The young man smiled. A kind smile that she barely saw, triplicated behind the beast’s monstrous reality. Something in that smile caught her mind; a fleeting note, sad and asynchronous, that dripped across space in ripples in search of its matching interval. That note rang true, like the knowledge Sehin herself sought so ardently. It pulled her back to the moment and the simple physicality of her presence.
She was standing in the doorway of the solarium. A young man was in the middle of the room. He was smiling at her and his eyes, not green but brown, shone with anticipation. Laughter rumbled in their depth, as if they were privy to what had just erupted inside of her. She quickly brought the teetering of her jaw under control and uncomfortably wiped the sweat at her side by pressing her arms to her ribs. She took a few steps toward the young man and introduced herself.
“I am Sehin,” she said in a voice she hoped conveyed confidence.
The young man’s smile stretched ever so slightly wider across his face. Bringing the palm of his hands together in front of himself, he said:
“Hi, it is nice to meet you,” and no more.
“Humph, what, you have no name?” Sehin thought, her brow furrowing.
She went on without skipping a beat.
“Mother Magdal requested that I assist you with some research. How can I be of service?”
“I search of a word that has never been uttered,” he said in all seriousness. “I was told that the Sacred Arhan Sisterhood has both one of the most extensive libraries there is and seers who might be able to help in my search.”
“A word that has never been uttered?” Sehin said, perplexed. “Is that even possible?”
The young man’s smile began to take a contrived bend. The corner of his eyes started crackling into worry lines. But before the budding expression could settle over his face, his smile returned.
“I sure hope so!” he said, “I’ve been looking for it for quite some time now. So, do you think you might be able to help?”
“Er,” she hesitated, “I guess.”
She closed her eyes briefly, as much against the sun pouring into the room as in trying to focus on making sense of both what happened to her and the bizarre request the young man made. She quickly decided that there was no addressing the vision she just had; its green shadow was already fading away anyway. She might as well focus on helping the stranger.
“If it’s not asking too much, why are you looking for such a word?”
She had barely finished asking her question when another slew of broken imagery floated up in her mind.
A delicate face.
A mind, imprisoned.
The beast, again.
A distant sorrow howled in a foreign tone from the recesseses of her mind as swirls of emerald flames whooshed pain through her senses. The stream of consciousness she had followed during her elevation suddenly was right in front of her. She panicked at the idea of letting it skip away again.
“But that can’t be happening.
“I’m in the middle of a conversation.
“It takes time and concentration to get there.”
Her own thoughts declined in layers above the ever forming flow of constructs.
A stone, two waves.
A man, two times.
A…
“Are you a seer?” the young man interrupted.
Once more the knowledge, images, feelings, and thoughts scattered away like the thousand birds of a flock speeding away in as many directions, her mind unable to follow any particular one. Once more she opened her eyes onto the young man. He was closer now and was looking attentively at her.
“What?” she managed to ask, taken aback by the unexpected vision.
“Twice in a row! What’s going on?” she asked herself through the lingering emotions and confusion.
This never happened. Visions came during elevation, only during elevation. Sometimes they lingered in the aftermath, while she came back to the world. But never before had they spurted on her this way.
“Are you one of the seers?” the young man repeated quietly.
Sehin gathered herself. She was pretty sure her bewilderment showed and for some reason she felt embarrassed. The visions were a very intimate, personal thing, at least to her, and having them in the presence of a stranger was discomforting to say the least.
“I… I guess,” she managed to say, all too aware that she avoided his glance.
“Great!” he said spiritedly. “I’m sure you’ll be very helpful. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll probably be staying here for a while. Mother Magdal mentioned accommodations?”
“Er… yes, yes, this way,” Sehin said.
She led him out of the solarium and to the guest quarters. She had not expected him to be so thrilled about her being a seer. After all, what she saw during elevation usually faded away when she came back to the world. And on the rare occasions when the knowledge did not fade completely, she could hardly comprehend whatever remained, let alone share it or explain it to others. Mother Magdal had assured her many times that she would eventually have a better grasp on her elevations, that it was a matter of maturity and practice and that she would, one day, like the other seers in the order, be able to remember and share her vision with her sisters. But Sehin was nowhere near being able to do so and she felt that the stranger was setting himself up for disappointment.
Still confused about what the young man was after, she led him up through the maze of bridges, staircases, and similar-looking white buildings.
“It seems like I’ll have time to figure it out what he’s looking for,” she thought as they neared the guest quarters.
The guest quarters were located one level below the sister’s sleeping chambers. They consisted of four small rooms with straw-filled mattresses and small wooden chests of drawers, a water room for daily ablutions and a communal room with a table, some stools, and a small hearth.
Sehin showed the young man to one of the rooms where he dropped his pack and turned to her expectantly.
“So,” he asked, “where should we start?”
“Humph,” Sehin thought, “he sure is in a rush to find that word of his.”
She found his whole endeavor strange and was in no mood to entertain him; the spurts of elevation had left her unsettled and she wished she could focus on what was stirring in her depths. But duty was duty; Mother Magdal herself asked that of her.
Ever since she first joined the Sacred Arhan Sisterhood, Sehin had found Mother Magdal to be severe but also kind and fair.
