Shadowkill

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When he had the wood he needed, he went into the prairie and gathered grasses.

He settled on the sand and began smoothing and knotting the grasses into a sacred mat, his fingers twisting and pulling in a pattern so familiar he didn’t have to think what he was doing. On DunyaDzi he would have whistled an ancient sin-di while he worked, the music gathering his forces and feeding power into the grass. Here, he was empty, there was no music in him and the grass felt dead in dead fingers. He went on knotting anyway.

Not so long ago, when Shadow had hinted for a reading-she wanted reassurance before they hit Koulsnakko’s Hole and went for Ginny-he couldn’t answer her, Gaagi wouldn’t come. He told her he wasn’t worried. It had happened before, his gods going off somewhere and leaving him to himself. They’d always come back.

This time felt different. Voices had come to him in the Hole, but they were chilly whispers as alien as this alien wind.

He was bereft. Yes. Good word. The right word. His gods were his tie to his home-earth and the personification of his several Talents. He needed those god images and they had to be REAL. Ghosts conjured by his imagination were worthless as guides.

He knotted and wove and wondered if he’d been too long away from DunyaDzi, if he’d worn his gods thin and finally to nothing at all. If that was true, he didn’t know what he’d do, what he’d be. The thought frightened him.

He wove the ends into the mat, spread it on the sand, and went to stand at the lake’s edge, watching the waves leap and sparkle in the wind. Nothing came to him. The water was alien, it rejected him. The sand beneath his feet rejected him, the wind would not speak to him.