A Broken Paradise (The Windows of Heaven Book 3)

by Powderly Jr. , K. G.

She had felt it in her best interest to agree—at least for now. Khumi had silver saved up. Carpenters rarely lacked work in Akh’Uzan.

  Tiva shifted her position carefully, afraid of waking Khumi. The sleepy surreality of the seers’ buttons they had eaten about an hour ago had somehow dissipated too fast. That’s stupid—we each took four big ones. Maybe the buttons are wearing off sooner because they’re not as potent as the ones Moon-chaser had before. That didn’t make much sense either.

  Khumi had still gotten tired and fallen asleep too fast, as if four buttons were more than he could handle. She suddenly regretted her insistence on taking that many. They had agreed always to eat the same portion when together, and she had thought that more would be better.

  She flipped herself away from him to sun her back, once she realized how deeply he slept.

  Frustration grew into boredom—boredom in the midst of a fantasy brought to life. She couldn’t understand it. The forest panorama should have been enough for anyone. Suddenly, it wasn’t.

  Despite the fact that she still felt a quiet glow from the other buttons, an overwhelming urgency to take just one more hit her like wildfire on dry grass. He doesn’t even know I’m here, all snoozy like that! So we’re not really together—are we? What am I s’posed to do all afternoon, anyway?

  It dawned on her why she felt dissatisfied. The mushroom’s effect was supposed to last four to six hours, at least three of which should “move her halfway into the upper realms,” according to Moon-chaser.

  What if I can move all the way up? What would I see? The name seers’ button invaded her mind with its glorious epiphany.

  Aren’t seers the nearest men on earth to divinity? Can I move above the earth-reality into the one revealed by the buttons? Maybe I might find power there to hold on to Khumi—maybe even the secrets of Aeden!

  There was only one way to find out.

  She sat up silently, and reached across his snoring face to their outer clothing piled at the edge of the blanket. Slowly, she lifted Khumi’s satchel from his belt and drew it back over. Inside were over two dozen mushrooms they had recently purchased from Moon-chaser. She took one out, looked at it intently, and then popped it in her mouth.

  She felt a twinge of guilt for sneaking it like that. The guilt flared up into a blaze of slinking thrill as she fished out another, ate it, and then another. Khumi would notice if she took more, so she resealed the satchel and placed it back on his belt, careful again not to arouse him when she leaned over his body to replace them with his tunic.

  Tiva smiled at her own silly fears. Nothing short of World-end could have brought him out of such a slumber.

  She laid back to watch the orange skylight sprinkle through the trees, trying not to give in to the itchy boredom while waiting for the buttons to caress her consciousness. She was about to sit up and reach for the satchel again, when all sense of time dissolved into a flood of disjointed images.

  A swell of immense satisfaction rolled over her, swallowing up the boredom and frustration in the snap-jaws of a white-hot gryndel of star-flame. The forest flew into flaming glass splinters and then reformed itself again before her eyes. She moaned softly, as she sat up to see the results.

  Charming little animals and deliciously green plants with bright blue and orange flowers speckled her world. The piecemeal sky through the boughs and leaves far above began to take on the pinkish-gold of late afternoon. A chicken-sized striped scamper rushed into the clearing at her feet. It paused on two bird-like legs with its lizardy tail held stiff up behind, and peered at her through bright sunshine eyes.

  “Hello little fern sprite,” Tiva said softly, as the tiny creature began to chirp to her its pleasant greeting.

  “Welcome to your Aeden!” she clearly heard in the reptile’s twitter.

  The little fern sprite cocked its head at her, and then rushed off into the bush. Tiva called, “Good bye,” after it, and lay down again on her back.

  Everything swirled into a multi-colored vortex. All things became one as she felt herself linked to the earth, to the forest, to her orchard, and to her Khumi. Aeden really is mine!

  She had no idea just when or how everything changed again.

  Perhaps she just forgot that in Aeden—where Atum and Ish’Hakka ate of the forbidden tree—a God had also promised death.

  Two shadows loomed over the resting couple, blocking out some of the gold-green woodland sun. Tiva didn’t notice them for a long time, thinking they were trees that had bent over to greet her as the scamper had. When she became fully aware of them at last, their blackness touched her with spiraling dread.

