“This confuses me,” I told him. “It’s hard to keep a grasp of reality when it doesn’t remain constant.”
“Such is the power of story,” he said as I followed him to the front door.
He opened the door and I saw darkness instead of sunshine. What should have been the front yard of my estate was an enclosed room, large and spacious. We stepped through and I shut the door behind us.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Seattle,” Simon replied. The room had a hardwood floor and high ceiling, and Destiny’s Price hovered in the center. “We have to stay on the move or the Order of Chaos will find and kill us.”
“Will they rewrite Spenser back to life?” I asked Simon. We walked toward the people who surrounded Destiny’s Price. “Like the Storytellers did to you?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “In order to join the Order of Chaos, prospective members must accomplish some dark deed. It is obvious that Spenser’s dark deed was to tempt you and get you to join his Order. Since he failed, I don’t think they’ll write him back into the story.”
“What about those shadow-demons loose in Philadelphia?” I asked. “I’m worried they might harm innocents and—”
“With Spenser gone, those creations of his are gone, too,” Simon interrupted. He waved and smiled at the new Storytellers. “Now we have to figure out what your mission is.”
“My mission?” I asked. “I survived Spenser’s temptation. Isn’t that enough?”
The Storytellers exchanged smiles with each other, and they excused themselves for a break when we approached. “Rearranging story threads and altering the destiny of the world takes a lot of concentration,” an Oriental woman said. “We need many breaks.” I watched them walk off and wondered where our exact location was. Yeah, I knew it was Seattle, but was it a house or an office building, another warehouse or a mansion?
The surreal story I had fallen into wouldn’t yield its grasp upon me, and neither would Destiny’s Price. I realized if I ran and didn’t look back, the Order of Chaos would get me. I thought about Storytellers who altered the destinies of world leaders, and I considered the Order of Chaos who impeded them with famines and wars and new diseases and super-flu viruses—whatever destroyed lives.
Why?
Where did Destiny’s Price come from? Who had created it? What was the name of the orb the Order of Chaos used to rewrite and warp reality? When I asked Simon he said nobody knew.
“Once you become a Storyteller, you have no time to research,” he said. “There is the constant need to keep your wealthy lifestyle through Destiny’s Price so that you have plenty of money to live, take care of whatever family you have, and work with other Storytellers. A Storyteller must be able to drop what he’s doing at a moment’s notice as inspiration hits, which is why we set ourselves up as owners of successful businesses and let others run them for us.
“We can’t just walk up to Destiny’s Price and operate it. She must call us, and when she does we feel inspired to create story. She leads our thousand-strong members by intuition and inspiration, and we never know who will show for the next meeting… or even where it will be held. We don’t control her; she controls us.”
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