People of the Sea(175)
“At what… what cost?”
“Many things will change. Beautiful animals will die, along with different kinds of trees and butterflies. Some of the sweetest flowers in the world will pass out of existence.”
Sunchaser gripped his stone knife so hard that his fist shook. “I have not failed yet, Wolfdreamer! Mammoths still exist in my world!”
“Yes .. for now. I haven’t given up on you, Sunchaser. I just wanted you to know that I realize how hard it is. I, too, loved once. She was beautiful and kind. I made a different choice than you have. But that doesn’t mean you’ll fail because of your love. A few rare Dreamers actually need love to keep them Dreaming well. But sometimes even the best, the most faithful, Dreamers fail. Some fail because they choose worldly responsibilities, others because they’re just not strong enough. And some fail because they’re being witched and don’t even know it. But failure is not the end. Power will just select someone else and pray that its new Dreamer can accomplish the impossible task set before him or her…. And there’s something more you should know, Sunchaser.” “What is that?”
Wolfdreamer let out a breath and smiled forlornly, watching the whiffs of dust that curled up along the ruined walls when the breeze gusted just right. The reddish-tan streamers sailed upward and vanished against the blue sky like the long-dead souls of hunting serpents. Wolfdreamer’s brows drew together. “Just this, Dreamer. Failure is not wasted effort. Mammoths may vanish from the world …” Sunchaser started to protest, but Wolfdreamer lifted a hand for silence “… but that doesn’t mean your efforts are smoke in the wind, Sunchaser. Every moment that humans spend cherishing and worrying about the Life around them is another spark added to the ocean of Light; it drives hack the Darkness for just that much longer.”
Sunchaser frowned, bewildered. “Wolfdreamer, please help me. I feel lost. I don’t know what’s right anymore. I can’t get
through the maze. People are losing faith in me. What am I doing so badly?”
The agony in those words reminded Wolfdreamer of a thousand such pleas he’d heard—and each of them had pierced his soul like a needle of ice. He smiled and put his hand over Sunchaser’s fist that held the halves of the turquoise knife. “I came to help you. You don’t realize it, but all the suffering, all the confusion and exhaustion you’ve gone through, were necessary. A beginning. Even the witching had a place. The wrong paths you think you’ve taken weren’t wrong at all. You’ve just been concentrating so hard on the twists and turns that you missed the reason why you were traveling.”
“But isn’t that why you gave me the maze? So I could study it? Because it represented the sacred geography of the Land of the Dead? I thought that if I understood the twists and turns, I’d be able to find my way to you at any time I needed to.”
Wolfdreamer sat up and laced his fingers over his drawn up knees. “No. That wasn’t the reason. I gave you the maze in the hopes that you would stare so hard at the lines that you’d finally see the spaces between them.”
Sunchaser blinked. The dust on his lashes glittered as he straightened. “I don’t understand.”
Wolfdreamer sighed. “Answer this for me. What would the maze be without its background? Without the hide or the stone or the bark you draw it upon?”
“What would it be?” Sunchaser cocked his head and seemed to be thinking hard. “I… I don’t know. It wouldn’t be anything, would it?”
Wolfdreamer lowered a finger to the dusty plaza. He patiently drew each of the maze lines, but overlapping, until they obliterated the spaces between the lines. “What is this, Sunchaser?”
Sunchaser leaned forward. He glanced sideways at Wolf dreamer, then back at the lines. “It looks like all the strands of the maze have pulled tight into a knot.”
“Does it?”
“Well, yes. I mean, that’s what it looks like to me. What do you think it looks like?”
The question made Wolfdreamer laugh. “I think it looks like an eagle. Monster Rock Eagle, actually.”
Sunchaser’s face slackened as a glimmer of understanding lit his eyes. “Monster Rock Eagle, who sits at the crossing that leads to the heart of the maze?”
“The very same. Few Dreamers ever see him. And he’s very hard to kill, but you must kill him. Or you’ll never find your way through the maze.”
Wolfdreamer waited while Sunchaser digested that bit of information and related it to Good Plume’s Dream. Sunchaser’s face went from intrigue to fear in less than ten heartbeats. He looked up at Wolfdreamer with his whole soul in his eyes.