yet their souls are gentle. In the same example, I’m sure you’ve met delicate beings who have the souls of tyrants.’
I thought of Gog, who could flatten a door by poking at it with a finger, but who was as gentle as they came. Then I thought of Phaedra, the tiny doer-of-evil, and Morrigan, whose delicate beauty contained a monster.
‘Don’t judge a book by its cover,’ I said, turning to clichés to help me understand what the man was saying.
‘Essentially, yes,’ the man said. ‘The Red and the White were created by forces that permeate all of us, in different measures. We all have many conflicting characteristics. In a single person, goodness sits next to rage, which dines with generosity and pettiness, before going to meet greed that lives next door to empathy. We are all conflicted creatures, but not all in equal measures or in equal ways.’
‘Are you saying that the Red and the White represent characteristics that we somehow pick up from them?’ Ryu said. He didn’t appear too invested in the idea.
The man took another sip of his tea, radiating calm as he spoke again. ‘Yes and no. The fact is that people are a combination of many things, environment being just as important as genetics. But I do think that the Red and the White spring from something essential. What you think of as your elements are, I believe, similar to our understanding of DNA. They’re the building blocks of our world; your people are just able to interact with and wield them in ways that my people can’t. But we all come from the same source, do we not?’
I nodded vigorously. Back when I’d fought Phaedra in the creature’s lair, the night I became the champion, the creature had beamed a vision out to me and any of the surrounding minds close enough. Well, it wasn’t a vision really. It was the creature’s memories, and in those memories was revealed the fact that supernaturals were not a separate species. They were humans who’d evolved to manipulate the elements that were all around them. Supernaturals such as Ryu, born and raised to think of themselves as very much separate from and superior to humans, had been unhappy to discover we were all originally humans. Indeed, since then many had dismissed the vision as impossible. But I knew it was the truth and was thrilled, for it meant I hadn’t really changed. I was still essentially the human I had always believed myself to be.
‘Yes, we have seen a vision in which that scenario was true,’ Ryu said, all shifty-eyed.
The monk’s Cheshire cat smile managed to look even more mysterious at Ryu’s obvious discomfort. ‘Well, if we all come from the same sources – these building blocks of genetics that you supernaturals understand as elements – it means we have all of the same things inside us, but mixed up in different proportions. Hence the fact none of us are the exact same person, except biological twins, of course. And even they can be so very different from each other.’
‘So what you’re saying is that we all have a bit of the Red and the White in us, but some have more and some have less.’ I was starting to get it. He was really talking about genetics. The Red and the White were formed of the elements that made our earth, quite literally. They’d been spawned of fire and air, and those things existed in all of us, because we were created of the same forces that made them. Humans and supernaturals were just a later version of the life that sprang out of the elemental forces colliding. Life 2.0, so to speak.
‘Exactly,’ said the monk. ‘We all have a bit of what created the Red and the White. And for those that have more … when the Red and the White appear in our world, it affects those whose natures are more akin to Fire and Air.’
‘I haven’t been paying attention,’ I admitted. ‘We’ve been so busy with everything involving the Red and the White. Have there been things happening?’
‘Oh, yes. Crime on the rise everywhere. Domestic violence ending in murder, in households that were always happy. Brothers slaying brothers; mothers slaying their children. And those are only the individuals. There have been mass lootings and rapes, gangs fighting. Armies mobilizing…’
‘Holy shit,’ I breathed, forgetting there was a real holy person already in the room.
‘Exactly. But this is not the first time in history. The