Page 239 of Hunters and Prey

I saw him hesitate, thinking about the question.

Then he nodded.

“I think so.” Looking at me, he gripped my hand tighter in his, pulling me closer to him. “That whole thing with Dragon––”

“It rattled you,” I said. “I know. But what does it mean?”

Exhaling in a kind of frustration, Black combed his free hand through his hair.

“I probably should have explained it to you,” he muttered. “It just didn’t seem that important. And unlike your uncle, I’m not keen on replicating every damned thing from Old Earth in our version.”

I nodded, holding his hand in both of mine now.

I got that. I really did.

“So, there are these beings,” Black said next, exhaling. “They’re supposed to be ancestors of modern-day seers. There was a whole race of them.” Gripping my hands tighter, he led me between stalls filled with food and handcrafts. “But there’s also a kind of ‘family’ of them,” he added. “What the Bridge was talking about when she said ‘the Pantheon.’ That group was supposed to have specific roles in history. According to the myths, they come back again and again, whenever those roles are needed.”

He glanced at me, frowning.

“Truthfully? I always thought it was bullshit.”

I nodded, unsurprised. I probably would have thought the same, if I’d been raised in his world. It sounded like a lot of religious myths.

“Yet you call Allie the Bridge,” I said, smiling faintly.

I was teasing him, but he answered me seriously.

“Yeah,” Black said, looking at me. “The Bridge is the Sword’s wife, even in the myths. They’re probably the most famous beings in the Pantheon. They supposedly bring about the evolution of a whole life wave… which often ends in the destruction of a planet. There are a whole bunch of other beings in the Pantheon, though. One of them is called ‘Dragon.’”

I nodded, frowning faintly as I thought about this.

“And they think you’re Dragon?” I clarified.

Black threw up a hand, frowning. “Apparently.”

“But Dragon already existed on their world, raped Allie, and she gave birth to Narik.”

Black exhaled again, throwing up the same hand.

“Apparently,” he said.

Frowning, I stared down at the ground, barely seeing it as I walked.

“Could there be more than one of you?” I said next. “More than one Dragon?”

Clicking in annoyance, Black shook his head, but not exactly in a no.

“I don’t know. The far more logical explanation is that they’re just plain wrong,” he pointed out. “That I’m not Dragon. That I just remind them of him for some reason.”

“Maybe.” I stared at the ground in thought. “They didn’t seem to believe that, though. Either one of them.”

Black exhaled again, but didn’t answer.

“You don’t believe it, either,” I observed. “Not fully.”

He gave me a sideways look, his lips tilted in frustration.

“You really had no memory of coming here?” he said, apropos of nothing. “All this time? You really seem to know them. My cousin. His wife.”

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