Excerpt: Subject to Change at Whim of Author 6 - Up to My No-Good Tricks

There was an apple tree in the garden. Agathea recognised it, somewhere in the back of her mind, as something she had once given as a gift and seen grow, but all she could think about now was the fact that it was still unharmed.

There was no trace left of the grass, plants scorched to nothing more than black pieces and piles of ashes, and several of the heavy stones that adorned the gardens had dark spots and singes that looked so burned into the stone that it would never come off again. At some point she had passed the remains of some metallic figure or another, halfway melted and fully deformed, but the apple tree was not as much as singed, whispering quietly in the breeze.

Her nose was stinging - the smell of fire and smoke and magic and melted stone and metal and worse, and her eyes would have stung, too, but she was too drained to really be aware of the emotions just yet. It would come in time, she knew, but right now she was too tired, too overloaded, and someone was actively working to keep her that way.

There was a glimpse of something out of the corner of her eye - white and calm and graceful - and she turned to watch the human-dragon-goddess approach. Agathea knew that Hal had once been human, knew that she had married dragon and been made one herself, but the final bit was something new and surprising that she hadn't known before, another piece of the overwhelming puzzle that she was still trying to figure out.

She knew how she knew, or she didn't, she wasn't sure. Part of her was willing to accept that the god-figure she had known growing up had stepped in and pushed her mind aside to get the job done, and another part preferred to ignore it completely, scared of what lingering on it might reveal. Agathea had never know before that Hal shared her body with a goddess, but looking at her now, she wondered how no one else had ever seen it before.

"Your mind is reeling. It needs time to settle." It was Hal's voice that spoke as the albino reached her, but not her tone or way of speaking. There was part of her in there, but most of it was something alien and distinctively not human. "You are a new avatar, and your god is young. There was no time for practice or finesse."

Agathea nodded, because her mind was still unresponsive, and she said the first words that came to mind. "How are the kids?"

Clawed and scaled and pony-sized and hiding behind that apple tree in a memory that still felt foggy and distant.

"Safe. Upset. Their father is with them. I will go be with them soon. For the moment, I am needed here." Red eyes watched her with an unreadable expression. "Much has happened this night."

"Yeah." Understatement, if Agathea had ever heard any, and she let out a slow breath and tried to get her mind back under control. The world didn't look right. The ground shimmered occasionally, flickers in the corner of her eye and gone the moment she tried to focus, but the apple tree was not just a trick of her exhausted mind, but seemed to breathe as she watched it, growing and retreating and growing again. Flowers blooming and vanishing like they had never existed. The air was scorched, and flowers, and summer and winter and autumn, and Agathea closed her eyes tightly to keep from getting dizzy.

"Gods see the world different from humans," not-Hal said and was still watching as Agathea opened her eyes again. "It will pass, and you can forget."

"All of it?" Agathea asked, and wet suddenly dry lips. She didn't want to forget, not all of it. It had happened, and the past was important, that had always been drilled into her. Without a past, you had no future. Her god was her ancestor. Not by bloodline, but through adoptive bonds, and in her family, that counted for every bit as much as genetic relations. It had not been a nice day, but it had happened, and that gave it the right to be remembered, for better and for worse. People had died, people she knew, and to forget them would be to dishonour their memory.

Not-Hal tilted her head. "Not unless you want to. Some do. Hal forgets for her mate. He is uncomfortable with gods, and to find that his mate shares body with his goddess would not be good for him. My children need happy parents. We cannot rebuild a species on a broken foundation."

"I can't forget. Sacrifices were made. I have to understand, or they would have been in vain." Agathea frowned, and tried to make her mind work through the haze of confusion. She was starting to see what the dragon-goddess had meant about gods' way of seeing. It was, she suspected, not just present, but past and future she was seeing as well, an apple tree blooming and retreating with the ebb and flow of time.

On a whim she turned her head and watched as the mansion was rebuilt in the blink of an eye, expanding and changing and reversing and expanding again, and part of her was happy she couldn't tell how much time she was really looking across. It could be five year, it could be five hundred, couldn't it? She should go look at her buildings, the city, see-

-The city growing and changing, buildings and parks expanding, a living, breathing entity as green sprung up, temples were raised, a multitude of people passing before her inner eye, glimpses of things that was and might just-

-be.

A deep breath, and Agathea gave the dragon-goddess - and she still didn't know her name, and she wondered if anyone save the dragons really did - a wide-eyed look, and got a sympathetic sound in return.

"Might-bes," Hal's voice answered in that tone that wasn't hers. "No one can really tell the future. A few can make some very qualified guesses about the most likely courses of time, but no one can know for sure. The strands of time are as many as a hundred dragons' scales. Only the future knows what the future will bring. My children should have been gone. I brought them back. Your ancestor should have stayed Odin's. We made him a god."

Agathea took another deep breath. "Is that him? In my mind?" It had been before, she was almost sure of that, but there was still something in the back of her mind, evading her attempts to pinpoint it.

"It was. It's an echo of it now. His way to ensure your safety until all is calm again. There is much to handle this day. An important rule of warfare is to strike when your enemy is weak, and so we will, and return the remaining ones to their god."

Something about the words made Agathea shudder as more memories was brought to the front of her mind. Somewhere in the mansion there were bodies, she knew. Someone had moved them from the garden until it could be decided what to do. She had known them, and she hadn't, she realised as much now. She had known half the story, and it had been enough at the time. She knew the second half now, and it made her feel a little better. It would still hurt, and already did, but it was easier, in a way, with the realisation that it had never been her choice or decision at all.

"A divine game of chess," she murmured, and continued as Hal's red eyes fixed on her with a curious tilt of her head. "They were his. I had seen the tattoo on Isaiah. I didn't know about the others." The other, her mind added, who had names and personalities and lives, too, and Agathea ruthlessly pushed the thought aside for a later time. "He put them there to die."

"He put them there to save a life," not-Hal corrected. "They might have lived, although they didn't expect to. They knew their purposes and they embraced it. Should they not have? Their death had purpose, and they earned the gratitude of their god. Odin's men will actively seek out death. Would that be better to you?"

Odin. The flare of cold anger and dark, burning satisfaction wasn't just from her, she knew that. That echo of a presence. Odin had tested them. Odin had tested the general-turned-god that he had seen slip through his fingers, and people had died for it, and far from all of them had been on their side.

"We gave him an excuse," said not-Hal. "It was worth it. Do not let your anger forget that. Your family has not been Odin's since the death of your father. The men you still have working for you had no hand in his. They are followers, nothing more. Two of them died to save you today, Agathea. It may or may not have been against the will of their god, but they still did it. They swore an oath to protect you and they obeyed it to the last. They did not betray you."

"Others did," Agathea said. The anger had helped clear her mind, she noticed. Was that because of that presence in her mind? Had Odin's name cut through the haze? She didn't know and for the moment, she didn't care. "I want to know."

"Know what?" the dragon-goddess asked and looked distinctively amused.

"Everything." There was much to catch up on, she realised that now. She had been playing a game without knowing the rules or her opponents, and with only half her cards on hand. There was so much more to this whole mess than she knew. "I have to know. And yeah, maybe I'll forget, but maybe something will stick, and maybe it's someday going to matter again."

"You could ask him," not-Hal suggested.

"He's not here. You are," Agathea pointed out. "He's off finishing this business. I might have forgotten I ever wanted to know by the time he gets back."

She remembered belatedly the dragonets with their father, somewhere in a scorched mansion that still reeked of magic, but the dragon-goddesses never lost that touch of amusement in her eyes, and when she spoke, the words wrapped around Agathea inside her mind as well.

Let me show you, then.