A draft only, I will most probably have to rewrite it.
But it's good getting your reactions, and also it's an hard one to write for me.

In many ways.

===
==

As they made ready to leave the next morning Roland went down to the ocean to take a last goodbye. To be honest he couldn’t explain even to himself why he felt the need, there were already too many bad memories of this shore as it was, but still, there was something calling him back a last time. As he stood there looking out on the azure sea, so calm and innocent, with the slowly raising sun painting it in streaks of silver, he suddenly felt as if it all was a dream again. He had a hard time fitting the impression created with that of his memories of his last night. Suddenly he wasn’t sure he was there at all, maybe it was just another of his ‘almost there’ experiences. Dreamers had those, it was a common disease they all had to watch themselves against. Once, a long time ago, when his father first had started to read to him from that book, that strange old book he had gotten hold of somehow, wherefrom he refused to reveal. In it there had been many strange concepts, but there had been one that Roland had recognized even that first time, all to easily. Probability it was called, and also ‘many paths’, the book had gone too long turns describing how all paths were taken, simultaneously, for every instant of time. And how only when that instant finally had passed, probability would fade out into a certainty. Even then he knew this to be true, that all paths existed, side by side, some of them so far from what his parents called reality that it had scared him to thread them, and still did. But thread them he had, early on he had learnt that a dreamer had no choice, for them all paths was there, and why some beaconed stronger than others he still had no answer for.

So he had grown up under the tutelage of other dreamers and been filled with what knowledge they could impress on him, but always with that feeling that there had to be something more hiding behind it all. There had to be a reason why something was called reality and all those other paths would fade, and yet slightly differently become renewed, for every moment of his life. That he had learnt how to read the old language he could thank his father, and that book. It was called “Physics and philosophy” and it had seemed as if it had been meant for some course, that as it had questions after each chapter that the reader apparently was expected to answer. There were many times he wished he had had those answers, but they weren’t in the book, and when asking his father had just shook his head. “No son, those answers are gone. Be glad with what we have.” And he was, he was glad that he had that book, even though some of the ideas seemed ludicrous. Discussing how very small things, how small he didn’t really know, what the book called a quantum level could be possessed of this quality of ‘many paths’ but still leave a macroscopic world free from that probability. To his knowledge, the one he and all other dreamers shared, that quantum world was the only one existing, and the one they had to keep an unending struggle not to let fall into ruin.

As he stood there he, how long he didn’t know, he felt a certain calm descend on him, an fore bringer of that acceptance of the inevitable. This was real, he knew that, and she was gone. This life line still held him, and Shadow, but not her. He felt a small release accepting it, but with it also a sudden urge to change it. That was a path not lightly taken, few had chosen to thread it and there were dire costs to it. To do so one would need to weave life’s own pattern. Nobody knew how many that had succumbed to its lure, not even those dreaming, but they all could feel when someone was falling for that last promise of solace. After all, all was intertwined, that which existed, as well as that what might be, and when the threading fell apart life’s pattern ached. Roland had heard that pattern scream in pain twice under his life, as someone tried to adjust it, both times with a feeling as if countless souls falling into an abyss. You had to be mad first to choose that way he had thought then, so many life’s lost, and others changed beyond recognition on someone’s whim, but, he wasn’t sure any more. He knew he still had her inside his reach. ‘ Death might rule her here, but with just the slightest adjustment ‘, he shook his head violently, disgusted with his own thoughts. He was no God, he had no right to.. “Roland, time to go.” It was Shadow, still in the form of a man, The form he found most comfortable for journeying though was the one he had held yesterday, the black stallion. “Man child, it’s time. Merry is gone, let her free from you now Roland, we still have a path to follow and a quest to fulfill.”

Shadow worried for Roland, only a very few could contemplate that possibility, of bending life to their own desires and wishes, and those who fell prey to that need was, with right as he saw it, mostly considered pariahs by the rest of the community. Ill seen, even killed at times, they were shunned by all but the mad, and few could really create those lasting changes. But some exceptional, or mad, ‘probably one have to be both before?’ thought Shadow somewhat cynically, had it inside their power, and now Shadow couldn’t help but fear for his friend. As Roland looked up at Shadow, his face a weary mask, in equal parts anguish and self-depreciation, he vainly tried to smile at him. “You’re right naturally. Shadow will you lend me your back? I’m weary today, the years seems to have caught up with me my friend.” Shadow had to look away as he saw the pain mirrored in his friends eyes, but nodded graciously, seemingly finding a new interest in the shed, now standing a lonely grey watch over the strangely cobalt bleached beach . “This time Roland you’re welcome to it. I too feel Merry’s death weight heavily on me, but staying here won’t diminish the loss. Come my friend, let us leave.”

As they rode Shadow, struggling to find his footing in the fine sand started to hum. The tune he was setting was to that old poem ‘journeys end’, about how a world would come to be when all that was lost finally was found again, written by a poet, and as some said, one of the first dreamers countless years ago, although without the weave. Some expected it to be true even so, others just called it delusions of a mad poet outside the weave, dreaming the impossible. But to Shadow and Roland both that song held a deeper meaning and a wider promise, as it had done for Merry too. The promise they felt it hold was not so much a return to what once had been, but the promise of a place where humans for once would be welcome. This was another disturbing thing the dreamers had found as they threaded the paths of the weave. Humans seemed to be an abbreviation, neither expected nor welcomed to the weave. And the way the old ones seemed to have treated their world hadn’t made it better, The weave had reacted and that reaction, finally given its chance through humans bungling, forced upon them their transformation. Not that anyone had planned it so, and that final confrontation more sinister than anyone could have foreseen.

Not that the weave ‘thought’ as we see it. It was just the weave, finding no need for any linear processes. Thinking is after all something best done inside our ‘arrow of time’, experienced as a past, a now and a future, and therefore also under Chronus watchful eyes. The weaves view of time was different, to it all was there, simultaneously, and it’s only interest was in the weaving. You could say that time was just a ‘depth extra’ to it, and as it changed its focus so it, to those human, seemed to move in time. So humans, and the idea of what we call life was something of an enigma to it, it couldn’t really see it, as they followed that ideal of 'free will', steered under an constant flow of 'time', pointing in only one direction. It would still notice humanities disruptions though. There is a balance to all things, and you might say that the weave held that ultimate balance, with us being the disruptive force constantly disturbing the weaves equanimity. And in much the same way as our cells and skin will heal a wound the weave constantly was healing those disruptions. It wasn’t until humanity at last, through their dreamers, was forced to acknowledge the weave for what it was that they understood just what harm they had done, and continued to do. And it wasn’t so much of a war, as you can’t really war against yourself and they too was a part of that weave, as a series of constant iterative eruptions where the weave tried to heal what it found to broken, whilst our dreamers with the help of those still left human desperately fought to keep the only thing allowing them to exist, their arrow of time.

Roland remembered how the book had discussed the dichotomy of chaos and order, or 'law' as it also seemed to be named in a more archaic sense. and he had to smile, a little bitterly, remembering how humanity was seen by itself as the foremost defender of just that order and law. They had been so terribly wrong about that he though, dark thoughts washing over him as he dejected sat there, hunched over Shadows back almost asleep. Humans were the ones representing chaos, the weave was all that stood between them and total disintegration. No wonder it tried to get rid of them, the human enigma threatened its very existence.