He shrugged. “I thought that I’d give you time to come to me. Sometimes I wonder if I made a mistake that day.”
“I dreamed of it. The dragon.”
He made a low humming noise. “He is the oldest living thing in the world. Of course you did. What did he say to you?”
“What makes you think it said anything?”
“Curious,” Dimitri said.
“What is?”
“You. You always have been. From the very first day, you have been this thorn, but not buried in my side. More like you were scraping my skin. Not wholly unpleasant.”
“Did you know him?”
“You’re not speaking of the dragon.”
“No. But how did you know?”
“You call the Great White it, like he’s a thing, this unnamed thing that you haven’t begun to accept.”
“It’s not my god.”
“He never asked to be. He just is. But yes, to answer your
question, I knew Myrin.”
“Did you know that all of this would happen?”
Dimitri laughed. “I didn’t have all the pieces. I warned Randall the day he and Morgan set the seal. I told him that all things came full circle. That the mistakes of the past have a tendency to become the problems of the future, especially if they aren’t corrected as they should have been. No, Sam. I didn’t know that all of this would happen exactly as it has. I didn’t know about you, though I could understand your importance. The gods do not speak to me. I am but the caretaker of the forest.”
“You told him to kill Myrin?”
He looked at me sharply. “I never said that.”
“You said corrected.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“Isn’t it?”
“I do not advocate death. I breathe life.”
“If he’d killed him, we wouldn’t be here.”
“The path would have gone in a different direction,” Dimitri agreed. “But here we are, and I think this is where we’re meant to be. The actions that have led to this moment are as much yours as they are theirs. This is your history, Sam of Wilds. You carry the weight of their past because it has been placed upon you. Their mistakes have become your future.”
“That… sucks.”
“Indeed it does,” Dimitri said, and he sounded far too happy at the prospect. “The last time I saw the Great White was the day the seal was locked.”
I stopped. Dimitri turned to look back at me, eyebrow arched. “It was there?” I asked dumbly. “Randall never—”
“Randall didn’t know.”
“But you did.”
“It is my forest. I know all that happens here.”