Thrall - Christie Golden [53]
Thrall was too disheartened to argue. Nothing was real. The glittering scales that lured him from timeway to timeway, an assassin who shouldn’t exist, some deep draconic mystery—his head was swimming, trying to keep track of it. Taretha’s hand on his shoulder wasn’t real, yet it was. What was dream? What was reality? What was—
And then suddenly, with the gentleness of breeze and the force of an explosion, Thrall understood.
He saw again the black bird Medivh speaking to him: This place is full of illusions. There is only one way you can find what you truly seek—only one way you can find yourself.
And Krasus’s words: Though you must be very careful. It is easy to be trapped by illusions. … This timeway is, frankly, something that should never have been … an illusion, as it were. …
The timeways were not full of illusions. This timeway was not an illusion.
It was time itself that was the illusion.
Historians and prophets made much of the past and future. There were tomes aplenty written about old battles, strategies, historical events, and how they had changed the world. And there were prophecies and predictions, hopes and wonderments and speculations about the next five hundred years, or the next five minutes.
But the only true reality was now.
Scholars would have debates raging over what he was wrestling with now, but in his mind it suddenly seemed so simple, so obvious. There was only ever one moment.
This one.
Every past moment was a memory. It was gone. Every future moment was a hope, or a fear. It had not yet manifested.
There was only now, this moment, and even it slipped away into the past, and the future moment became this moment.
It was so elegant, so peaceful and tranquil, and Thrall found himself letting go of so many things he could barely understand them all. They slid from his shoulders like a pack dropped to the earth. The obsession over past actions. The worry about future ones.
And still the need to plan, the need for regret—wisdom dictated that even in this moment such things were necessary. To understand the past was to be the best one could be in this moment. To anticipate the future could shape the next this moment.
But all that became so much easier—became light as a feather and magical and innocent—once he finally understood.
He was trapped in time, yes. In this seemingly endless path of revisiting his past—or, most recently, in glimpsing a possible future.
But all he needed to do was step out of the cycle by truly being in this moment. And Nozdormu—
Thrall blinked and trembled with the vastness of the understanding that broke upon him. Now he understood both how it was that he was so mired in these timeways that felt so personal, yet he saw Nozdormu in each one of them. Thrall had been trapped in a single moment—a vital moment of his own past. The mighty Timeless One was trapped in all moments of time.
But with his newfound ease, Thrall knew that he now could find the great leviathan.
Krasus was smiling at him. Thrall knew that the red dragon was dead in the real timeway, but that was not truth; that was not reality. This was. And Taretha, too, was real, and alive. He could almost feel her breath slipping into her lungs, hear each sweet heartbeat as if it were the only heartbeat ever to exist.
Which it was.
“You have figured it out,” Krasus said, a slight smile curving his lips.
“I have,” Thrall said. He turned to Taretha and smiled into her eyes. “I am glad to be with you.”
Not glad to have been. To be.
He closed his eyes.
* * *
When he opened them, he knew he was in a place completely and utterly out of time. He was floating, unanchored even by gravity, the darkness around him illuminated only by the soft glow of a truly infinite number of portals. And through each one, Thrall could glimpse the glitter of golden scales.
It was a startling, unsettling image, yet Thrall felt complete peace in his heart as he drifted in a nothingness surrounded by everything. His mind was calm and open, holding something that it