by Holly Lisle
Birkwelch dismissed that out of hand. “You beat him, fair and square. Rearranged him, completely overturned his own private hideaway— No, babe. The Unweaver is history around here.”
Darryl said, “Now all we have to do is keep in mind the fact that dragons are basically full of shit.” He stepped ahead of Birkwelch, and smiled just a bit as he heard the dragon protest.
“I saved your ass from the Cindy-monster, pal. It wouldn’t hurt you to remember that.”
Minerva turned to him, curious. The Cindy-monster?’
Darryl, who had managed to forget, due to the press of events, the precise details of his culpability and moral failings, remembered them again in sudden, horrifyingly vivid detail.
“Ah, yes,” he said, struggling for detachment, “ah, the Cindy-monster was one of the Weirds, like the ones who went after you. Green-eyed monsters...” He should have found a better way to phrase that, he decided.
Minerva gave him a penetrating look, and he thought he would be certain to kill the dragon at his earliest opportunity. But at that moment, they came to a place where the long hall crossed another long hall — and at the intersection, they found small, red footprints running along the floor to the left.
Minerva spotted the footprints and took off in a flat-out run. Darryl galloped after her, with the dragon bringing up the rear.
Minerva skidded to a stop at the point where the footsteps turned and led beneath a closed door. “We’re coming, kids,” she shouted. Darryl heard no response from the kids, but all the doors were solid stone. He imagined they were fairly soundproof.
Minerva stopped. She pointed to the lion’s-head doorknob and said, “Watch that. It came to life in the dream and nearly bit my hand off.” She removed her vest and wrapped it around the doorknob — but no amazing transformation took place. The doorknob stayed a doorknob. Darryl grabbed it, turned it, and shoved the door open; Minerva brushed past him yelling, “We’re here—”
The room, like all the other rooms, was empty. Well, not precisely empty. Darryl noted the child’s bloody footprints going across the floor to a thin blanket laid out on the stone — and the meager remains of several meals. He reached down and touched one of the footprints — the blood was dry. The prints were very small. Probably Barney’s, he thought, feeling rage build inside himself. And we let that bastard get away — we should have annihilated him, no matter what the fucking dragon said.
“They were here,” Minerva whispered. “They were. Where are they now?”
“Not likely he took them with him,” the dragon said. “I don’t think he was in good enough shape to do anything requiring that much effort.”
Minerva was on her knees, tracing one of the tiny footprints with a finger. “We don’t even know that they’re still alive.”
The dragon looked from Darryl to Minerva, then back to Darryl. Darryl saw his expression grow more and more exasperated. “Well, you’re Weavers, dammit. Weave yourselves a way to find out.”
Minerva looked up at Darryl, but stayed on the floor. “I have the compass, but that turned out not to be very reliable.”
“I have an idea.” Darryl took the pad and pencil and got ready to write.
“I do hope you’ve thought this out fairly well,” Birkwelch said. “More carefully than your evil dragon fiasco, in any case.”
“Shut up, Birkwelch,” Darryl and Minerva said in tandem.
Darryl wrote:
One moment, Darryl, Minerva, and the dragon Birkwelch were standing in an empty room of the Unweaver’s lair. The next instant, they were magically transported to their children, who were safe and healthy and happy to see them.
The last glowing letter scrawled itself into the air a few inches in front of one of the room’s blank stone walls. Then, as the three comrades-in-arms looked at each other, the room dissolved into a swirling, shimmering rainbow of light. Darryl hung, suspended in weightless, timeless nothingness for what could have been a second or an eternity — and then the world reformed itself, this time in vivid emerald greens and sunset oranges.
The three of them were standing out in the pasture again.
“No,” Minerva wailed. “It didn’t work.”
The horses looked up at them, ears flicked forward in curiosity. The orange tabby cat leapt down from the fence in one fluid movement and launched himself onto the back of the smallest horse. He yawned and settled himself into a crouch on the horse’s rump. “Mrrrrp?” he asked.
