The Inner Self: The Prophecy

by Raqurra Ishmar

  A lot of the homes in this village are circular, which is a good sign. That means that we’ll have more people willing to help us, regardless of the strange clothes that we’re wearing. I stop about twenty feet away from the nearest structure, waiting for the three stooges to catch up to me. I turn around, forcing myself to look at Renee as I speak to the group.

  “We’re lucky,” I begin, but she cuts me off before I can continue.

  “Why are we lucky?” she asks, ever the curious one.

  “We’re lucky because this town has much more carefree habitants than strict or recluse ones. The circular buildings are how I know,” I quickly say when her mouth opens again, probably to ask the question I just answered. “You cannot tell anyone you're a Blessed, Ren.”

  “Why?” she predictably asks.

  “Because we are forbidden to turn a Blessed away if they seek something. Though the hostility won’t be out in the open, it will still be there. We want genuine hospitality if you are to enjoy meeting your first village of Relvarians,” I say, tacking on that little bit of information to try and smooth the divide a little. Yes, I want to keep some distance between us, but I need her to trust me a little more. It’ll make my job easier in the long run.

  “Oh, ok,” she nods her head as if she understands everything that I just said but I highly doubt that that is the case. Her eyes unfocused for a little bit, and I envy her the ability to have an Inner Self and someone to always confer with. The whole Blessed and Unblessed thing is bullshit. We’re deemed less than because we don’t have a voice in our head talking to us. Back on Earth, we’d be the ones being envied while they’re labeled insane. But we’re not on Earth. That was never our home and it never will be.

  The village, from what I can see, is small and humble compared to Kor. There are clusters of villages around Relvaria. Some Unblessed would rather live out in the wilderness instead of in Kor. We have more freedom and are allowed to feel like we mean something when we’re not around the Blessed.

  A woman, dressed in a thick wool dress and boots, stops in the middle of her task of carrying a basket of what looks to be vegetables to the center of the village. Her dark brown skin blends in with her dark dress, but what makes her stand out is her shock of blonde hair and blue eyes. She props the basket on her hip, waiting for us to get closer.

  “Travelers?” she asks once we’re close enough. Her voice is as strong as her build, and I know that if we were to cause her any problems, she’d have no problem with taking us on. Her accent is thick, which tells me that she’s lived out here all of her life.

  “Yes, we’re on our way to Kor, but we seem to have gotten lost,” I respond, trying to block as much of Renee as I can. I won’t hide her the entire time we’re here, I just want her to get her ogling out of the way before she exposes the fact that she’s not from here. From what I know, no one not born in Relvaria is allowed to enter. Even though Renee’s body wasn’t born here, her soul was.

  “Yah, you’re far from Kor. Almost a three day's journey. How did ya get out here? Not much out there from the way ya came, so where are ya traveling from?” She suspiciously looks at me and my brothers, and she has every right to look at us that way. If what she said is true, we’re deep into the wilds of Relvaria.

  “We took a trip to Earth to receive an object for a Blessed family. They said that they’ll pay us well if we bring it back,” I smoothly lie. It’s kind of the truth, but just stretched a little. I hear Renee whispering to my brothers behind me, but I can’t catch what she’s saying.

  “What is it that they wanted?” the lady asks.

  “They wanted this,” Caylen walks forward with a watch in his hand. It’s a dainty watch, so I know that it belongs to Renee.

  “What is it?” the woman says, stepping closer with awe on her face as she glances at the thing.

  “It’s a watch. It keeps track of time,” he answers.

  “But why would they send ya all the way to Earth for something that the suns and shadows easily do naturally?”

  He casually shrugs his shoulders as if he doesn’t have a clue in the world. “Who knows. You know how those Blessed are. They never make sense.”

  She throws her head back and laughs. I can see that my brother has won her over as easily as he did Renee. What a surprise.

  “We were wondering if there is somewhere that we can sleep for the night? We will be gone by first light,” I interject, trying to get this conversation back on track.

