“What did I do?” he wonders.
A prison…
“Did I…”
There were rules, things not allowed. It meant nothing to him but his friend followed them, so he followed them too.
Why?
He smiles; he’s pretty sure he does.
“The secrets…”
He hesitates.
“We always had secrets.”
His cheek feels wet. He moves a hand to his face but it never gets there.
The birds are far now and he can’t hear his friend.
The room gets brighter; a cloud must have moved. The crack in the beam is still there. He thinks it got bigger.
He wishes for his friend. His friend understands, he is like him.
“And more,” he reminds himself.
Because that’s the secret; their quiet secret.
The beams keep getting closer. It’s not right. It didn’t use to be like that. Too many shades, he thinks; that’s the problem. That’s not how it should be.
He hears footsteps.
“He’s coming. We must be going.”
He feels some measure of relief. Although, that is not really true because he doesn’t really feel anything anymore. He’s not sure why. Maybe it’s part of their secret too.
He laughs quietly, he thinks.
“He taught me how to laugh too. Though, we don’t do much of that anymore.
“We need to find it, that’s why he’s coming. Time to go, the roads are waiting!”
The roads.
So many roads.
“But which one to follow?”
There’s a pause.
He falls asleep for a bit.
When he wakes the question is still there, but he knows the answer:
“All of them. Follow all of them.”
That’s what they did. So many roads, for so many years. Dynasties rose and fell and they walked the roads.
The light changes again. It has more volume now. The wall is crisper at the end of the bed. The lines in the paint are more present; but less at the same time. He doesn’t like it. It shouldn’t be like that. It’s all too bright, too…
“Is he not coming?”
The thought scares him, he thinks.
“I didn’t use to feel,” he thinks. “He made me, didn’t he?”
The world is getting flatter now, his thoughts as much as the room around him. Flat and distant, lacking dimension. His breathing is heavy, but he doesn’t realize it. A bee zigzags through the open window and buzzes by his ear; a shallow sound lacking dimension.
“He’s not coming.”
The bee lands on his bare arm. Maybe it mistakes his wrinkly skin for the folds of a fruit. But it leaves immediately, so probably not. The bee flies to the crack in the beam above him.
“I should feel it…”
He feels sad, he thinks.
His friend walks in, but he doesn’t see him. He doesn’t sense him. All he sees is the beam with the bee on it.
It gets brighter, or maybe just faded, he wouldn’t know anymore.
The bee flies off but the beam is still there, one long road to the wall.
“And beyond!”
Beyond, he likes that. He’s taken again by the paths of the past. It’s so unlike him, but his friend changed him, and they changed together.
Sleep takes him again.
He opens his eyes. His friend is in front of him.
Something is wrong, he thinks.
He feels sad for him; he’s youthful still, but less also somehow.
He struggles to remember. What changed?
He doesn’t sense him as he should.
The beam moves closer and it surprises him.
He gasps.
“Too close, too close!”
He wants to move, but he doesn’t.
His friend takes his hand. He doesn’t feel it, but it comforts him somehow.
“His face is too flat,” he thinks.
“Where did they go?”
His eyes are taken by a trembling. The room bounces and swirls. He doesn’t feel good.
His friend puts something in his hand. It’s jagged and black. He doesn’t really feel it between his fingers but it slows the room a little.
“We’re not going,” he thinks.
He cries, but doesn’t realize it.
“But, we need to find the word,” he pleads.
He wants to raise his hand against the beam and the crack above, but it weighs too much on him. He wants to see his friend again, as he was, as he is, truly.
“Maybe they went ahead, the other hims.”
“Maybe they found it!”
“Maybe…”
His friend is flat but he smiles at him nonetheless, he thinks.
They’ll never find it now. Not like that. Not with the beam so close, so heavy.
It’s hard to breathe. Maybe the air is getting flat too.
His friend, flat and blurry now, moves closer.
“I love him,” he thinks through the fraying plane of his mind.
There’s a breath, raspy and clotted, that stretches in his throat. He wants to say something but his mouth is too dry.
“Where did they go?” he wonders one last time, “the other sides of him?”
“The beam,” he thinks, “It’s the beam’s fault.”
His friend’s face is close now. He sees him through a funnel. He’s saying something. He wishes he could hear him.
But the beam likes a world deep of secrets, that’s why it’s so heavy.
“Too heavy…”
He wants to call out. His lips move, maybe. He pushes on his eyes to pierce the blur. He wants to see his friend. But it’s getting brighter instead; bright and narrow, and flat and plain.
He can’t sense him anymore!
“But I love him,” he thinks furiously, “more than all the worlds.”
He wants to tell him, but he can’t. He tries to, he thinks, with all his might, but nothing happens.
“But I do, so much!”
“More than all the worlds!” the weak voice screeches behind his lips.
Him and the other hims, his true face, the true landscape of him.
“I love you,” he screams to the fading cone of flat light, to the hand he doesn’t feel, to his one, only friend.
“I love you all!”
So much he’d want to say.
So much he doesn’t.