* * *
The grass was sweet, and the creature perched on his back was companionable. The creatures who stood around him making so much noise were very familiar. Their presence was somehow reassuring. The little horse did not know why. It wasn’t important. He enjoyed the warmth of the sun, and the pasture, and the quiet.
The little horse couldn’t seem to remember many pleasant things from before. It remembered fear and pain—
But that was over. Gone.
And the horse, being a horse, did not let itself be bothered by the past.
CHAPTER 15
The three miniature horses trotted up to Minerva and Darryl, whickering. No, Minerva thought, remembering how she and Darryl had created those horses — had changed them from malformed nightmares into something better—
— Remembering how close she had come to destroying the monsters—
Not monsters. Her children. The Unweaver, that misbegotten fiend, had twisted her children — made them into monsters. His idea of a joke, no doubt.
The sky and the earth seemed to spin — Minerva felt faint. She sat on the grass, and rested her head in her hands, and shivered. The littlest horse walked behind her and nuzzled her on the neck, and she started to cry.
She let herself — let the fear and the tension flow out of her. Just bawled, until she ran out of tears. It was what she needed right then. When she’d cried herself out, she brushed the hair away from her face and looked up.
“When we were in the Unweaver’s trap, he sent the kids to us, counting on us not knowing them — and destroying them,” she said. “That would have been the ultimate irony, wouldn’t it? The Weavers unweave their own children.”
Darryl knelt between the other two horses, an arm around each of their necks, a look of mingled shock and horror on his face. “They were running toward us... Not attacking us — running toward us. Wanting our help. We would have killed them,” he said, “if it hadn’t been for the dragon.”
Birkwelch smiled a broad alligator smile and flopped back in the grass. “No flowers, no parades, no ticker tape — nothing like that,” the dragon said. “Just throw food and women.”
“Shut up, Birkwelch,” Minerva said. “Let us be grateful to you. Let us say thanks without you making a big joke out of it.” She managed to stand again, though she still felt sick and weak. “We owe you.”
“And I’ll make sure you pay.” The dragon looked up at her, and his grin stretched wider. “Darryl’s already promised to make a whole harem of girl-dragons for me.”
Minerva glared at Birkwelch, and he sighed.
“Look, I appreciate your gratitude, but I only did what I came along to do. All this mushy stuff makes me uncomfortable.”
It figures. Dragons aren’t the mushy sort. She gave the dragon a hug around the neck and dropped the subject.
Darryl had sat on the ground, pad and pencil in hand. He wrote:
All three children were returned from horse-form to their human forms, healthy and whole and uninjured.
Minerva watched millions of tiny lights spring to life around and through the horses. The lights glowed brighter, compressed tighter, and squeezed and twisted her children from horse-shapes into child-shapes. And then Barney and Carol and Jamie stood in front of her — naked and emaciated and filthy, but smiling.
“Mom!”
“Daddy!”
“Who’s the dragon?”
“You saved us!”
“I missed you!”
It took a while to get everything sorted out
, to get hugs and kisses, to get the kids clothed — to discover her nightmares had actually happened.
Birkwelch, still sprawled in the grass looking pleased with himself, said, “Dreams are the secret battlefield of the soul. And they’re real — the big dreams are anyway. For every battle you fight in your dreams and win, you gain something you didn’t have before. And every battle you lose, you lose for real.”
The children curled up against her and Darryl, uninterested in dreams or magic. They wanted only hugs and kisses; the simple reassurances of their parents’ touch.
Minerva needed reassurance, too, but hers could only come from knowing.
“Where did the bloody footprints come from?” she asked.
Barney, who had flatly refused to put shoes or socks on, looked down at his feet. “The Unweebil cut my feet,” he said, “because I ran away with Murp once. He made me walk on them. He was mad.”
His feet were healed — but she could see the scars. Horrible scars.
