Chance unfolded his arms slowly and raised his head so that his gaze went to the horizon of trees silhouetted against starlight. He had been fragmented only once, just before he became human, during his earlier era of arrogance and rebellion. To punish him, Patience had bled off a portion of his power and transferred it to a Stick. He remembered what it had been like to lay hands on that Stick while he was still barred from taking back his power. A storm of light, ice, and gales had been unleashed as reality struggled to reconcile two separate embodiments of a single being.

Somewhere in the midst of his fight with their adversary, he had sensed a similar storm.

“He is not me!” he insisted harshly.

The Trickster sighed. “No, he is not you. But I’m guessing that he is made of your undying essence.”

Another pang of memory went through Chance. No, not once—twice. Twice he had been unmade. When at last he had returned to Patience for judgment, she had proposed a unique solution. He shivered, recalling the sensation as Patience had peeled and unwound his very being from him, like stripping bark from a tree, preparing the tender core of his soul for rebirth into humanity. “Patience,” he said softly. “What has she done?”

The Trickster’s eyes glittered in the starlight, wide with shock. “All the time we were growing up as Paama’s sons, hiding from the world of the undying for our various crimes, I thought you were pretending to forget. I thought you made yourself small, weak, and dormant for the same reason I did, so as not to attract attention, but she really did pare you down.”

Chance veered away from considering the unthinkable and focused on his initial question. “Why me? I believed I was sent to effect a change. Now I wonder if I am simply the canary in the mine, a way to detect what cannot be seen.”

“Canary in the mine or bait in a trap,” the Trickster amended.

Chance nodded slowly. “If he is of my essence . . . this changes everything, even what we imagine to be real.”

“What has already happened might . . . unhappen?” mused the Trickster.

“Balanced probabilities, unformed realities, waiting for a critical choice to be made and witnessed. A rare occurrence and a challenge to resolve, but not unprecedented.”

“Ah,” said the Trickster, his eyes filled with awe and fear and anticipation. “One of those situations. I should have guessed.”

“I should have known. Tell me, since we were born, have you been able to touch any new threads in the far future, any threads more than one hundred years hence that we have not already traveled in pure undying form?”

“I have not,” the Trickster acknowledged. “It has all been past-work since we became human. Why is that?”