Shenrakari had led the way back into Amber, hauling a heavy load of timber as he went. It had been a good time to think; the alternative was to occupy his mind with every step of the slow journey and the tiredness of his body, a burden up to which he had not been at the moment.

Thought he had. The few days just before had been something of a relief. He had spent a troubled night trying to restore a tiny part of Amber's city, and in time had found a few brave allies to the cause among the dwellers. Somehow inspired by this, they had organized a party to Arden for raw materials, and the time working away in the woods had done him good. Salome had come to visit him while he was there, a gesture Shen appreciated tremendously, and he had shared with her the things that were troubling him. He had been hoping she might have some clarifying words, something he'd been missing all along, that would have make everything make sense... Amber, the Pattern, Shadow. If only it had been that easy.

Now he wandered the palace, groggily stuffed with the blueberry pancakes he'd proudly helped to bring about, and considered sleep, but knew it would elude him, at least for a while. His mind was still reeling with the mechanics of it all.

The problem was that there weren't any exceptions to the rules. Not only were there other Rhearis out there, full of alternate Nariakens and Erisrakaris, but there were other Shenrakaris and Salomes out there, too. Every world, every possibility, every conceivable variation of every tiny condition was theoretically out there, and they always would be.

So now what? What meaning did anything have? What point was there to saving lives? Or ending suffering?

Salome hadn't had any answers for this, only ideas. One was that the universe would always remain balanced, and so everything one chose to do did matter, because it kept that balance. Another was that somewhere in the system there was a lean, a tilt one way or another, and that the state of Amber, as well as the actions of its kin, could turn that balance. The second was more seductive than the first, but he saw more consistency in the first than the second. In truth, he wasn't sure he liked for either of them much.

Salome had also offered her mother's theory on it: that all of shadow didn't exist in consistent form at all until one arrived there. Shen recalled an idea that Griffin that shared with him some time ago: that a shadow became "more real" simply because someone of Amber had been there.

This idea lingered in his mind as he looked around for a moment and found himself thoroughly lost in the halls of the castle. Rather than fight it, he simply sat down.

Shen's grandmother's view was an interesting one. It made Amber itself the exception to the rule that he was looking for. It meant the Pattern wasn't the creator of the vast expanse of the Ni, or even the key to finding paths through it, but instead the template for shaping it. It rose forms of the mind from chaos, and let dreams find substance. It was the weave one used to hold the wind still long enough to stand on it, live in it... love it.

Shen's people's lessons on the Ni were that dreams were already real in their own worlds, in the places seen through the closed eyes of seers, and that spirits simply wandered through them.

Held in union, the two teachings pointed toward the idea that there wasn't any difference between travelling to a place one sees in the mind and creating it from the shapeless winds themselves.

Shen wondered if he was getting somewhere.

If this combined theory was true, then it meant that the only reason that shadows carried themselves forward in time, and followed their cause and effect as they did, was because it was imagined that they would. It also meant that the only reason the creatures within shadow had free will was because it was imagined that they did. It meant that Salome had loved and born child with something she had, in some way, created.

These thoughts didn't sit anywhere near as well.

Shen looked at his hands. If this were true, half of him was made up entirely of dream. More to the point, he was half made of dream to which he, in theory, had the key to shaping. If he could use the weave of the Pattern to pull a whole world from nothing, then it seemed he could reweave the half of him that was made of the same nothing. How strange seemed the idea that perhaps shapeshifting wasn't in his mother's blood so much as it was in the half of his blood that was pure shadow. Now it seemed this new outlook wasn't making sense anymore.

Shen found other problems with the theory. Why did shadows follow paths that didn't make any sense? When Shen returned to Rheari, he never would have imagined to find what he did. If the Rheari that had not been scurged by demons existed, and it must have, then why hadn't the Pattern taken him to that one when, at its center, he had thought upon his home? It would have been, in truth, far closer to the one Shen had had in mind. What connected him with the Rheari that now held his broken village, and not to the one he expected to find? What made that one "his", and all the others not? If his being in the Rheari was what made it real, then when he left, all of the possible Rhearis that sprang from it should have been equally real, yet only one, and an unpleasant one at that, had somehow been chosen.

This bothered Shen. Had he somehow, in some unconscious way, made that choice? Or was it made by Zamorna, who shaped chaos into form by sending his demons? Perhaps once Shen left the Rheari, it ceased being real entirely, in which case he should forget the whole thing and never give it a second thought.

He let his head fall against his bent knees. He was tired of this. In particular, he was tired of feeling like he was the only one wrestling with it. Why didn't the humans he'd travelled with ask these same questions? They were no more familiar with this whole idea than he was. Why didn't Stark seek the shadow where Dragos lived in peace, or the others fear confronting their alternate selves or families? Why didn't they worry that everything they did wouldn't really matter at all?

Shen cleared his mind. It was time to stop. He thought about what he'd done in town. Be it a real deed that changed a tiny piece of the world or just an insubstantial excersize in distraction, it had felt like it had mattered, and right now, even if it was out of weakness, it was a feeling that he needed very badly.

He surrendered to sleep right where he sat.