“He said you didn’t love us,” Carol added, “but you kept coming to see us, so we knew he was lying — and that made him even madder. He was really afraid of you.”
“But then you turned around and went back,” Jamie said. “And the Unweaver made us forget,” he added.
“I didn’t, though,” she told them. “I never went back. I never stopped coming for you.”
Minerva took it all in. She had her kids back. She had her husband back, in a way she hadn’t had him for years. Her life had meaning again. All that was left was going home.
But that could wait. Night was falling on Eyrith, and the day had been long, and terrible, and exhausting, and had come at the end of a chain of long, terrible, exhausting days. With her family safe around her, she wanted to sleep.
Darryl created a house for them in the middle of the pasture — no one wanted to sleep in the mansion. Darryl wrote the house into being complete with a fully stocked refrigerator, three bathtubs with endless hot water, and one huge bed for the whole family to sleep in. There would be a time for separate beds, he’d said, but the time hadn’t come yet.
The dragon settled in with beer and television, the kids ate, bathed, and crawled into bed, and after a good long soak in the tub, Minerva followed them. Darryl curled up next to her on the bed, and the two of them hugged and spooned together, too weary to talk.
Minerva was asleep almost the instant her head settled onto the pillow.
She walked through the darkness, painting light — gifting the universe with luminous flowers, emerald cliffs, rainbow-bedecked waterfalls. She created an Eden, in which beautiful beasts of every imaginable type cavorted, and her children laughed and ran and played.
She walked through that wonderland, knowing it was of her own making. She felt wonderful — magical — godlike…
She waved her hand, and in the distance, a shimmering alabaster city grew out of the rolling hills. Nearer, she created hummingbirds that flitted, gemlike, in the cool, radiant morning.
All this is my handiwork, she thought. I can do anything.
But then she noticed her alabaster city was graying and crumbling. Trees browned. The waterfall dried up, and the earth grew parched and sandy. One of the hummingbirds died in midair and toppled at her feet. Before her eyes, it decomposed. A mushroom grew out of the body, and stretched taller and wider, becoming huge — the mushroom towered over her. It split from bottom to top, and the cloak-garbed Unweaver stepped out of it.
“I am the canker at the heart of the world,” he said. “There is nothing you can create that I cannot destroy. Even time, your greatest enemy, is on my side.”
“You are nothing.” She rested her hand on the hilt of the silver dagger in her belt, and laughed. “You don’t frighten me. I beat you.”
“You don’t frighten me,” the Unweaver mimicked, falsetto. “Give you a magic ring, and you can save the universe.” He laughed. His laughter was hollow, and horrible, and ringing. “You win a minor skirmish — but only with the help of your husband and a dragon, and as a result you think yourself master of the universe. Very well, little master of the universe — can you fight me alone and win? I am immortal. Entropy cannot be destroyed. But you are mortal, and someday must lose.” His hood fell back, and Minerva saw there was nothing beneath it but two glowing eyes. “The universe will wind itself down to nothing, and I will be triumphant — now or later... with you or without you. You cannot win this war — yet because of someone else’s error, you are destined to fight it.”
The Unweaver laughed. “Tiny creature of flesh, whether you die tomorrow or today is all the same to me. You will still die, and all your works will come at last to nothing.”
Minerva would have argued the point with him, but what he said was true. In her heart, in her soul, in her bones, she could feel its truth, no matter how much she tried to deny it. Death would some day meet her and win.
In the short run, her fight with the Unweaver was brave and glorious: her victories bright to behold. But in the eternal measure, her fight would only last a moment, no matter how long that moment might be — and the outcome was preordained. She and her world and her universe would all wind down to chaos.
She stared at the ring on her hand — the Weaver’s ring. Its perfection mocked her. Who am I? she wondered. Who do I think I am, to confront the eternal and triumph? I failed as an artist — I gave up. Quit. I was chosen as a Weaver by mistake. I’m no hero. I’m nobody special at all. If my kids hadn’t been kidnapped, I wouldn’t even have fought.