“I sense it in her,” Mother Magdal had said to the elder who brought her to the temple the night her parents died. “If she works hard and pushes herself toward Arhan with all her will, she will see things few can even dream of.”
She lifted Sehin’s face and with the corner of her white robe she wiped away the tears rolling down her chubby cheeks. Sehin wanted nothing more than be in her mom’s arms or bury her face in her father’s neck and feel his prickly beard against her cheek. But she knew she would never again, and the sadness that thought brought forth was almost unbearable to the child she was then.
Mother Magdal looked at her tear-streaked face.
“Your parents are gone,” she told her, the first words she spoke to her and brusquely stating a fact that was gnawing at her like a monstrous rat. “The faster you accept it, the faster you will feel better.”
But Sehin did not care about feeling better. She just wanted what every child wants, the comfort and safety of her parents.
“This is your home now,” Mother Magdal continued with a vague gesture meant to encompass all that was around them.
“Your gift is all you truly have left,” she added gravely. “We will teach you the ways of Arhan, the Five Precepts and the One Prayer. And you will practice with fervor to hone your gift, for the bettering of the Sacred Sisterhood.”
Mother Magdal stood up and took the sobbing Sehin by the hand.
“Come,” she told her. “I will show you
to your room and then I will introduce you to your sisters.”
Mother Magdal pulled her gently but firmly toward a door to the left of the large table with the oppressive window full of colors above it. Sehin followed. What else was she to do? She had nothing else in the world.
As she stepped over the threshold, she looked back Justin time to see the slouched elder walk away along the rows of stone benches. That was the last time she saw him.
The sisters welcomed her amongst them and cared for her as one of their own. Only later did she realize that one rarely came to them at such a young age. But despite, or because of it, Mother Magdal treated her like every other sister, demanded of her and gave to her as much as she would any other member of the order. And so Sehin spent her childhood, her youth, and her budding adulthood in the white citadel on the hillside, facing the sea but rarely going to it, rocked by the daily rhythm of prayer, practice and study.
The weekly cadence of chores and duties anchored her firmly in her new life. And the seasons, which came and went and morphed the landscape of her contemplations as they strummed along, became the inalienable thread of her existence.
Fifteen summers came and went. For fifteen winters she pushed herself on the path of Arhan, the path of Truth. For fifteen springs she struggled with her gift, the visions she could not comprehend, the knowledge locked a hair’s width away. Fifteen falls went by and saw her grow into the young women she was now. It had all gone by in the blink of an eye, and now her whole life was condensed into a single, unlikely point: her standing at that exact moment in the guest quarters with an equally unlikely stranger.
Sehin looked at the young man, slightly disconcerted by his single-mindedness.
“I have things to do myself!” she thought. “I bet that thought never crossed his mind!”
She did not voice her objections and instead she forced a neutral expression on her face and stepped aside from the room’s threshold.
“If you’re going to stay for a while, I guess I should first show you around,” she reluctantly said.
“That sounds great,” the young man exclaimed. “Let’s start with the libraries!”
“He is so obtuse” Sehin thought. “And irritating.”
They walked back into the sun. The lazy heat rolled over their skin in gentle waves. In the distance the sea glittered softly below a few white clouds. She took the young man on a tour of the complex, following the same route she had taken on her way to the solarium. They met a few of Sehin’s fellow sisters, and she made an effort to introduce them to the young man. As she was naming her sisters to him, the fact that he had not properly introduced himself, or rather that he had willfully withheld his name, stuck out more and more.
“Who doesn’t introduce themselves anyway? How rude!”
Within a few minutes it was all she could think about.
They were walking down one of the staircases leading to the Early Library when, keeping her stare locked onto the stairs in front of her, she blurted out:
“So, you don’t have a name?”
He did not answer immediately and she was starting to think that maybe he did not hear her when he replied, his voice at once playful and mysterious:
“One that is one’s purpose needs no name,” he said.
She looked at him, a frown on her face.
“What does that even mean?” she let out sarcastically, realizing a bit too late how rude her tone was.
He looked at her and smiled, but the sadness behind his next words was overshadowed by the seriousness of his tone.
“Let’s say that my name might bring you misfortune. So I’d rather not share it.”
Something stirred in her depths and for the first time in her life she felt afraid of what might come up. Her heart skipped a beat and before she even realized it she was pushing away a nascent vision, forcing her will against it; an alien motion to her who had spent most of her life encouraging the visions to emerge from within. She focused on the young man’s face as an anchor against the rising tide, only to find herself torn by contradicting currents, the vision pushing hard against her effort.
It was then that somewhere in the most intimate recesses of her mind the idea that he was the one inducing those visions was seeded. It was less than a thought at the time, but over the next few weeks it would flourish into a certainty.
After a final push, akin to a painful mental swallow, Sehin forced away the nascent vision. She took a deep breath and covered her fluster with feigned edginess.
“Fine, I’ll give you a name then.”
