Outside the night was cool and open, alive with the sounds of critters and birds, the ruffling of foliage moving in the night breeze and the soft buzzing of insects. The pebbles on the path welcomed him back with their loud crunching.
He headed straight into the brush and walked aimlessly for ten minutes. He needed to be away from the seer’s house, as if his presence interfered with a process of the utmost importance.
Green, Many As One and flames collided in his mind, but the ideas refused to fit into a coherent construct.
He stopped in the middle of the woods where the grass was thick and strewn with dead leaves. He sat under a large tree amidst the pungent and earthy smells of fall and rested his back against the thick and rugged bark of its trunk. He felt its warmth radiate through his shirt and seep into his still-tender back as he focused on his wayward thoughts.
He started with the flames. They had last come to him only a few days prior as he fought off the men that were after him. The flames always came when he was in duress, green over the world, like an anomaly of his vision that twisted the perception of his environment and bent it to the wills beyond his will. Usually, before the flames, came the voice that knew and foresaw, the voice that was at the same time his and not his. It had hints of his love and of masters long forgotten. The voice and the flames were connected, but how, he did not know.
The concepts gyrated in his head but repeatedly failed to combine into a coherent thought. Many As One came back to the forefront. It was distinct from the rest of the ideas floating in his head, alien in its origin and in the dimensions it hinted at. He murmured the words to himself and the light diffracting through the seer’s glass ball flashed in his mind. Many Coming From One begged for his attention only to morph into Many Into One and quickly dissolve into an awkward thought that attempted to combine the Night, its ravenous pull and the flames.
The connection was there, he felt it. If only he could change his angle of perception or the direction of his approach, things might fall into place and align themselves into a neat concept.
He sat for a long time, battling with ideas and impressions that refused to congeal into a concrete whole. The forest around him changed slowly, its sounds shifting as the night unfolded. The stars above ran across the sky and soon the horizon lightened, slightly at first, then more pronouncedly. The prince tried his best to keep at bay the frustration that arose in him for he knew it would interfere with his efforts.
He was stuck on the green flames again. They would not go away so he forced himself to dig out whatever memories he could of the times they had appeared.
There was not much at first, only scattered fragments of recollections, but he pushed himself, straining his concentration, relentlessly plucking at any thread of memory that had hints of green. The clearest one was his latest encounter with the men that pursued him. The green flames that had spread over the plaza were still plain in his mind’s eye. He recalled another fight he had some time before that. He did not remember his assailants, but the flames were there as well. Another memory partially came back to him. He was trapped in a cave that had collapsed. More recollections came, less and less distinct, remnants of things mostly forgotten. The flames were always the same. They came when he was in need and wavered out of existence as soon as he was out of harm’s way. They distorted his world and stretched the fabric of reality to his advantage. The prince kept on meticulously searching his decimated memories and as far as he pushed the flames were always the same, both foreign and intimately weaved to his will. Always the same, always-
His train of thoughts unexpectedly derailed. It jerked sideways and suddenly brought him back to an old monastery he had ardently sought. An old man, a father, and a child-friend were tied to that memory, but they were not what drew him to it. Shadowy figures of others he fought were attached and a picture of his pendant, its stone glowing brightly of an emerald light over a stone floor, came back to him as well; but those were not what beckoned for him either. The memory was blurry and distant and he struggled with it for a moment before its significance dawned on him.
He indeed had fought others in the depths of that monastery. They had almost killed him but at the last moment the flames had come into existence and allowed him to prevail, but the flames had been different. How, was difficult to describe. The fuzzy recollection hinted at them being darker for one thing, but more importantly, the way they had affected him was different, more personal in a primordial way that eluded description. Somehow, they had affected him physically rather than solely affecting the world around him.
His head swirled with questions about what it meant. The flames were dual, alike but different in a fundamental way that he had difficulty grasping.
“Two flames over the world,” he thought.
He knew beyond a doubt that it was the key he had intuited back at the seer’s house. Now, if only he could extract the underlying truth that lay behind it. The two flames swooshed before his mind’s eye. Dark-jade and light-emerald beasts, they spread over the infinite plane beyond his eyelids and rose intertwined toward a point he could not reach. He lost himself in their insubstantial fire, looking to let them lead him to the answer.
Shortly after, Many As One imposed itself again over the concept of the dual flames and was soon replaced with ManyFlames As One.
By then the sun was casting its first rays over the tree tops. Dew had layered itself over the prince and beaded in the folds of his clothes. Slowly but surely he was growing tired; the grip he willed over his thoughts was quickly weakening. He fought to retain control for a while but soon fatigue prevailed and as he relinquished his cognitive processes to sleep, his thoughts ran unbridled and wild. And out of the sleep-strewn muddled chaos that ensued came an old memory, vivid despite its age. It was of his love and a bonfire they had shared. It was a comfortable thought, warm and pleasant like a warm bed after a long and arduous winter-day. The memory lingered, half-thought as the prince fell asleep. The languid flames of the bonfire and his love rolled and whirled gently in the diminishing plane of his psyche until they became one soothing notion that floated lightly in his mostly unconscious mind.
