The million trials

Pssst.

I'll say a little now, because the part before he left is the part the five still argue about, and I was there for all of it, and I don't blink.

They split the universe off.

Theirs from everyone else's. Cut it away the way you'd cut a pocket off a coat, so that whatever was coming for the water had to come a very long way round. It looks like nothing. Five old people on a hill, and the sky one shade different, and that's a universe gone into a pocket.

And on the seam, a guard. Not a wall; walls hadn't worked, and there was a girl who could have told them so. A condition. Whoever wants in must first pass the million trials. All of them. And whoever passes has their brain grown, afterwards, to the size of what they've just learned, so they arrive already understanding why the trials were there. I thought that was elegant and said so, in my way.

"Only like that," he said, "can I be sure it won't repeat itself."

He wasn't sure. He never is. He was sure it was the only thing he could think of and that he'd think of it again, and for him that's the same.

···

Then we went over.

To the other side. Me on his shoulders, him with his hand out. And he did what he'd done at the academy: he found the best minds. Not the loudest. There are a lot of loud ones over there. He found the ones I go still for, and he knows when I go still because his eyes are my eyes and I stop moving them.

With those, we learned the inner life of the so-called gods.

Carefully. Over there they'll tell you all sorts about gods. That they left. That the others stayed. That if you enjoy life a part of you can't go. All true; I've looked. What he learned is smaller and worse: a god is a thing that has never once been made to pass a trial. That's the whole of what's wrong with them. It can be fixed. Fixing it takes a battle.

A long one. I won't lay it out. The good tellings skip the battle; I've heard enough from the rafters to know that. At the end of it we hadn't won and they hadn't won and we joined. A pact. Mutual support between the two worlds, theirs and his, the pocket and the coat.

···

They were millions of years ahead of us. Say it plainly. And they'd been there much longer as well, by our reckoning, though I'll put one thing on the record before anyone quotes a figure back at me. A dragon cannot always be believed when it comes to numbers.

Four fingers. You try counting to a million on four fingers and see how far you get before you round.

"How long have you been here?" he asked one.

"Long," it said, and held up a hand, and I counted for him, and we let it go.

So. Ahead of us. Older than us. And willing, after a battle, to sit down with a blind old man from a teashop and a snake and agree to hold each other's walls.

He's never understood why. He says so, in the dark, with his hand where it's always been.

"I've decided it was you," he says.

Pssst, I say.

He takes that as agreement. He always has. I've never once told him what it means.