"Even regular human beings have stories about it," Kit said. He took off his windbreaker and shook it out, mostly on Nita."I'm not surprised," S'reee said. "Everything that lives and tells stories has this story in one form or another. Well. After that war in the Above and Beyond, the Lone Power spent a long while in untraveled barren universes, recouping Its strength. Then It came back to our native universe, looking for some quiet, out-of-the-way place to try out Its new inventions. Right then the only place vulnerable to It, because thinking life was very new here, was this world; and the only place thinking life existed as yet was the Sea. So theLo"e One came here to trick the Sea into accepting Death. Its sort of death, anyway—where all power and love are wasted into an endless darkness, lost forever." "Entropy," Nita said."Yes. And any sea people It succeeded in tricking would be stuck with thai death, the Great Death, forever. —Now there was already a sort of death «J the Sea, but only the kind where your body stops. Everyone knew it wasn ~DEEP WIZARDRY 187permanent, and it didn't hurt much; you might get eaten, but you would go O n as part of someone else. No one was afraid of not being his own self any m0re —I guess that's the simplest way of putting it. That calm way of life drove the Lone Power wild with hate, and It swore to attach fear and pain to it and make it a lot more interesting." S'reee sighed. "The whales' job then was what it is now: to be masters and caretakers for the fish and the smaller sea people, the way you two-leggers are for the dry-land beasts. So naturally, the only wizards in the Sea were whales, just as humans were originally the only ones on land. That early on, there were only ten whale-wizards, all Seniors. Ni'hwinyii, they were called, the Lords of the Humors—"
