I conceived Max until the time she went supernova, it was nothing like a curtain for me. It was more like prison bars.”
Mordecai stiffened, “You were locked up?”
“Locked out is more accurate,” Dana admitted.
Mordecai allowed the words to roll through his mind for a moment before they finally clicked. “You couldn’t cross the veil?”
“No. Not at all.”
“So, when you said you couldn’t do anything all those years Max was lost here – you meant it literally.” It was a statement rather than a question.
“Very literally,” Dana confirmed. “I could see and I could hear, but I could not pass.”
Mordecai felt his anger returning. “Why didn’t you say anything before?” he ground out.
Dana peered back at him once again, her face close to his. “And why would I?”
Mordecai opened his mouth only to snap it closed before he finally got the words out on his third attempt. “Why? Because I was horrible to you! You let me think you didn’t give a damn about Max and her wellbeing. You let your people think you were ignoring them – ignoring their prayers in their greatest time of need.”
Dana faced the ocean once more, her eyes lingering on the sun setting in the distance. “The truth does not change anything, Mordecai. Besides, you were – are – more than entitled to your anger. My paladins and wardens are more than entitled to their pain and grief and bitterness. The why of how I was absent for so many years is irrelevant. It only matters that I was absent.”
“But not of your own choosing,” he pointed out.
“No. Not of my own choosing,” Dana’s voice was sure and firm. "Although, you need to understand that I did understand and accept my punishment. I had earned it. I hate the consequences of my actions and I wish more than anything I could have helped our daughter and my guardians of nature. But I broke the rules. Important rules.”
“You’re not allowed to have sex? No, that can’t be right. It’s not like you were a virgin that night,” he quickly added. Silence met his statement and he felt his insides start to knot up and sweat form on his forehead. “Dana? You weren’t a virgin, right?”
Dana stared resolutely ahead, saying, “It wasn’t the sex. Do not worry. Sex is allowed. I was punished for creating a new thread.”
Mordecai blew out a breath of relief. He wasn’t sure his ego could handle it if he found out he was Dana’s first. There was no finesse and no consideration that went into his lovemaking that night. He was too raw, too angry, and too drunk to do much more than ensure Dana had orgasmed with him. Putting those thoughts to the side, he latched onto what she had revealed. “A thread?”
Dana nodded, relaxing back against him once more. “Every life force has a thread – an origin and a destination. Now, that thread, it can take many detours on the way, get tangled up, turned around, burn out, get cut. That is free will, you see. It is free will that allows these deviations from the original path. It allows people – and all living things – to end at a different place or a different time than they were originally destined to when the thread was first created.”
“Wait, are these the threads Max often talks about? What she can see with her weird custodian-hybrid vision? The threads of light connecting souls, people, places …?” Mordecai guessed.
Dana nodded. “Yes. Exactly. They represent a lifetime of choices as well as our fate.”
“Okay,” Mordecai allowed, trying to follow Dana’s information. “So, destiny is fluid?”
“In a very literal sense; yes. But as much as our life threads can be altered, there is one rule that is universally infinite; we all get just one thread. One thread to do with as we will in that one lifetime. I can see the threads, the same way Max can. But I cannot create them. The Sisters are responsible for that. My thread had no biological children. In any time, in any place. Custodians are entirely different – made of energy and formed from power – they have no physical bodies, even though I refer to them as my offspring.” Dana paused, stroking Mordecai’s arm in an absent way. “Somehow, when we slept together, we created a whole new thread.”
“We created Max,” he stated.
“Yes,” Dana smiled back at him. “We created Max. A child unforeseen by the Fates themselves. It caused a conundrum amongst the deities.