#dwybts

[kerahs]

♦ Depending on where you began the story, it was about  C a b e s w a t e r.

              Cabeswater was not a forest. Cabeswater was a thing that happened to look like a forest right now. This was a peculiar magic that meant that it was always very old and very young at once. It had always been and yet it was always learning itself. It was always alive and waiting to be alive again.

[kerahs]

♦ Depending on where you began the story, it was about H e n r y  C h e n g.

              Henry had never been good with words. Case in point: The first month he’d been at Aglionby, he had tried to explain this to Jonah Milo, the English teacher, and had been told that he was being hard on himself. You’ve got a great vocabulary, Milo had said. Henry was aware he had a great vocabulary. It was not the same thing as having the words you needed to express yourself. You’re very well-spoken for a kid your age, Milo had added. Hell, ha, even for a guy my age. But sounding like you were saying what you felt was not the same as actually pulling it off. A lot of ESL folks feel that way, Milo had finished. My mom said she was never herself in English.               But it wasn’t that Henry was less of himself in English. He was less of himself out loud. His native language was thought.

[kerahs]

♦ Depending on where you began the story, it was about the  W o m e n  o f  3 0 0  F o x  W a y.

              Psychic was not so much a personality type as a skill set. A belief system. A general agreement that time, like a story, was not a line; it was an ocean. If you couldn’t find the precise moment you were looking for, it was possible you hadn’t swum far enough. It was possible that you simply weren’t a good enough swimmer yet. It was also possible, the women grudgingly agreed, that some moments were hidden far enough in time that they really should be left to deep-sea creatures.

[kerahs]

♦ Depending on where you began the story, it was a about  N o a h  C z e r n y.

              The problem with being dead was that your stories stopped being lines and started being circles. They started to begin and end in the same moment: the moment of dying. It was difficult to focus on other ways of telling stories, and to remember that the living were interested in the specific order of events. Chronology. That was the word. Noah was more interested in the spiritual weight of a minute.               It was easy to know everything when time was circular, but it was hard to remember how to use it.

[kerahs]

♦ Depending on where you began the story, it was about  D e c l a n  L y n c h.

              Although it was hard to believe, he hadn’t been born paranoid.               And really, was it paranoia when you weren’t necessarily wrong? Caution. That was what it was called when people really were out to kill you. He’d learned caution, not paranoia.               He’d been born pliant and trusting, but he’d learned. He’d learned to be suspicious of people who asked you where you lived. He’d learned that lies were only dangerous if you sometimes told the truth.

[kerahs]

♦ Depending on where you began the story, it was about the G r a y  M a n.

              It seemed peculiar that he couldn’t quite remember his decision to become a hit man.               He remembered the academic portions of his life as a historian back in Boston: the lectures, the papers, the parties, the archives. Kings and warriors, honour and wergild. He remembered the Greenmantles, of course. But everything else was difficult to piece together. Hard to discern what was true recollection and what was merely dream. Back then he’d strung one gray day into another, and it seemed likely that he had lost weeks or months or years to this foggy dissociation. Somewhere in there someone had breathed the word mercenary, and somewhere in there someone had given up his identity and become the Gray Man.

[kerahs]

♦ Depending on where you began the story, it was about  S e o n d e o k.

              She had not meant to be an international art dealer and small-time crime boss. It had begun as a mere desire for something more, and then a slow realization that something more was never going to be reachable on her current path. She was married to a clever man she’d met in Hong Kong, and she had several bright children who mostly took after him except for the one, and she had seen how her life would play out.               Then she had gone mad.               It hadn’t been a long madness. A year, perhaps, of fits and visions and being found prowling through the streets. And when she had come out the other side, she had discovered that she had a psychic’s eyes and a shaman’s touch and that she was going to make a career of it. She’d renamed herself Seondeok and the legend had been born. She handled wonder every day.

[kerahs]

♦ Depending on where you began the story, it was about  G w e n l l i a n.

              Gwenllian stood between the mirrors. The magic of them tugged and howled. The glass was not meant to show so many times at once; most people were not built to process so many possibilities at once. Gwenllian was just another mirror, though, and so the magic glanced off her harmlessly as she pressed her palms to either glass. She reached into all the possibilities and looked around, darting from one false truth to another.