  Her entire world spun upside down, until she felt sure it would drop her off through the trees into a sickening black void that had somehow swallowed the sun.

  A wrath-filled god blasted the darkening trees with the shadow-wind of his fury. “So this is where you hide!”

  The ground shook. Crows flew squawking from blackened branches stripped of greenery.

  Tiva rolled away from Khumi’s body to clutch the ferns on the other side of the blanket, convinced that she would fall up into the sky through the clawing tree-limbs; ejected from her orchard into a howling emptiness of outer darkness.

  Eyes.

  Huge bloodshot orbs—crimson fire rings around two pairs of black holes—brooded down on her from out of the shadows. A new fright surpassed even her panic of falling up. Though she was partly covered by one of Sariya’s pelt wraps, to those eyes she might as well have been naked. She lunged for the edge of the blanket to pull it over herself, but Khumi’s weight pinned it to the moss. He sighed in his deep hallucinogenic sleep.

  The voice of Henumil roared like a lanced gryndel dragon. “I search all of Akh’Uzan for you, only to find you up here doing this!”

  Another voice hissed from the second shadow, the very tongue of the Basilisk. “I didn’t want to admit it—even to myself, out of hope—but I suspected we would find her up here playing whore,” Yargat said.

  For a second Tiva was terrified that tongue would coil around her entire body and pull her into some snake-stretched maw. When it did not, she merely shuddered. That’s it all along! E’Yahavah and the Basilisk are together! They’ve got it rigged! It all makes sickening, horrible sense now!

  The shadows coalesced into Tiva’s father and brother. She squealed, uselessly trying to cover herself with crisscrossed arms.

  Henumil’s dark face became a rage-contorted clay mask with bulging eyes. His voice roared mountain thunder, while the forest hillside trembled under his dire pronouncement. “You’ve defiled yourself, you whorish bynt!”

  Tiva tumbled over into the ferns, curled into fetal position. Sobs convulsed her body with internal blows that felt like angry kicks. She had thought herself finally immune! Now all her control—all her Aeden—violently tore itself away from her like a poorly-healed scab.

  “I should have said something,” the Yargat-Basilisk said in mock sadness. “But the sanctity of the counseling chamber should only be violated as a last resort. Forgive me, Father, I have miscalculated. You should know a few things now, since she has chosen to wallow in her uncleanness.”

  Oh E’Yahavah, no!

  Other voices taunted her from far below, “Sow-wallow! Sow-wallow! Tiva-suuee!”

  Yargat’s words ripped into her like all of his secret intrusions put together. “It started at the new Girl’s Academy, Father—which you have rightly opposed—sadly, to no avail in Tiva’s case. She learned to behave lewdly from the immigrant girls. Instead of praying to Atum-Ra for deliverance, and pouring out her error in front of the Treasures, she let it take her. I tried to turn her back in the counseling chamber, but she only pretended to listen. You are so right about that school, my Father.”

  Tiva heard her father’s breath puff like some giant flesh-eating wurm’s, and somehow knew even in her horrified incoherence that no thinking person could believe such a ridiculous fabrication. Then again, who could have ever accused Henumil of being
a thinking person?

  For an eternity, he seemed to hover there, huffing and puffing.

  Clarity briefly embraced Tiva—a tiny sip of water in Under-world’s flames. Is he wrestling with his conscience or just thinking up more words?

  When her father finally spoke, his voice shook both mountains and sky. “You are disowned, Tiva! As priest of the Divine Name, I declare you banished from the Comfort of Q’Enukki by your own whoredom!”

  The moment of clarity dissolved. Tiva didn’t have to look up to feel Yargat glaring down on her, still raping her with his eyes. “I told you this would happen,” he said. “And now E’Yahavah and your family have cast you away. It’s out of my hands.”

  “Shall we take her back to the village, and make an example of her?” Henumil asked, sounding unsure for the first time in Tiva’s memory.