Many Flames As One resounded one last time, and then his thoughts yielded to sleep.
He woke up hours later. Birds chirped and cooed above him. The soft ruffle of foliage enveloped the day in its tranquil rhythm. He opened his eyes. Sunlight filtered through the treetops and gently bathed the forest floor around him.
The first thing he felt was the tension at his core calling him west. It was faint and felt distantly of things he cherished, but he knew at once what it meant: his love was calling for him again.
His heart swelled with joy as it had not in eons. The emotion so overwhelming, dizzying even, that at first he do nothing else but remain seated as he had awoken, slanted against the large tree trunk, and basked in its glorious glow. He stayed that way until the remnant of sleep that still fogged his mind dissipated and he was able to think past the delight that coursed through him.
And beyond the joy, beyond the call, was the answer he had been seeking for so long.
Chapter Thirty Six
Luhitha Mountain Range, Cahifu.
Year Hundred and Fifty One of the New Age.
The sun was setting to the west, low below the cold stretch that was the WorldMight’s sanctuary. Through clouds and distance, frigid and flat, remote in its beauty, it shone its orange light on Cassien.
It would be the last sunset Cassien saw before he left. In the morning he would head further east, truly alone for the first time. Alymphia, his home, lost to the whims of fate, for reasons he would never get to know, was somewhere before him.
Now that he knew where Aria was, and what he needed to free her from her prison, her call had ceased. Its absence weighed on him; although he was certain that as soon as he would need to make his way back to her, it would surge from his depth once more.
The skies above him darkened further, as if the sun was pul
ling their colors behind it in its dive toward the horizon.
Despite what lay before him, Cassien was calm, if not peaceful. What he thought would be the end of his journey had turned out to be its true beginning. The monks who looked after the WorldMight, Hei-ji, the charitable monk, in particular, had insisted he sought the word in the holy places of the world.
“There. The Word. Be.” he assured him.
“Holy places,” Cassien thought now.
How little it meant to him.
After a few days with the monks, Cassien became used to their accent and more or less readily understood what they said; which was a far cry from comprehending what they meant. And in the several weeks he spent at the WorldMight’s sanctuary he had learned much, but still the WorldMight, The One Who Is One as the monks called it, was still a mystery to Cassien. According to them, it was a transcendental being which had been around longer than life; so long in fact that eons ago the world itself became background noise to it. But there were records from times immemorial of a word, Hak-Ti, the True Word, or also True Speech, a word that had never been uttered, which alone could rouse the great beast from its slumber
The sun disappeared beyond the horizon but its light remained stubbornly aimed at the curvature of the sky as if reluctant to give way to the night. Its rays spilled from the edge of the earth in diffuse lines of muted reddish gold that soon blended into the dark blue above.
How Aria had ended up in the WorldMight also remained a mystery. Multiple times, late in the night, as they sat around the small table Cassien had collapsed by on his first day amongst the monks, Hei-ji had talked to him about the spaces of reality, the dimensions of what is, and how those could get entangled. He mentioned many times the layers of being. He talked of the mind, vast and convoluted, of stacked levels folded upon themselves. He shared his conviction that the one Cassien sought, Cur, his love, was trapped in a particular layer, one of the deepest in the folding of beings, one of the dream-layers, where mind and spirit collided into one, where the will of the Whole surreptitiously seeped into man’s consciousness.
“In dream?” Cassien had asked. “Of Ca-ho. Nit?”
“Yes.” Hei-ji simply replied before going into more details about the arrangement of the layers; as if that statement was the most natural thing in the world.
Cassien had reminisced about the many dreams of Aria he had during his journey; almost every night that he could remember. At the time he thought that his missing her was the cause of those dreams. But in light of this new knowledge he wondered if she so readily came to him in his sleep because she was trapped in the dream-layer the monk talked about.
Cassien listened avidly and questioned the monk aplenty. Yet, in the end, how Aria winded up in the WorldMight’s dream remained a mystery to him. More than once he wished that Master Baccus was still around. His old master undoubtedly knew more than he had shared with him. Cassien was sure that he could have shed some light on those murky concepts and helped him understand what had happened to Aria.
The orange light across the horizon turned purple and the last glow of the sun scattered through the clouds and shimmered mutedly before yielding to the night.
Cassien exhaled slowly. He held on tightly to the sense of peace that permeated him. Aria was here, he told himself, and she still will be once he came back with the word. It was a certainty he had mindfully anchored himself in; one that he needed in order to be able to leave when morning came.
He stood up and looked at the stars that had sprouted above him. The multitude of lights spread across the moonless sky in a cold, uneven blanket. The world seemed vaster than ever now that he was to set out without a concrete destination. He felt small, smaller than one of the faintest dots struggling to shine amongst the many bright ones above him. He turned around. Before him the sanctuary’s outline was stark against the snowy landscape. He took a deep breath of the cold evening air and returned to Hei-ji’s dwelling to share one last meal with him.
