I could not even speak. I strained to break free, to reach her.
“Don’t struggle, Orion. You are in a stasis field and you will remain there until I determine what to do with you.”
But I’m not your enemy! I wanted to tell her.
Her withered face cracked into a sad smile. “My poor Orion. Of course you’re not my enemy. Not consciously. Not willingly. But you are Aten’s creature and you will do his bidding whether you want to or not. You have no choice. And I have no choice except to protect myself as best as I can and fight against the others with the last atom of my fading strength.”
You can’t be dying, I said silently.
“I am dying, Orion. It takes a long time, but the strength ebbs away a little more each day, each hour. It took an enormous effort for me to appear young, the way you once knew me, when you first entered this chamber. Now you see me as I am, with very little time left.”
No, I thundered silently. No!
Anya shook her head painfully. “I don’t want it to end this way, my beloved. I don’t want it to end at all. But I am trapped. Aten has won.”
“Never!” I roared. And with all the willpower in me, with all my anger against the smug self-styled Creators, with all the rage against my being used as a witless pawn in this battle across the millennia, with all the blood lust that had been built into me so that I would be a useful hunter, assassin, murderer—I broke free.
I tapped the energy of the stars, the energy of the continuum. Just as Aten and the others had sent me across space-time I reached out for Anya and leaped through the continuum, through the endless cold of absolute nothingness, across eons of time and parsecs of space.
And found the two of us standing in a forest. Tall trees dappling the warm high sun, colorful birds flitting through the foliage, squirrels scampering, insects buzzing.
“Orion!” Anya gasped. “How could you…”
Then she looked down at her hands and saw that she was young and strong again. I pulled her to me and kissed her tenderly.
“Do you know where we are?” I asked her.
She took in the entire world in a single glance. “On Earth,” she said. “In the forest of Paradise.”
The wide woodland that someday would become the Sahara Desert. We had lived here with a Neolithic band, happy and content once we had escaped Set and his reptilian invaders.
“You remember that we thought about staying here forever,” I said.
“Yes,” Anya replied. But she pulled slightly away from my arms. “Yet we decided that we could not enjoy Paradise when there were so many conflicts in the continuum that had to be resolved.”
“Perhaps we were wrong,” I said. “Why can’t we stay here and let the continuum solve its problems without us?”
She fixed me with those lustrous eyes of hers. “Because then Aten would solve the continuum’s problems. And he would take all this away from us. He hates you, Orion. He fears you. And he hates me for loving you.”
Aten fears me? That was a new concept for me to consider. “My powers are still growing,” I said. “Perhaps I could protect us, protect this whole segment of the continuum. We could be safe here.”
“Not from Aten. He’s robbed me of my power. He is deliberately killing me, and all the other Creators who sided with me.”
“But here you’re strong and young.”
“Yes,” she admitted, smiling sadly, “but that’s your doing, Orion, not mine. I can’t change form anymore; I’ve lost the power. Aten has stolen it from me. He wants me dead. Me, and all the other Creators who oppose him.”
“Why? What’s the reason for all this hatred and killing? Why the war? What’s this ultimate crisis?”
She almost laughed. “Orion, you’re like a little boy, asking so many questions. They’re not easily answered.”
I gestured toward a sunny glade where a swift stream burbled over rocks, hardly a few meters from where we stood. “Very well. Let’s go sit in the warmth of the sun and watch the deer come down to the stream and drink. And you can begin to explain it all to me.”