  She sobers up and stares at me and Caylen before looking around us at Titus and Renee. Her eyebrows furrow for a second, as if she’s in deep thought, then she straightens up suddenly. “Yah, ya can stay with me. You’ll all have to sleep on the floor, but I have enough quilts that the stone won’t be a bother.”

  “Thank you,” Caylen beams at her and she smiles back. I hear a huff behind me, and for the first time since we’ve started this trip, I genuinely smile. Seems as if Renee is the jealous type.

  “You’ve come at the right time,” the lady says. “It’s the Winter Festival tonight.” I stifle my groan. Of course we’ll have the unfortunate displeasure of coming here during the Winter Festival. It’s an event that’s held mainly among the Unblessed. We tend to celebrate things more than the Blessed, which is ass-backwards.

  “My name is Dee, by the way,” she says.

  “I’m Caylen, that’s Zavid, Renee, and Titus. It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he beams a smile at her again and I can’t hold my chuckle back this time. He’s laying it on thick. Must have something to do with Titus taking liberties with Renee’s lips as if he owned them.

  Dee moves closer to Caylen with a megawatt smile of her own. “I think this may be my favorite Winter Festival to date,” she purrs.

  “Mine too,” I jovially respond as I can practically hear Renee grind her teeth together.

  Yeah, this may turn out to be really entertaining.

  22

  Renee

  Watching Caylen flirt with this gorgeous woman has me contemplating murder. Not her, but him. He tosses a smirk over his shoulder as he follows her towards the center of the village, and it’s taking everything in me not to let Sheya loose so that they can fry his ass.

  “Be careful what you wish for,” they say.

  Yeah, well, this might be something that I really want to happen. I can practically feel the joy radiating from Zavid at the sight of my discomfort, and that’s pissing me off even more. What the fuck is his problem? This whole trip he’s been nothing but an asshole, and at the first sign of my uneasiness, now is the time that he wants to show a positive emotion?

  Titus grabs my hand and tugs me after the little trio when he notices that I haven’t budged from my spot. I don’t even have the patience to gawk at the weirdly shaped homes. Some are circular and colored in ways that would be considered tacky on Earth, but seems right here on Relvaria. I eye the woman up and down, knowing that she could whoop the boys ass, but definitely not Sheya’s.

  Her wool outfit doesn’t seem like it would do much for her in this cold ass weather, but seeing as the boys have been prancing around in little to nothing, I guess it does enough for her. I want to hate her already, but I can only admire her confidence.

  “So what is the Winter Festival?” I ask Titus.

  “Well, it’s the-,” Caylen starts.

  “I asked Titus,” I snap. Caylen smirks at me from his position ahead, but he’ll regret that. I don’t know what games he’s trying to play, but I’m not one to be toyed with.

  “It’s the celebration of winter, essentially. The cleansing of the planet. As the snow falls, it obscures the tracks that were made, creating a blank canvas over and over again. To us, it signifies new beginnings. A chance to clean our slate and start anew,” Titus answers, giving my hand a squeeze and a look that I don’t know how to decipher.

  I turn my head forward and catch the eye of Dee. She’s looking at me as if she can’t figure me out, and I realize it’s because I should alrea
dy know these things. It’s going to be so hard to try to blend in with these people when I know nothing about the culture and how someone out here would behave.

  Hell, I get most of my knowledge from dreams of my past self, and even that was the cliff notes version. So what do I do? Say absolutely nothing for our entire time here? Even that would be a little odd. I can whisper to Titus, I guess, when no one else is looking. It may just look like we’re two love birds flirting.

  Here’s to acting.

  I smile at Dee in a way that I hope is inviting, yet she only frowns harder at me.

  “So, Dee, what do you do around here?” Caylen asks, taking her attention off of me. She looks at me a little longer before turning to him.

