by Cora May
She clenched her teeth.
She scrunched her face.
It didn’t matter, though. The irritation never came back. By her own doing or by Reiter’s, her anger had calmed, and he had won her over instead.
She took a deep breath.
“Then what happened?” she asked him.
“After graduation, I have moved on to study this life, to teach my fellow Soothers, and to bring in the new students—to assure them that, like me, they will find themselves at home and comfortable in this new place.”
“What’s a Soother?”
“An Amber Soother,” he explained gently. “It is what I am, what my stone and my Blessing pair are called.”
“And are you doing it now?” she asked pointedly. “Soothing me, I mean?”
Reiter thought for a moment. Chanta wondered if she was about to receive the truth or not.
“I don’t think so,” he told her. “I have not tuned into your emotions on purpose, by any means.”
So, no, she decided. She wasn’t going to get the truth.
“Fine,” she brushed it aside. “So you’re an Amber Soother. What is a Communicator? Is that the Jasper stone?”
“No, no,” he shook his head. “Those are two different stones. The Jasper Warriors are a purely physical type. The Celestite Communicators are a spiritual type. You’ll read about them in that book of yours soon enough, but for now, in a nutshell, they are exactly what the name entails. They communicate with the Realms beyond this one. But for today, let’s focus on the two you have read about. Did you find any similarities in what has happened to you and what has been defined in the book?”
“Well,” Chanta thought for a moment. “Not in the first one. The Amber, I mean. I don’t think I have messed with anyone’s emotions. But the physical part? I think that could be me. I’m not sure how I do it, but… Well, I hurt people. Is that what they do? The Warriors?”
“Sometimes,” he admitted. “That is how we usually find them. But that is not necessarily the only thing that happens. Tell me, how do you hurt these people? Do you use a weapon? Or is it with your own hands?”
“Neither!” Chanta defended herself. Then she paused. She knew she was about to sound crazy. She wanted to explain herself, but suddenly, it didn’t make sense to her all over again. “I mean… We fight… And then they are hurt, and I am not. Sometimes they are bloody. Sometimes they have broken bones. But I do not touch anyone! Not with my hands, not with a weapon, I don’t even wish them harm. It just… happens. Maybe my own mind refuses to recognize that I was the one who hurt them. Could that be it?” she said, looking at Reiter as if she was asking him to confirm her sudden theory. “Am I hurting them and just refusing to believe it? Blocking out the memory of touching them altogether?”
Reiter contemplated her words. He looked at her with deep concern, and she couldn’t decide if she liked what that might entail. He also looked utterly confused at her words. Or confused at how to answer her words, maybe. Whatever the case was, it took him quite a while before he actually chose the words to respond.
“Don’t be afraid of who you are,” he said. “Don’t be afraid of what you can do. We will test you for the Jasper stone, of course, just as we will test you for the Amber and for many others. We won’t give up until we are able to help you understand yourself and control yourself. In the meantime, take advantage of your time down here to study the books I have provided you.”
There was that instruction again. Chanta rolled her eyes. Apparently, these people lived by the words written long ago.
“And what if I hurt you?” she asked him point-blank.
It hadn’t actually been a fear of hers, and she didn’t really care if she did. But it had to have been a fear of his, having to deal with her in the basement all alone. She wanted that, too. She was afraid of this place, so someone should be afraid of her. Everyone should.
Reiter only grinned at her, though.
“If you hurt me, you hurt me. I am capable of handling myself. And I am very good at calming any situation.”
Right, Chanta reminded herself. He got to play with everyone’s emotions. If he could cause riots and make his mother commit suicide, there was no doubt in her mind that he could also calm a girl who hurt everyone when she felt hurt herself.
“Now, what other questions do you have regarding the text?”
Chanta thought hard. She had a few more, she supposed. Who had written that diary? Was it really Prisanni, or was it her mother? Who was that Nessi person, and would she meet her, too? How well were people able to control their… Blessings…? Were there plenty of emotional breakouts among the students, or did they have the Amber Soothers running around dampening everyone’s emotions all the time?
The line of questions she settled on, though, was something she hadn’t understood in the least.
“Who is the Reaper? Is he, like, the god of this religion or something?”
“Far from it,” he answered her with a serious tone. “In fact, there is no god in this ‘religion.’ Perhaps that is one reason I do not think of it as religion at all. The Reaper of Death is a being that predates all of us, and all of history. It could likely be that he predates the Earth itself. His job is simple—he collects the souls from this world once their human bodies have expired, and he places them into the appropriate Realm. His job has gotten more complex; for instance, when he had to create a second Realm to sentence Dimonis to. But that is not all that has changed.
“The Reaper has a stone, much the same as we do. His stone is in his scythe—or, rather, it is his scythe. It is not just a symbol of his power, but it actually gives him the power to do his job. In the mid-nineties, there was a war.”
“The world war?” Chanta asked.
Reiter chuckled. It was a dry, dark sound.