  “Oh, Father, let’s not,” Yargat said, with just a hint of fear in his voice. “It would be more humiliating for us than for her. She obviously has no shame. And the boy—is he not a son of that heretic, A’Nu-Ahki? Best not to antagonize his house, now that he’s returned. We have the Three Gifts with the Cask of Atum Ra to think of. The Ancient could legally take them from the Shrine.”

  Even in her fiery inner void, Tiva relished his hint of fear—Yargat knew that if they took her into town, or if Khumi were hurt, she could expose her brother’s “counseling methods.” What more had she to lose?

  Henumil said, “You could be right—at least for now.”

  “Let us go from here and leave her to her desolation.”

  Tiva could hear the underbrush rustle as her father and brother walked off, back to their Lit world. A world in which one barely ‘tween-aged girl would hardly be missed.

  Blackness enveloped the once golden glade, as tangible demons raked at her huddled body like a cloud of web-winged amphipteres. She crumpled into herself, a slug shriveling in a pile of salt. Her only consolation was that Khumi had somehow slept through the whole encounter, unharmed.

  E’Yahavah suddenly became very real to her. She felt his terrible rejection shredding her psyche with all the fear and disgrace drilled into her since infancy. It sucked her down, a leaden force that pressed her out of fetal position, against the ground. She wanted to sink into the soft earth toward Under-world, just to get away from the face of the dark sky beyond the trees. Tiva wailed as her same old nightmares returned—this time made solid by the mushroom. She pulled herself onto her side, against the leaden force, to gaze at Khumi’s sleeping form.

  She recoiled at what lay on the other half of the blanket.

  Yargat faced her, also lying on his side, his eyes aglow with that dreadful anticipation. Somehow, he had replaced Khumi.

  Her brother sat up, grabbed her around the shoulders, and shook her.

  “You went away, and now you’ll always be a whore!” He laughed as he throttled her. “But don’t think you’ll ever escape me—oh no! I’ll always be with you wherever you go! I’ll always be there, no matter whom you love, and whom you marry! Because deep down inside, whenever you give yourself to him, you’ll only be giving yourself back over to me!”

  Tiva screamed. Her brother’s leering face melted right before her eyes into that of Khumi. The shaking continued, only it lost its violence.

  “Tiva! Tiva! What’s the matter? Snap out of it!”

  Suddenly, she could sit up again. Khumi crouched over her, his eyes terrified.

  “I had a bad dream,” she half-lied.

  “Well, it’s over now.” He held her close and stroked her hair.

  But she knew that it wasn’t. Somehow, she knew that it had only just begun.

  “Khumi? Do you think I’m a whore?”

  “What kind of talk is that? You listen here, as far as I’m concerned, you’re my wife! Understand?”

  She nodded, but felt only slightly comforted.

  The drab vision of her mother flashed to mind—the eternal frown, that shrill prating voice with its rare interludes of sickening sweetness, her scurrying gait, and the vicious gossip that made up the only entertainment the woman permitted herself. It dawned on Tiva in one black damning moment how the word wife could be just as ugly a prison for her as the word whore.

  At the same time, we need to remember that the ark need not have been a particularly complex structure. The Jewish scholar Ben Uri has suggested that the ark was built from a series of triangular templates, each of which had been of the same size and shape. This… enabled Noah to use virtual mass-production methods in the construction of the ark. It should be added that this combination of “prefab” components into an ark has been determined to be seaworthy. We need to put ancient archeological evidence in perspective by noting that the record of the earliest ships is very skimpy… It is acknowledged that we are still in the early stages of the study of the history of boat structures. We can only know when a certain state of ship building technology is first mentioned in writings or drawings (or as tangible archeological evidence), but this certainly does not tell us how far back this technology goes. For instance, the earliest representations of vessels date from 3000 BC, and there is… no basis (much less guarantee) that this represents the most advanced shipbuilding capabilities of that time. Imagine some future archeologists discovering the remains of rowboats and canoes, and then using these to try and draw firm conclusions about the upper limits of shipbuilding technology in 20th-century America!

  —John Woodmorappe

  Noah’s Ark: A Feasibility Study

  7

  Architecture

  A year passed, during which Khumi began to build a house for Tiva in a gigantic maple tree, about a thousand cubits down the waterfall brook from Grove Hollow. The land was technically his father’s, but Khumi had assured her that his elders had no plans for it. In case his father or the Ancient objected, he was prepared to buy the lot fair market standard.