  “I teach the young. I am also the one that takes them to the Ceremony for the Awakening of the Inner Self. But this may be the last year that we make that journey. We haven’t had a single Blessed chosen from this village in decades. And the last one that was chosen, was so weak, that they had to double check that he was even a Blessed.”

  “The same is happening in Kor. Even most of the Blessed there aren’t taking their children to the Ceremony.”

  “Kor? I thought you only took the job there. But you live there also?”

  “Yes.” Zavid’s clipped response had her stopping and spinning to face him. She did that twirl without wasting a single vegetable. That takes talent.

  “Do not take that tone with me. I have offered ya shelter in my home! The least ya can do is tell me a little about yourself,” she snaps, blue eyes blazing against her dark skin. Zavid actually took a step back from the angry woman, and I gladly let my laugh slip from between my lips. She flicks her eyes towards me and I give her a thumbs up. She struggles with keeping the smirk from her face, but her lips lift ever so slightly and I can’t help but feel a warm glow. Maybe she’s not so bad, after all.

  “Oh wow, because she smirked at your juvenile antics? Amazing.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be busy?” I ask.

  “I’m taking a break.”

  “Yay me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Zavid says, voice low like he’s speaking to a rabid animal. “We live there with our Dad.”

  She flicks her gaze over to Caylen and then over to Titus before landing back on Zavid, and for a second I feel bad for the way that Caylen’s shoulders tighten from her obvious confusion.

  “We were taken in,” Titus says.

  “Your parents were Blessed.” She says it as a statement and not as a question.

  “Yes,” Caylen says. All sense of playfulness left him when she clearly questioned their brotherhood. She nods her head and continues on to her journey.

  “Where are we headed?” I ask as we pass more and more homes. No one is out right now, and it’s a little eerie as we walk through, essentially, a ghost town. “And where is everyone?” There are a few square homes littered around, but the triangle ones are the most interesting. I would think that they wouldn’t want to design their house like that; it must really take away from their square footage.

  “This is not HGTV,” Sheya snaps.

  “Well, it should be.”

  “They are resting for the festival tonight, as I will be too. There is a storage area in the center of the village that we use for days like this. I am to drop this food there for the festivities. There are groups of us designated for this job, while others will be up a little later to decorate.”

  “How many people live here?” I ask. Dee glances over her shoulder to look at me as we enter the center of the village.

  The center of the village is, literally, the center. There are five paths that branch off from this wooden stage-like pavilion. There are strings on the top that are connected to five poles. On the strings are purple tear-drop shaped… something. They’re not too large, almost the size of my thumbnail. Around the pavilion are wicker basket storage trunks, and I’m assuming that’s where all of the food is being stored. I hope they cook it later, because I’m not too keen on chewing on frozen corn, or whatever it is they have here.

  “There are forty-four families here; they all differ in sizes. I see that you keep staring quizzically at the kieranella seeds, do you not know what they are?” That strange look is on her face again, and before Sheya even has to instruct me to, I lie.

  “Yes, I have.” I keep the lie short and sweet so that I won’t catch myself up in it. Dee is already suspicious of me; if we stay here longer than a day, I have no doubt we’ll have to tell her that I’m from Earth. Shit, I even talk differently than she does. And the more the boys speak to her, the more their accents change to match hers. It’s almost like they were pretending to talk like me the whole time.

  “We love kieranella seeds. More in the winter than in the summer. The nights are darker and colder, which makes us value the light they emit and the little bit of warmth they give off,” Caylen says to Dee. Ah, so that’s what they are. I wonder how the plant looks.

  Titus cups my cheek and turns my head towards his. He whispers in the ear further away from Dee, making it look like he’s kissing me on my cheek. “They look almost like sunflowers, but the petals are red and the stem is blue. The petals are also really big. Some use them as hats or the women will use them as tops.” He kisses my forehead after his quick explanation, and I can’t help but be grateful for his ingenuity.