“Alas, no,” he said. “While the human world was busy fighting a terrible war on Earth, there was an ever-greater war fought in the Realms of the afterlife. Dimonis, you see, is quite capable of exacting revenge from the place that he is trapped. He is quite capable of commanding an army. And he did just that, sending an army into the Realm of the Reaper. He had not been expecting it. He did not know it was even possible.
“His scythe was shattered that day, separated into pieces and dispersed into the different Realms. Since then, his power has weakened daily. The humans of this world keep dying, but we are not sure that their souls are going to the proper place. Really, we can’t even be sure their souls are going anywhere at all. Perhaps there is some sort of limbo where they dwell until the Reaper is able to get to them; or maybe they wander the Earth, lost and haunting; or, worse yet, maybe the Anam that have the remaining pieces of the scythe have been given a sort of power through it and they are doing the Reaping now. There is no way to know. Not unless we die, too.”
“So when we do die?” Chanta asked quietly. “Then what?” Fear had trickled into her heart throughout the telling of his tale. If this is the religion these people believed, then where was the hope a religion always had to offer? And why would she want to be a part of it after he told her this story? “Because everyone eventually dies, you realize.”
Reiter nodded, his eyes drifting to the table. He seemed to understand her unspoken thoughts.
“This is not a religion many people would choose to accept. If we were to tell the humans, the Unfamiliars, they wouldn’t understand. They would ridicule us. But there are those among us, the Communicators like Prisanni, who have seen the other side and know this to be not just a religion, but a truth to our world. It is a horrible truth today, because, as you have just pointed out, we will all die one day. We are not sure if there is a Realm of the Light waiting for us, or if we’re doomed to wander aimlessly for an eternity.”
It was a gloomy note to end on, and she didn’t really feel like asking any more questions. Still, there was one that was pulling at her.
“Does this Dimonis character have a Blessing?”
Despite herself, fe
ar had trickled into the end of her question.
And, despite himself, Reiter offered her no comfort in his words.
“It is believed that Dimonis has to have something. Some say he must have been Blessed before he was taken away; Blessed at birth, as some of us are.”
“Is that what you believe?”
“I believe,” he said with a great sigh, “that Dimonis was never human to begin with. I believe that, like the Reaper, he was some other kind of being from the time he was brought into the human world by his mother. In the texts that I have studied, it is clear that she, too, believed this. It is also clear that he believed it as well. He always thought of himself as a god. I do not think he is, or ever was, a god, but I think he must have powers beyond what we know of. He must have a stone himself. To say he has a Blessing would be utter blasphemy of the word, just like it is not quite accurate to say that the Reaper has a Blessing. I believe the two beings were perhaps crafted from the same power, but Dimonis became much darker in his crafting. Thus, I believe that their powers come from the same source, but a Blessing? Neither of them has that.”
Chanta considered all of his words and all that he had said in their time together. She didn’t have any more questions. In fact, it was getting harder and harder to listen to anything he had to say. It was now up to her to decide if she believed any of it or not, and it was evident that Reiter felt the same. He checked his watch before he spoke again.
“We have spent a considerable amount of time together this morning,” he said. “I have told you a great many stories and answered a few of your questions. I hope that I have answered them aptly. I will take you back to your room, and I advise you to study more. Decide what you wish to believe for yourself. That decision, of course, cannot be made by anyone but you. I will be back for you after lunch, and we will begin the stone tests. You should read up on Gold, as that is one of the stones we will test today. The other is my own stone, Amber.
“Each of these tests is performed by the head of their respective houses, as we call them. I am the Head of the House of Amber, and Professor Sahira Raka is the Head of the House of Gold. You will meet her today, and each day we do the tests, you will meet someone new.”
“Does everyone go through these tests?” she asked.
“Most of the time, no,” he told her honestly. “Most of the time, we already know which stone responds to them, based solely on their histories or what their families have told us. Most of the time, we only run one test, with the stone we believe to be the match, and that’s all that is needed. Occasionally, we are wrong, and we must run another test or two. In your unique case, we are not sure what your Blessing and stone pair could be, so we have decided the best course of action is to test all of the stones to find which best fits you.”
He had begun to ramble a bit, but Chanta wasn’t paying much attention anymore. She would be given every test, that was the moral of the story here. Because she was some sort of freak, even these freaks themselves couldn’t classify her or claim her into their own houses right away. They had to run a whole bunch of tests.
Therefore, whereas most students just did it once, she would do it—how many times had he said? How many pairs were there?—seven times. She would be put through seven tests.
Her original question came back to her. What kind of tests were they?
Reiter stood, though, before she got a chance to ask him. She followed his lead, far too cowardly to do anything else. He led her to her room. She shut the door behind herself.
CHAPTER THREE: CHANTA
S he had been sitting on her bed for what felt like an eternity. She was chewing on every word Reiter had told her, and still, she had not come up with a decision. Should she believe what he had said? Should she accept this religion, or whatever it was? Or were these people all just a bunch of nut jobs?
If they were just a bunch of nut jobs, then they couldn’t help her. If she chose to believe that, then she was wasting her time here, and she was, essentially, trapped in a mental institution. There wasn’t really a way for her to escape, either. At least not yet.