  At this stage, only the lowest platform with a small shanty provided shelter. Nevertheless, Tiva felt like queen of the forest—enough to satisfy her that things were hardly the “desolation” prophesied by her father and brother. Life had somehow stabilized.

  Henumil had called for a Dragon-slayer strike to drive the Hollowers out, not long after he had found Tiva and Khumi together, on the blanket. She marveled that her father and brother had not beaten Khumi in his sleep. Then she remembered what Yargat had said about how they had only gotten the Shrine Treasures from Muhet’Usalaq on condition. Tiva’s father could not risk the humiliation of provoking a demand for the return of the relics. Henumil apparently feared an empty Shrine more than failing to do what, to him, was the “right” thing; horrible as that would have been for her.

  As for her father’s “Dragon-slayer strike,” many valley parents, unwilling to risk violence against their own children, had petitioned the Magistracy at Farguti to halt it. Tiva had to laugh whenever she thought of their ruling—Grove Hollow was now a “wildlife sanctuary” of sorts, with the Hollowers being the “wildlife.” She knew the legal reasoning was more convoluted and arbitrary than a lunatic’s rant, but she had no complaints. If this is desolation, then happy are the desolate! Well, if not happy, at least “desolation” isn’t near as desolate as “celebration” at Henumil’s Shrine.

  Rest-days were at least restful. Tiva prepared a breakfast of fruit and wheat porridge, while Khumi crawled out of the hovel and stretched. He wore only a linen loincloth and looked unkempt and dirty. On Rest-days, he always slept in and bathed in the morning.

  She thought; He’s been driving himself hard between building the house and keeping up his few remaining carpentry jobs down in the valley. At the same time, he had to travel farther toward Farguti and the Inland Highway in search of new clients. The only reason he had any contracts left among the Lits and even the Orthodox was his hardworking reputation. Contrary to her predictions, many of the old-line Akh’Uzan folk had cut off even their business ties with him. His work ethic had usually been enough to overcome his stigma as a son of �
�A’Nu-Ahki the Apostate,” but not with the added scandal of “living in sin” at Grove Hollow.

  Khumi had just finished his bath in the brook and Tiva her table spread, when they first noticed the Stranger.

  Hairless and beardless, the man slowly made his way toward them down through the forest giants. He dressed as a mid-tiered zaqen, in a long earthen-toned cassock bound at the waist over a blue tunic by a jewel-studded belt. The Stranger sang softly to himself in a voice Tiva found vaguely familiar, though she could not place his reddish-tan head and face. She recognized something about his eyes, once he drew near enough for her to see their mirthful blue twinkle.

  Khumi dropped his towel in the moss. “Father?” he asked, as if unsure he could claim the man as such.

  The Stranger only stopped his song when he entered the small cleared area between the tree house and the brook.

  “Father, is that you?”

  “Ahh, Son! What do you think?” The man pointed to his own head.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never seen you without hair and a beard. It takes a little getting used to—no disrespect.”

  “And none taken.” A’Nu-Ahki gave a robust laugh, some jolly lesser god whose passage through the wood, Tiva could almost believe, would make fruit sprout from every branch and turn the streams into wine.

  She muttered, “A Lit with no beard—now there’s something new.” Then she realized she could almost grow to like the old guy, if she allowed herself. Then again, he’s an apostate—as I am—just a different kind.

  Khumi spoke in a solemn, respectful voice, “Father, I would like to present to you Tiva, my wife,” He moved onto the platform and wrapped his arm around her waist as if to challenge the Old Man to call her anything different. She could not help but smile at his father in triumph.

  A’Nu-Ahki seemed to take his defeat in their tug-of-war with grace.

  “At last I get to see you, my Daughter.” The Zaqen smiled tenderly and bowed—as if she completely deserved it, as though she and Khumi had passed through a respectable betrothal arranged in the valley! “May you both know the love E’Yahavah has for you.” He spread his hands, palms up, to offer them a genuine parental blessing.