Chapter 21

It's misleading at best and just outright wrong at worst, to think of the facets that exist around us as if they were simply an infinite, three dimensional honeycomb of connected facets.

Using this analogy of an infinite honeycomb, you could easily think of every cell of the honeycomb as being at the center of an infinite universe, and for practical purposes, there is some value in this way of looking at it.

For most of those who travel the facets, the image of where they are and where they are going is nowhere close to this concrete. Legionnaires and McKesson alike don't seem to have spent much time at all in wondering about the shape of the universe they are traveling in, and have taken the original analogy of a gem and its facets far too literally.

there are different ways of moving you see. For everyone in my family, the Legion and the Guardians, the method amounts to casting oneself out like a life ring on a rope. Wherever you wind up, you are still tethered to Earth, or Meadow, or one of any number of facets centered around the Earth-Human subset of realities. Even if you don't know the tether exists, or how to find it, it's still there. This tether keeps them safe, but is limiting.

If you could feel the facets without having to cast that life ring into one first, you might see that they are arranged in vast, strange and wonderful ways. You might see them arranged in strings and braids; complex, ornate and infinitely expansive in a completely non-fractal way — just as likely to be arranged in smooth and elegant patterns or wild, disorderly tangles and knotty clusters.

All the facets of reality are like a web woven by a drunken spider caught within a capricious wind, but woven in every direction at once, and through more dimensions than there are senses to perceive them.

A string of facets can be in phase with each other, making their connections close and easy to find, with multiple sets of congruent signatures in common. At the same time the strings can be twisted and convoluted and cross each other in many places but completely out of phase, making them hard to feel and rendering movement from one to the other difficult. Some strings are woven together for great stretches, forming ropes of concentrated congruities that move in and out of phase in smoothly stepped or wildly careening patterns. The worlds within such strings share oddly random and yet evocative similarities, some of geography, and climate, others sharing similarities of culture and history. Some run so close together and are so in phase and they share so many congruities that it's almost impossible to see where one facet ends and the next begins.

Most of the worlds that Grandpa Dave found, and later those explored by the Legion of Light share great sets of clustered similarities. Not all, but almost all. They may have felt like they were fishing for facets in a somewhat random fashion, managing to do so in a less-than-random manner only rarely, but it was both more and less random than even that. Their jumps always take them along strings of closely connected facets. Some along simple strands, some up and down thicker clustered ropes of congruent facets, but always within the very closest vicinity of where they started, and still always centered at their original facet.

Aunt Serenity was able to step across the threads a little bit more freely than most, but it was not that she could sense the possibilities any better than most, but rather that reality was more willing to answer back when she asked for something. Not that she really knew she was asking, or being answered. Still she is tied by that tether back to the facet of her birth - still centered in that same familiar, comfortable chunk of the honeycomb that defined her.

I am a Walker, and this is the reality my senses show me. I see them, taste them, touch them, feel them, and with that, I walk them.
I am a Walker and I have no tether. The center of our universe is whatever facet I inhabit at the moment. This is my miracle, and my curse.

Again I'm getting ahead of my story and looking back with the perfect false prescience of hindsight. What I know, I have learned over many hard years. I didn't know it then. Then, I was mostly a slave to my own half understood instincts.

-oOo-

The open prairie was dotted with grass runners. It was the heart of the night, but the moon was full and the sky clear. Here and there I could see one of the beasts standing guard, alert and watching the edges of the cane fields that bordered the small lake that surrounded the spring.

I slid out of my cloak and began to move slowly and as quietly as I could through the scrub brush and grass tufts that lay between the cane and the herd. Bent low, I moved at a slow walk for almost a quarter candle. Along the way I picked up a stone as big as my clenched fist. When I was within a fifty feet of the herd, I stopped and waited a while, giving the guard beasts a chance to settle from any unease my movements might have caused. When I was ready, I raised up slightly and threw the stone, arching it up and over the near corner of the herd and into the grasses just past the grass runner who stood guard there.

The sound of the grass rustling as the stone passed through it, and then the thud if it hitting the ground, brought a cry of alarm from the grass runner on guard nearest to it and that section of the herd, perhaps thirty or forty grass runners, came up out of their sleep and bolted away from the alarm and almost straight for me. I slipped my sonshu into my hands and took off at a full run, angling for the edge of the herd that approached me. I waited until the last moment to let my O'e out to dance through my weapons. In the dim light I saw the bulk of a large cow passing within a few feet of me with her eyes flashing wildly. She was probably a couple of years into her adulthood and prime meat on the hoof. I leapt, and as my leap carried me over her, my sonshu flashed down and out, boxing the grass runner just behind the ears. The cow dropped like a stone from the charge. I rolled from my leap and sheathed my weapons as I came back up, drawing my grass knife, just in case the charge had not killed her. The rest of the herd was mostly done rushing past as I returned to my target to check her out, but I moved to put her between me and the remainder of the rushing herd. Otherwise I ignored the rushing flow of panicked grass runners. I bent to check, and yes, the charge had been enough for a clean kill.