She sank to her knees, while the Unweaver towered over her. How silly, to think one person could really matter in the scheme of things. One person — one average, normal, nobody of a person — can’t really make a difference. The universe is too vast, and eternity too incomprehensible, and people too unimportant.
But a small voice in the bade of her mind screamed, So WHAT! In spite of everything, you won, dammit! If it was a little victory, so what? You won it. You saved your kids, you rescued your husband, you saved the universe. So what if you were the wrong person, and nobody special. You thought, and you fought, and goddammit, you won anyway! Everyone was against you, no one believed in you, and you still won!
Minerva looked up into the face of the Unweaver, and suddenly smiled. “That’s right,” she whispered, and her smile grew broader. “I did win. I won now... today... this fight.”
She stood and walked toward the Unweaver, gripping the knife, and this time there was no uncertainty in her. “I won this time. I won because I loved. Because I acted. Because life matters. So what if I didn’t fight you alone? Love and action make allies. People who dare to love and dare to think and dare to act never have to fight alone for long.”
She drew the knife and her smile grew fierce.
The Unweaver backed up a step, his cloak swirling around him. He seemed to Minerva to shrink the tiniest bit.
Minerva took another step forward. “And if I can’t fight you forever... so what? When I fall, when I can’t fight you anymore, someone else will be standing behind me to take my place. Maybe that someone won’t be anyone special, either. But it won’t matter.
“Don’t you see that?” she asked. “It won’t matter, because the person who comes behind me will have a dream and will fight for it, too.
“You can’t even lay claim to the end of the universe. Chaos may just curl itself into a ball of fire at the end of time, and fling out a new universe, like a phoenix rising from the ashes. Life will be born anew, and love will be waiting for it. And you will be as lonely and loveless and empty then as you are now.”
The Unweaver shriveled under Minerva’s attack. He collapsed in on himself, and his fear and his emptiness radiated from him in waves.
Minerva looked from him to the silver blade in her hand, and was surprised to feel a sudden rush of pity for the creature. To embrace nothingness, to choose emptiness, to desire grief and despair, to face an eternity in which nothing good could ever happen—
She
threw the knife away from her. It soared in a high arc, glittering in the sunlight, and vanished over the edge of the cliff.
Minerva could suddenly see it all — her place in the universe, Darryl’s... the Unweaver’s. “You’re a part of the creative process,” she whispered. “Without you, there would be no ashes for the phoenix to rise from.”
The Unweaver shrieked, “No! Not so! I am the antithesis of creation!! I destroy! I destro-o-o-oy!” His smoky form ripped itself to shreds, and vanished.
And Minerva woke.
“It was real,” she whispered, and sat up.
Beside her, Darryl was rubbing sleep from his eyes. “I had a dream about the Unweaver,” he began.
She interrupted him. “It wasn’t a dream, Darryl. It was real. We fought him again, and we won again.
“As long as we dare to create, and dare to love life,” she said, staring at her three children, who slept in the bed beside her, “and as long as we never give up, I don’t think we can lose.”
* * *
They stood at the top of a gently rolling hill — Darryl, Minerva, the blue dragon Birkwelch, three small children. The land which fell away beneath their feet had been baked mudflats only moments before. The inhabitants of the beautiful little cottages, people who were almost, but not quite, human, had been nothing so lovely or so fine when Minerva had first crossed their path.
“It’s back the way it was before the Unweaver came?” Darryl asked.
“Maybe even better.” Birkwelch shielded his eyes and stared almost into the sun. A shadow passed over it, and as he studied that shadow, his face lit up. “There’s one now.”
“There should be a lot,” Minerva said.
“Thanks for bringing them back,” Birkwelch said. “And the satyrs — er, cheymats — too. I know Talleos would thank you if he were here.”