But if she chose to believe that they were right, that Reiter had told her not just what he believed, but a part of history she had never had the chance to hear before, then they could help her. Couldn’t they? They seemed to believe they could.
Then again, they weren’t even sure what she was.
Maybe no one could help her.
She sighed, still unsure of what she was going to believe. She went over to the books again and pulled The Book of Stones off of the desk. She might as well read on if there was nothing else to do.
She made herself comfortable on the bed and flipped to the Gold stone.
The stone of Gold is a very misinterpreted stone. It is seen as a sign of wealth, a sign of glamour. It’s worn by every culture and seen as nothing more than money in some. It has been traded for wealth and hoarded for beauty. It is given by men to women to be worn around their finger as a symbol of marriage; more than that, it is seen as an expensive symbol of marriage. The greater the piece of Gold given, the greater the woman must be in the man’s eyes. In that way, the woman was assigned a worth as well. That’s not seen as a bad thing, though—it’s not seen as vain or possessive. Instead, women often compare the Gold they have each been given. They determine their own worth among each other by the Gold they wear.
Little has anyone ever taken into consideration what the Gold actually represents. It is something that is known generally only amongst the Familiars. Gold is the counterpart for Amber. Though created in two vastly different ways, they seem to be related in their Blessings. Whereas Amber is the stone of emotion, Gold is the stone of physical manipulation. Many would argue that Jasper is the true stone of physical manipulation, but Jasper is restricted to one’s own physical strength, duress, and ability. Gold is the stone of healing.
Those who have been Blessed with this stone have the ability to control the physical state of those surrounding them. They are able to heal the wounded, to cure the sick, much like the Amber stone provides a therapeutic manipulation to those surrounding its bearer.
The most unfortunate side effect to Gold, however, is that it allows every kind of manipulation. Where it allows for the healing of wounds, it also allows for the inflicting of them, and where it allows for the curing of sickness, it also allows for the infliction of disease. It is not a stone that can only be used for good, it is one that can be used for hate as well.
In the case of Sahira Raka, both good and hate were used to discover her whereabouts. She was an Egyptian physician, though no one truly recognized her as such. That was because she did not use science to heal. Rather, she healed through a different kind of physical ability, one that she did not understand. She became a sort of fable amongst her people. When one was sick, they needed only the touch of Raka to heal. Eventually, she became revered as a goddess. Her own people came to her for healing, but soon, so did many others from surrounding areas.
Everyone was at peace with Sahira, Goddess of Healing. She was worshipped, and as a worshipped goddess, people brought her jewels and spices and, as is the Egyptian tradition, Gold, and plenty of it. That is, perhaps, why Prisanni’s School for the Blessed did not see her for what she was right away. Raka had the Gold she needed to control her Blessing, and, somehow, she also had the proper knowledge to control it. Perhaps it was just intuitive in her case. It is for that reason that Prisanni’s school was delayed in detecting Raka as a potential student.
Years went by. Raka was a young teenaged girl of fifteen when things finally went awry enough for Prisanni’s school to detect her. The Goddess of Healing had been in her temple, a place built by the Egyptians for her to live in and heal in, when the blasphemy began. Her peers had suddenly denounced her of her title of goddess, and her temple was raided. Soon, it had been left bare, without any jewels or Gold. They stripped her own clothing, too, which had Gold embroidered into its seams. They left her in her temple, naked
and shamed.
She remained there for two days, lying on the floor where they had left her sobbing. It was too much for a fifteen-year-old girl to understand, especially when she had been given such a great honor and led to believe herself a goddess. She had never questioned it, but evidently her people had. It filled her with such sorrow, she was unable to move.
But on that second day of her mourning, the walls around her began to shake. Her people were outside, banging and disturbing her sorrow. They had begun to dismantle her temple, which, to them, had been a sham of a structure anyway.
To her, though, it had been her home and her solace. She had been taken away from her family already because goddesses did not have family. They had people who brought them into the world to live their human life before they were ascended to the proper place. She had lived on her own in the temple for some time, and now her very own people were dismantling her home. That was more than she could stand.
Though she had no more Gold, she still lived in a society that was filled with it. Everyone that had been outside tearing down her home had been donning the stone. Without even knowing it, she had direct access to the control of her Blessing at every moment. She rose from the ground and left the temple, the tears dried on her face. She was clothed in nothing but anger, and the minute she stepped into the sun, everyone around her had frozen in place, seemingly shocked that she was still inside.
That is when she brought plague to her people. Boils and illness, scars and pain, she inflicted every kind of ailment that she could think of. For months, her people suffered. Many died quickly, others suffered much longer. It took that long for the news to reach Prisanni’s School for the Blessed.
The school acted quickly, and the Egyptians surrendered their ex-goddess without any question. Training for Raka was, perhaps, the easiest training the school had seen a student through. That was because Raka had already been introduced to her stone, whether she knew it or not, and had already seen years of practice with her Blessing. The biggest adjustment was for Raka’s own personality, as she went from goddess to an entire society to student among a school of many other students.