Memories of Ice

Peace had come to his stomach, finally. He drew a tentative breath, slowly sighed. Power. His thoughts had a way of slipping into mundane considerations — a means to procrastination, he well knew, and it was a struggle to return to the one issue he would have to deal with sooner or later.

A storm of plans, each one trying to make me into a fulcrum. I need only spread the fingers of one hand, and so encompass the entire Deck of Dragons. A truth I'd rather not recognize. But I feel those damned cards within me, like the barely articulated bones of a vast beast, so vast as to be unrecognizable in its entirety. A skeleton threatening to blow apart. Unless I can hold on, and that is the task forced upon me now. To hold it all together.

Players in the game, wanting no others. Players outside the game and wanting in. Players to the forefront and ones behind, moving in the shadows. Players who play fair, players who cheat. Gods, where do I begin to unravel all of this?

He thought about Gruntle, Mortal Sword to the newly ascended Treach. In a way, the Tiger of Summer had always been there, silently padding in Fener's wake. If the tales were true, the First Hero had lost his way long ago, surrendered entirely to the bestial instincts of his Soletaken form. Still, the sheer, overwhelming coincidence … Paran had begun to suspect that the Elder Gods had not orchestrated matters to the degree Nightchill had implied; that opportunism and serendipity was as much responsible for the turn of events as anything else.

Otherwise, against the Elder Gods, none of us stand a chance, including the Crippled God. If it was all planned, then that plan would have had to involve Treach losing his way — thereby becoming a sleeper in the game, his threat to Fener deftly negated until the moment the First Hero was needed. And his death, too, would have had to have been arranged, the timing made precise, so that he would ascend at the right moment.

And every event that led, ultimately, to Fener's extremity, his sudden, brutal vulnerability, would have had to have been known to the Elder Gods, down to the last detail.

Thus, unless we are all playing out roles that are predetermined and so inevitable — thereby potentially knowable by such beings as the Elder Gods — unless that, then, what each and every one of us chooses to do, or not to do, can have profound consequences. Not just on our own lives, but on the world — the worlds, every realm in existence.

He recalled the writings of historians who had asserted precisely that. The old soldier Duiker, for one, though he's long since fallen out of favour. Any scholar who accepts an Imperial robe is immediately suspect. for obvious reasons of compromised integrity and bias. Still, in his early days, he was a fierce proponent of individual efficacy.