So much boiled down to a single tear that slowly scrambles down the narrow furrows of his face.
The black stone with the jagged edges drops to the floor.
A silent breath escapes him.
And the beam of secrets takes him away.
Chapter Twenty Six
Four Leagues outside of Syndjya, Alymphia.
Year Hundred and Fifty of the New Age
Fall Passing Festival.
Cassien dreamt of the WorldMight that first night on the road, although upon waking he would not know of what he had dreamt. Every night afterwards he was to dream of it too, until he finally reached the beast’s resting place some thirteen months later.
The night was bitingly cold. The forests sprawling on either side of the road were mostly barren of foliage. The tall Hardwood trees which were thick of broad leaves during spring and summer looked thin and disheveled as they swayed weakly in the moonlit sky. Cassien had chosen a large Fellow tree which retained a semblance of leafage to spend the night under. For, not having to face the night sky while he tried to find sleep had seemed a worthwhile, albeit small, comfort. He felt lost enough as it was, in a world that had turned out full of shadowy unknowns, without having to face the crushing vastness that spread infinitely above. The night creaked and ululated as he lay cradled between two large roots protruding from the ground. A wind coming from the east, from the Empty Sea where his travels would take him, rushed through the woods in a monotonous howl. It rounded the wide trunk of the Fellow tree and vainly tried to grip him with its cold, lacey fingers
. Lying on a bed of dead leaves that smelled strongly of earth and exhaled hints of rot, Cassien curled up under his leather coat and, feeling small and lonely, he closed his eyes onto the faces of those he had lost.
“Master Baccus is gone,” he shivered to himself. “There is nothing you can do about it.”
He knew that to be true so he focused his thoughts on Aria, his princess. She was somewhere beyond the Empty Sea waiting for him to rescue her. He did not know how he knew it, but he was certain of it.
It had been as Master Baccus had said it would. When the time had come for him to leave Syndjya, after picking up his pack from underneath his bed in the dormitory of the Great Temple and snatching a decent blade from the weapon barn, he simply knew to head east. Almost despite himself, his feet took him through the less travelled streets that snaked away from the center of Syndjya and the noises of the festival. And once out of the city, they steered him across the fields that stretched around the capital and eventually to the small road he travelled on for the better part of the night, the road that would take him to a port on the Empty Sea. Aria waited for him in some far away land. How far exactly, he did not know. But regardless of the distance he would go to her and, one day, hold her close once more as he had only a few hours before. That thought brought him some degree of comfort. And it was with Aria making the rounds in his head and a deep longing clawing at his chest that sleep eventually overtook him.
In his dream he did not fall asleep. He lay as he was, folded onto himself against the cold, shivering under his coat. He closed his eyes, but when he did the world did not recede into the familiar darkness that usually waited behind his eyelids. Instead it stayed eerily still. The thick roots of the Fellow tree that cradled him did not disappear behind a dark blanket. The woods around him and the stars shining between the bony branches of the trees stayed as they were the instant before. Perplexed, he closed and opened his eyes a few times, but the world remained unabashedly present to him. It was not that his eyelids had turned transparent, no; somehow the world seeped under them as if it was refusing to be put aside. Cassien propped himself up against the grainy bark of the Fellow tree and stood up. He pressed against his eyeballs with the palm of his hands and closed his eyes again. Again the world stayed anchored to his vision. Incredulous, he looked around only to discover his own shape, still huddled on the leafy ground at his feet.
“What in Hethens?!” he heard himself think.
The thought seemed to come from different directions at once and stretched bizarrely around him. He tried to probe the curled up shape but his foot kept sliding around it without actually touching it.
“This is madness” he thought and once more the words languished and distorted in the night wind around him.
Suddenly, a long, raspy breath rustled through the woods. Cassien turned east, toward it. The sound was disparagingly slow and stretched on and on around him but at once, Cassien knew it to be a call.
Eyes closed, but the world still alive before him, Cassien stepped toward the low rumble. He left his curled up form at the feet of the Fellow tree and headed toward the sea he knew to be in that direction. He crossed the road with the rigidity of a sleep-walker and entered the woods beyond. The call did not change when he stepped into the tree line. Its pitch and low intensity stayed the same, but around Cassien the world shifted almost instantaneously. The dark, bluish-gray hues of the night turned into a deep, emerald green and the bare branches and tree trunks of the forest, the low, naked shrubs and the pale moonlight beams from above started undulating. The world shimmered into a sea of green fire that did not consume it. And as soon as the flames appeared, they shifted eastward, as if pulled in that direction. The world was bending to the call and Cassien was pulled along as well.
As he carried onward, without him truly realizing, maybe because it had always been so, his fingers started rippling of their own green accents. Soon the wavering spread to his legs and arms and before long his whole body was but a wavering mass of emerald reflections. By the time he noticed that he had changed, the fact had become insignificant in the face of the long call. Stuck in an eternal night of jade, he walked for what felt like days until he reached an immense body of water. It was the Empty Sea, Cassien knew at once, with green waves that battered the shore in an everlasting rhythm. And from beyond, the call kept coming.
