Page 131 of Broken Veil
Duncan’s cheeks turned a little red. “I just mean you could walk on either side.”
“We could,” Lakshmi said, “but we don’t.”
“Why not? The gates were created by the gods, weren’t they?”
“In a sense, yes.” Lakshmi looked at her sisters. “But it’s not that simple.”
“Who else could create them?” Lachlan asked. “The fae may tend them, but Angus has said they are not of fae construction.”
Godrik spoke from the center of the room. “Who else but the gods has the power to create entirely different realms?”
The three mother goddesses had placed Godrik in the center of their circle, as if drawn to the fundamental masculinity of the wolf. It was impossible for Carys not to notice.
The three women were utterly feminine in every way, three earthy, creative forces of nature in entirely different forms but with deeply feminine energy.
Carys felt as if she’d been plugged into an electrical outlet the moment she walked through the door.
“We didn’t create the realms,” Donna said. “We wouldn’t do that. We gave them shape, we created passage. But the lines between worlds were not built by the gods.”
“Who then?” Laura looked around the bookshop. “Who would have that power? Who would even want to?”
The three goddesses were silent. They turned their eyes toward Carys and let their stillness fill the room, the shop, the very air that she breathed.
She was steeped in their silence until every other sense faded away and her vision turned inward. In her mind, she saw the worlds she had traveled, the twin worlds of light and shadow, and from that twin trunk sprouted other branches.
Branches of dreams and pockets of vision.
Worlds of the dead and amorphous realms of the infinite.
A sorceress’s cottage on a misty mountain and a green hovel in the middle of the forest.
A still silver pool with no end and no beginning.
“We created them.” The realization sank into Carys like water into thirsty ground. She looked at Laura. Then at Duncan. “Humans did it. Brightkin.”
Oshun raised one eyebrow. “They were wise to pick this one. You are closer to understanding the nature of the gates now. Why they must be. How they must be protected.”
“Carys.” Duncan’s voice was hoarse. “What are you talking about?”
“We stopped believing in magic.” She looked at Naida. “We stopped believing in you. And the moment we stopped believing, we started pushing all the magic in the world away.”
Carys moved back from Naida and stood.
The three Mothers were sitting in a triangle with Godrik in the center, and Naida, Lachlan, and Cadell angled like spokes from him.
Duncan, Carys, and Laura stood on the outside with Angus in the periphery.
Three ordinary humans looking at the circle of magic in the center of the room.
Awareness dawned in Laura’s expression. “We turned to science and modernity and forgot the past. More than forgot—werejectedit. We rejected… you.”
“The wheel turns and turns again,” Lakshmi said. “It has not happened once but a thousand times, as long as human belief has existed.”
Donna looked at Carys. “The barriers formed gradually and then all at once.”
“Long, long ago,” Oshun said. “Before human history was written, the first walls between the worlds were formed.”
“And things that were once real in the Brightlands,” Lakshmi said, “drifted into the shadow as humans stopped believing.”
