from the redhaired woman…and vanished into thin air in mid-leap.
Leeana blinked, but before she could speak or otherwise react, the woman had risen, coming to her feet as if the armor she wore was no more encumbering than a war maid’s chari and yathu. She stood gazing up at Leeana, and somehow, despite Gayrfressa’s towering height, it seemed as if Leeana was gazing up at her.
“Give you good morning, daughters,” the woman said, and a strange shiver, like a flicker of lightning touched with ice and silver, went through Leeana. She knew she would never be able to describe that voice to anyone, for 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.”