She looked at him sideways, a quirky smile on her lips. She let her imagination float away, syllables jumbling in her mind and a couple of seconds later his name was carved in red accents in her head. As she spoke, she knew how inappropriate what she was doing was, but somehow it felt comfortable. Maybe too comfortable given that he was a stranger and a man, one of the few she had interacted with since her coming to the order.
“You are… Brahin! Yes, that fits you well!”
“Brahin? What is that?”
“I don’t know,’ she laughed, “it just came to me.”
“As you will,” he said with a smile, warmer this time.
Over the next few weeks they dove into numerous old volumes and manuscripts, conferred with most of the sisters, especially the two other seers of the order, Hania and Zahifra. Sehin did not understand how one could hope to find a word that had never been uttered in the first place, but to look for it in old texts made even less sense to her. Brahin briefly explained to her that he hoped something they found in one of the old books would trigger the knowledge of the word in him.
“I’ll know it when I come upon it,” he would say when she asked him about it.
She understood that from the point of view of her own experiences and thought it akin to him having the knowledge already but not being able to access it.
“So he is after the trigger to the word, not the word itself?” she pondered.
As for why he was after such an elusive thing, he avoided answering any question she dared bring to him. At first she surmised that word he was so obsessed with might be the object of a spiritual journey. It made sense to Sehin, especially if the word was locked within.
“It could actually be a common word,” she reflected more than once as they read some ancient treatise at candle light.
“A common word with a special meaning he is not aware of. And the awareness itself is what he really is after. A realization! That’s got to be it!”
Excited about her discovery, late one night she breached the subject with him but he pretended to be absorbed in his reading and did not answer.
Later, seeing how every time he showed hints of being tired, be it after spending hours versed in an old manuscript or sitting in prayer, he grabbed the stone at his neck and seemed to draw strength from it, she theorized that the stone was special to him. It was either a talisman of religious or spiritual significance or a personal item, the only other one he seemed to have besides the blade that never left his side.
One morning after a lengthy oration by Mother Magdal when she explained to Brahin in painful details the Five Precepts of Arhan, Sehin decided that the stone was a personal item. After all, all the religious persons she ever met tended to be overly vocal about their faith or beliefs, and Brahin never mentioned a thing. Plus, he regularly partook willingly in the Sisterhood’s prayers and rituals.
Brahin was in fact an impeccable guest. Helpful whenever he could, he actively took part in every aspect of the life of the Sacred Arhan Sisterhood and refused special treatment whenever it was polite to do so. Courteous and pleasant, he always seemed eager to interact with the members of the order, enthusiastically obliging any one sister who wanted to speak with him; listening intently to what they had to say as well as asking them questions about what they did in the order, their experiences or their knowledge in general. But after spending most of her days in his company for two weeks, Sehin started se
eing through his eagerness. She realized that every time he spoke with one of them, he was navigating surreptitiously toward that word he sought, be it when joking about the weather, the food being served, or discussing ancient texts or the teachings of Arhan. He was always on the look-out for hints, new directions, or the trigger to some kind of revelation. All he did was aimed at his word and all he was aimed to it as well.
Three weeks after Brahin first arrived at the Sacred Arhan Sisterhood, one afternoon he and Sehin were lounging in the day quarters. He was questioning her about her visions, insisting that she somehow could help him and Sehin was ardently trying to convince him that there was nothing she could do for him in that regard. At some point he leaned forward in his chair and locked eyes with her.
“There is to the world mysteries we know without understanding,” he said, “and knowledge we comprehend without knowing of.”
He reached over the parchment-covered bamboo table that separated them and put his hand on hers.
“You will be of use,” he told her. “You already have.”
As he touched her, feelings she had been struggling with since his arrival surged forward. And with them, uncomfortable and confusing aches and tensions she thought she had dealt with years prior rose violently in her. But before the full extent of the tumult his touching her had induced even spread over her, a vision imposed itself on her consciousness. Wants and fear mixed in her as her mind descended at frightening speed along a green lustful path toward macabre shapes. Suddenly she could not feel Brahin’s hand. Her eyes could not see his face. And the day quarters vanished, swallowed by a rising tide of screams and tenebrous hands. Something was coming for her. She fought off the vision with all her might but to no avail. She sank deeper and deeper as the accents of intimacy and the vibrant cacophony of desire that Brahin’s presence elicited were consumed by the rolling drums of darkness.
The skeletal face of Arhan appeared before her. Its wide-open mouth had long, bony arms for teeth and they swayed before the nothingness beyond like algae in a gentle swell. The face of her god glided toward her and as it did her body started expending painfully as if pregnant of itself. Soon her skin was stretched taut and in an excruciating tearing she flailed open as her consciousness triplicated outwardly. She became the image of her emerald reflection and at the same time the projection of her own translucent-green shadow. Then Arhan was upon her. A growling erupted from the void beyond his jaws and it rippled painfully across the three facets of her being. For a moment she hung suspended between time and space, raw from the birthing of her true form, her being throbbing inhumanly before the terrifying face of her god. Then another growl washed over her and the rows of bony arms surged toward her. They grabbed her and her mind reeled against the cold touch of their fingers, the sick feel of their nails ripping at her being. Like a hungry current they pulled her triplicated self into the god’s horrific mouth as Arhan’s voice thundered all around her.
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