He walked to the bank, his feet sinking lightly in the wet earth, the frothy surf rising up the smooth incline and licking at his boots before retreating away like a shy animal. Above him the moon shone bright green and its light bounced playfully on the choppy surface. He stepped into the water and it felt neither cold nor wet. Cassien normally would have been stopped in his tracks by that fact, but the call resounded and answering it took precedence over everything. Soon he was waist-deep in the water and a twinge of fear stained the tense focus of his world. Would he be able to swim the whole length of the sea? Could he? What if he did not make it? What if the call remained unanswered?
Despite the flash of anxiety that sprang in his chest Cassien did not slow down. The water soon swallowed his chest and he was preparing to hold his breath when the green waves seemed to retreat from him as if he were a shore during low tide. In an instant the sea had receded under his feet and he stood atop the water.
An exhilarating sense of lightness filled him. He was about to rush forward when a lone tug pierced the peace that engulfed him and made him turn around. A couple of feet behind him, the pale form of his torso stuck out of the water. Statuesque in its immobility, it stared blankly at the oncoming waves that slapped against it gently. Cassien instinctively raised a tentative hand toward his frozen likeness and the hand he brought forth was but flames; his fingers ethereal jade waves. His palm, his arms, his whole body was now insubstantial light that trembled and shimmered of its own secret rhythm. A thrill of delight coursed through him. The weight of his worries and fears, of his loneliness and his losing those dear to him was gone. He felt freer than he ever had. Free in a way he could not completely comprehend.
In that newfound condition, only the urge of the call and the elation that came with the freedom to answer it fully remained. He turned around and faced the call once more. He drew in a jubilant breath, and, gliding at the speed of thought over the flat plane of the Empty Sea, he flashed toward it.
Free from his physical bounds, within an instant he had crossed the immense body of water. He reached another shore, bare of vegetation and jagged of tall slabs that erupted from the rocky ground like inhuman teeth before cliffs so massive they shrank the sea into little more than a puddle.
As he approached the shore, the call grew stronger. It vibrated in every grain of sand and sea-rounded pebble on the beach. Its pulse reverberated in each one of the large slanted rocks that flourished on the beach and in the pristine faces of the gigantic cliffs too. Cassien scaled the imposing vertical surface in the blink of an eye. Was he still Cassien, then? He himself was not sure. But it did no matter. He rushed skyward, ever faster, and cleared the promontory at dizzying speed. The top of the cliff was a green expanse of thick grass that rolled into the distance toward a mountain that extended high into the night sky and disappeared behind a wall of rumbling clouds.
Without stopping, he rushed forward, and in an instant he was at the feet of the mount. There the call was a distortion of the world, a presence that permeated everything, from the thundering, dark green clouds above to the gargantuan mass of the mountain before him, from the smell of the brush that grew at the base of the slopes to the air itself, so thick of the brewing storm that it was almost palpable. The call was in everything, and all urged him onward. He flashed forward again, up the mountain and into the slowly gyrating mass of clouds. There, the voice behind the call grew monstrous in its demand. Thunder cracked loudly and lightning slammed brutally on the ground in blinding flashes of green. Ignoring the violent outbursts, Cassien climbed higher and higher, pushing himself ever toward the source of the call.
He
surged ever faster until the world was little more than an emerald blur that condensed into the call itself. All that was became a single, all-encompassing point in the eye of his mind. But still the call kept booming for him. Suddenly Cassien realized that he was the impediment to his own advance, that to answer the call he had to become the call.
In a twist of his will he shed the flames he had become like one rids himself of filthy clothes. Finally he became the point, the essence. Finally he was the call. And being all, there was nothing for him to experience. He was all, and in being so he was nothing as well; for there was no more possible externality to his being that might have stimulated a reaction.
“I am all.” the voice that was his said.
“And I am nothing.” the echo of the voice that was his replied.
“I am the call only in manyness.”
“For in oneness I am the call and the answer to the call. And the call is its own answer.”
“I am the call....”
“…because you are the answer.”
“I am…” the voice that was his said.
“… because I am.” the WorldMight finished.
Chapter Twenty Seven
Four Leagues outside of Syndjya, Alymphia.
Year Hundred and Fifty of the New Age
Fall Passing Festival.
Cassien woke up shortly before dawn. He felt disoriented and had the overwhelming sense of some crucial knowledge he should be holding on to. It was more a feeling than a thought, and it teased him with inklings of something wholesome and dearly important. But as soon as he turned his attention to it, it slipped away and was gone, leaving no trace of itself in his depths but for a distant bitterness that evaporated quickly.
He reluctantly opened his eyes and took stock of his situation. He was curled up in a pool of his own sweat at the foot of a Fellow tree. He was cold. His head was against one of the above-ground roots of the tree and he shivered slightly. When he lifted his face from the ground, a gray leaf stuck to his cheek. He brushed it away and stretched threw a yawn that was more a trembling of his body than an actual yawn.
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