She’d felt the force of his Power before it masked him from her gaze. Where he had been, only a curtain of black haze remained. It made no sense, but many things in the vision remained incomprehensible.
Memories out of time slipped between her souls. She had seen incomprehensible fragments of people, events, and heard scattered statements uttered by unknown mouths. The faces of the people, the places they inhabited, were all strange, foreign to her. She had seen herself as if from above. Watched her body undulating on Trader’s, heard her soft intake of breath as her loins burst with pleasure. She had seen the Seeker staring thoughtfully into a campfire burned low in the night. A circle of warriors seemed to appear magically from the forest, their weapons held at the ready. And then she would feel the terror. Fear would wash over her, drowning her in an ocean of disembodied souls. Then had come a blackness, a gap in events. A place she could not see—like a huge hole in the vision she had shared with Sister Datura. The rest had been like daydreams, all disjointed and thrown together.
Finally it would all come to an end. Distant murky water, a great Horned Serpent, and the dark-souled man awaited her just over the horizon of future-past. The terrible dark-souled man’s gleaming eyes stared at her from the future. They would Dance, surrounded by the shining scales of the great serpent. Around and around they’d go, and then down into the eerie light of another world.
She need only wait until the image became real.
I am backward in time. She had lived those things sometime in the future before her souls had been sent back, to see it all again. The sense of doing it all in reverse disoriented her, as if events had been turned upside down. It left her consumed with confusion.
Gods, if I could just keep it all in order! But control was beyond her abilities.
Traveling upriver, however, was moving backward, going counter to the flow. Doing so helped her to structure her thoughts. Things were calmer when she went backward. The sense of rushing toward inevitability lessened.
She clamped her eyes shut. If only the world wouldn’t move. She desperately wished she could stop the clouds in the sky, stop the movement of the sun. If the wind would freeze in place, if fire wouldn’t flicker, she could finally find herself.
What had been so normal when she was a child now left her senses reeling. Worst of all were people. They moved faster, like a juddering swirl of partially seen images. When they did, her confusion was complete. It took all of her willpower to keep from slapping both hands to her ears, pinching her eyes shut, and shouting, “Stop!” at the top of her lungs.
She had tried that when the disembodied voices came in a flurry. But to no avail. With real people, she could at least mute the sounds. The Spirit voices, however, seemed to come from inside her head. Sometimes they told her the most ridiculous things, like Trader and Old White were conspiring against her. That they would drug her food, or that one of them was urinating in her water bowl.
She couldn’t believe the voices. Sister Datura had shown her none of those things. When she watched Trader and Old White, it was to observe no nefarious actions on their part. Instead, they simply seemed to accept with mild amusement when, with no proof, she lifted her water jar, took it out, and poured it on the ground. Once she had heard Old White say matter-of-factly, “She’s a Contrary.”
As much as she missed home, and her family, she wouldn’t Trade being back there for her time on the river, as confusing as it was. Here she could listen to the voices, dump her water bowl, refuse food the Spirits told her had been poisoned, and fight to keep the world at bay without hearing anger in people’s voices or seeing the fear in their eyes.
Now she sat, facing backward, watching the river rush away from her. She was going backward, trees creeping into the corner of her vision, slowly moving away from her. And today, with a south wind, the few fluffy clouds, too, were acting correctly.
“You are the only constant,” one of the voices told her. “It is you who is in place. The rest of the world is moving around you.”
Stopped in time, she thought. But what anchored her? What terrible thing pinned her in place so that she was rooted while the earth, sky, and water flowed steadily past? Sister Datura hadn’t told her the how of it, only the why.
“Be who you are,” Sister Datura whispered from her memories. “The rest shall come to you.”
The fear that came from that knowledge was lessened only because she had seen and lived through it in her Vision. Time was alive. She had entered it, lived within it. Then that morning when she had awakened in Silver Loon’s temple, she had somehow slipped outside of its breath and being.