Titans of Chaos

Once I tried playing with the fishes. I reached into their governing monads, the point of nonbeingwhere their material and mental states overlapped, and tried to give them more free will. Freewill is always good, right?

Five days later, the last Saturday before Vanity's dreaded exam, came a strange night. A school ofmy fishes levitated out of the water, glowing with unearthly fire all over their scales, and the coralgrowths they drifted across turned into bubbles of some substance harder than jade.

Colin was on watch; we woke to the sound of him screaming in panic. Rushing out of the tentstark naked (who uses a nightshirt in the tropics?), I was in time to see a line of twelve bloatedsea-forms, glowing like fireflies, bobbing toward us through the trees, their little mouths openingand shutting.

Quentin tapped on the ground with his staff, and words like slithering snakes shivered from hismouth. A dark thing it was not good to look at too closely reached out from behind the trees andbegan snatching up the little fire-fishes, one by one.

Victor said, "Leader, should we keep them for study?"

Vanity, crouched in the tent flap, said in a shaky voice, 'The world, the universe, is not payingattention to them right. They're not... right. I think the laws of nature don't like them. Kill them."

Victor waved his hand. Nails bent awry during early, unsuccessful experiments in carpentry,Victor had not thrown away. Now they came out of a neatly labeled pouch on his belt, flewthrough the air at twice the speed of sound. The shrapnel splashed fishy guts across the trees,where they glittered with unnatural gemlike fire, dripping against gravity.

He also picked up a dropcloth and draped it over my shoulders, and wrapped it around me, verygently.

Colin, for once, had not been staring at me. He was watching the little fiery silver shapes dissolve.

"We can deform reality, can't we?"

I nodded. "Yeah. We're dangerous people."

Victor said, "Good. Maybe if we are dangerous enough, we can kill the enemy, and stay alive.

Leader, do you want me to gather those fish? As a food supply?"

Vanity shivered, and shook her head. "We're not eating those. Amelia, was that your handiwork?"

I nodded. "Yes, ma'am. I increased the inclination of the latitude of action. I was trying to splaythe number of possible futures to give them more free will."