He set out early the next morning. He bowed deeply to the four monks, thanked them for their help, and told them he would be back with the word. The monks wished him fast and safe-travel and he left them standing by the sanctuary’s eastern entryway, between the gold and red columns.
As he walked away, he glanced one last time at the sculptures of the WorldMight on the front of the temple. Despite the pre-dawn penumbra, their shadowy shapes still looked menacing, and he briefly wondered if, upon waking, the WorldMight would be as frightening as its likenesses were.
He reached the fork in the path and hesitated. Aria was trapped in the chamber, up the left path, and his heart went to her. For the first time since he met her, he was about to step away from her. His chest tightened as fear flashed its doubt-filled face in his mind.
“I will come back, I promise,” he whispered to her.
His hand went to the stone at his neck and he found strength in its hard surface. He shielded himself from the thoughts and feelings that could immobilize him and focused on that pledge.
“I will come back,” he mouthed again at the end of a shaky breath.
He stepped away from the fork and headed down along the tablet-framed path without looking back.
By the time the sun started spilling over the horizon, he was already well on his way down the mountainside.
He reached the strata of clouds that covered the midsection of the mountain around mid-morning and the weather turned stormy. Heavy snowflakes swirled madly around him to the whims of strong winds that made walking straight difficult. The visibility decreased dramatically too, but the stone tablets along the path showed him the way and not once did he feel as if he might get lost.
By early afternoon, he neared the lower edge of the swath of clouds. There, a dense fog shifted quietly over the landscape.
Cassien was carefully managing a sharp bend in the frozen path when, some thirty yards downslope, a shape came into existence only to immediately disappear out of view behind a heavy sheet of mist. It could have been nothing, the trunk of a dead tree by the side of the path or a small shrine. It could have been nothing and yet an eerie sense of danger raised the hair at his neck and filled him with the overwhelming need to hide. He looked around, panicking without really knowing why, his heartbeat suddenly pounding loudly in his ears and a nervous tension rushing through his legs. His eyes darted across the foggy landscape. The path before him was bare. It stretched another twenty yards before turning left into another sharp bend. He looked to his right and left, but on either side of him the mountainside was a flat field of snow that offered no cover.
“Hide, hide, hide!” he urged himself.
He spun around and in the elbow of the bend he had just passed saw a handful of boulders. He quickly retraced his steps, noticing that he had left no footprints in the frozen ground and feeling distantly relieved. He jumped from the path to a flat rock between two of the large boulders and lay flat behind it on the snow-covered ground. The snow and ice that had accumulated over his clothes in the past hours covered him from head to toe and if he did not move, he was certain no one could see him from the path.
From his hiding place, he could see the full length of the path from bend to bend. He focused on its far end, his heartbeat drumming fast in his ears. He could not figure out why he was hiding and yet, beyond reason, he had to.
His world collapsed onto the bend in the path twenty yards away. He heard a sound that felt out of place, fabric slapping in the wind maybe, and the tension in his chest heightened. He strained harder to distinguish the shadows and indistinct shapes that slithered behind the sheets of fog sliding by one another.
For a few interminable seconds nothing happened. He was about to raise himself on his elbows when three shapes erupted from the bend. They tore through the fog and gracefully rounded the path; three men, from what Cassien could see, clad in black, with long leather capes draped about them. They had twin blades hung at their hips and seemed to glide over the frozen ground rather than
walk on it. They came directly toward him and the moment stretched, as if the world struggled to move forward. Then, in the blink of an eye, they were mere yards from him. The lower halves of their faces were covered by dark cloth and their heads were covered with black, fur hats. The only visible part of their faces was their eyes, which shone flat and hard. These were eyes Cassien had sensed before; filled with deadly intent. Out of nowhere Aria’s smell filled his nostrils and as the knowledge of who the men were floated back up from his memory, he saw the unmistakable GrandJoy crest sewn in the lapel of the nearest man’s coat.
“Elites!”
He would not have thought it possible, but at once dread radiated from his chest colder than the frigid ground he lay on.
It had been so long since he first heard of the Order of GrandJoy, late one night in Gray Arlung that he had forgotten about the elites that were after him. He tried to stretch closer to the ground without really moving and stood utterly still while the men rushed past him and were swallowed out of view by the fog.
He let out a silent, controlled breath and remained immobile. He stared intensely at the wall of mist behind which they had just disappeared. A minute went by, then two. No sound or shape came from that direction. Once he was sure that he had not been noticed, he scrambled to his feet and slid down the mountainside to the portion of path below him.
They had found him. He could not believe it. He thought himself safe after crossing the Empty Sea. Not once did it cross his mind that they might follow him that far. It took them more than a year but they had; or almost had.
He thought of Hei-ji and the other monks and briefly entertained the idea of their needing his help. But what could he possibly do against three elites? His devotion was to Aria and Aria alone. He rushed down the path, sliding more than walking.
The WorldMight Page 40