“Yes. The oftener you change, the less chance you have
to be absorbed by any one particular mythical prototype.
And you, seeking some purpose beyond your human one,
are ripe for such an end as threatens you now.”
“I can withstand the pressure.”
“You can’t,” Kas said. He shook golden curls but of his
eyes. “You especially. All your life, just like Child, you
have relied heavily upon a mythological ill-logic to justify
your existence.”
“Christian mythos,” I corrected, wondering why I was
still trying to defend it.
“These are of the same level of value as the Christian
one. One will snare you as easily as the other. In all of
them, you will find the same simplicity and attractive lack
of complication as you found in Christianity’s legends.
And you will never leave this place.”
I thought, for the first time, of Melinda. I had been
forcing her and everything else out of my mind, refusing
to acknowledge her no-nonsense interviews in that other
world, her quick wit, and her supple and willing body.
Now they all rose and crowded into my consciousness at
the same moment, almost overwhelming me.
In time, as we stood there on the rolling earth under
the flat sky, listening to the sea, Kas said, “Will you?”
“What?”
“Change?”
“I guess… guess so.”
“Soon, then.”
I hesitated.
“Soon.”
And I changed.
Together, we started off across the hilly land, galloping
under the steel blue of looming thunderhead clouds. My
own golden hair streamed behind me. My tail rode
straight out behind, fluttering in the fingers of the sea-
tinged air.
If anything, this was better than the form of a wolf,
carried more of a sense of freedom and delight.
Child was not to be found here, either. We searched
everywhere, including the flat white beach where the surf
curled. We trotted through the shushing foam of the sea,
kicking up shells and sending crabs in frantic flight. We left
our hoofprints in the sucking mud of the moors, in the rich
black earth of the grasslands, in the sand by the ocean.
Sure-footed, we climbed the few small peaks and surveyed
this sector of the world, looked for caves and came back
down again. In time, when it was apparent there was no
blue-floored room and no exit to Child’s conscious mind,
we reached the curtain of mist to another climate, another
segment of the fractured reality that constituted Child’s
mind.
I was forced to say goodbye to Kas the centaur, though
I longed to stay here and enjoy the horseman form a
while longer. He lectured me about disassociating from
my centaur form upon leaving this plane, and I listened
and made my promises.
In the next landscape, I returned to my human ana-
logue, though shedding the horseman form was painful and
filled me with a sad need to feel my hooves striking stone.
There was no life here to imitate, so I did not have to
worry about becoming inextricably meshed with a myth
figure. This was the land of the broken black mountains
which jagged up in slabs as big as houses, some even
larger than that, like a world of broken crockery and
shattered bottles. The sunlight was discolored by the re-
fracting stone and became a depressing brown. The air
was flat, as if it had been bottled for a long while, and no
breeze moved in it. There were no sounds, no movements.
The sky was an even, ugly yellow, like dark mustard, and
not a single cloud marked its expanse.
I walked forward.
The onyx rocks were smooth and cold against my bare
feet.
As I scrabbled up the terrain, my fingers squeaked on
the shiny surfaces. Those sounds seemed unendurably long
in the ghostly silence. I did not like this place at all,
wanted out of it as fast as I could move to the next veil of
mist. But it was here that I found Child, found the place
where he was trapped in his own madness….
IV
As I made my way over the ebony land, I reached a
chasm in the shattered rocks, perhaps a thousand yards
long and three yards wide at the top, narrowing to two