  The suns are casting long shadows along the ground, and I’m a little afraid that we won’t have much time to nap before the festival. Almost as if Zavid read my mind, he asks her if there was anything else that we could do to prepare for the festival tonight.

  “No, we are done here. Come, I will show you my home.” She walks around the pavilion and takes one of the the back left paths. The path is large enough for Caylen, Zavid and Dee to walk side by side, with just a little room to spare. The homes have just enough space between them to give privacy, but not too much to feel as if they were isolated from their neighbors. There are stone pathways leading up to some of the homes, and others seemed to not have been bothered with clearing out the snow.

  The windows aren’t all shaped like the homes, so some square homes have triangle windows, and some triangle homes have circular windows. The weirder the shape the home is, the more vibrant the colors. It’s almost as if they want to tell people that they’re friendly. Or insane.

  I try to keep my ogling down to a minimum, while keeping my face as neutral as possible. I don’t want to give Dee anymore reason to suspect me. We only have to walk down the path for less than five minutes before Dee is turning down a completely cleared pathway, to no one’s surprise. Her house… her house is different.

  “It’s ugly as fuck,” Sheya says.

  “Not ugly… just odd,” I say, trying to correct them only slightly. Dee’s house is the only two story house that I’ve seen since coming to this village. The base of the house is circular and the top is a square. The shapes aren’t what makes it weird. It’s the coloring. She has every color known to man, and even some that I’ve never seen before, splattered against her walls. I toss a questioning look over to Titus, but he’s not looking at me. His eyebrows are furrowed as he stares at the back of Dee’s head.

  “Are you the Elder of this village?” Titus asks.

  “Yah,” she says.

  Ah, that must be why her house is the only two story around. It doesn’t answer why it’s painted as if it’s been used for target practice with paintball guns. The door is made from some really dark wood, and it looks pretty heavy. The windows range from squares, rectangles, to hell, is that a rhombus? Who the fuck knows. At this point I’m delirious from all of the walking and just a bite of honey bun.

  Dee opens up the door and stomps off her boots before she walks into the house. We all follow suit, entering into an open concept house. I thought there would be walls separating everything, but honestly, why did I? It’s a circular house. And it looks like nothing I’ve ever seen before. The floor is made up of stone and there are thick rugs spread spor
adically throughout the area. Against the back is, what I presume to be, the kitchen.

  There is an old time wooden oven, a few countertops, and a table. Hanging in the back “corner” of the kitchen is meat. My mouth waters at the sight of the meat, but I don’t know how to voice my hunger to someone who keeps looking at me as if I’m four-seconds away from stabbing her in the back.

  Immediately to the left of the entrance is a fireplace that’s roaring away. It’s emitting most of the light in the house, but I notice that there are a lot of kieranella seeds placed around the windows, probably so that they can do their job. Already, a faint glow is starting to show.

  There are bean bag like seats placed sporadically around the house, and there’s not a single couch in sight. I guess she wasn’t playing about us sleeping on the floor. The walls are painted in the same ghastly way as the outside, and there are three dark wooden coffee tables placed here and there. Jars filled with Lord knows what decorate the top.

  There’s no rhyme or reason to the set up of this house, and I almost missed the ladder against the far right side of the house. That must lead to her room, because I don’t see a place for her to sleep.

  “Make yourselves at home,” she simply says before climbing the ladder and disappearing through the ceiling.

  So much for hospitality.

  Titus raises an eyebrow at me before smirking and walking over to the wall of meat. He grabs some skewers from a rack on the wall and grab a long slab of meat. My heart is hammering in my chest as he confidently cut the meat with one of her knives, skewers the meat, and walks over to the fireplace. He doesn’t even bother using the old wooden oven. He gestures with his head for me to come sit with him in front of the fireplace. I drag one of the bean bags over to him, and I’m surprised by its texture. It’s almost like it was made from a really soft leather. It’s big enough for both of us to sit on.

  “Are you sure we should be eating her food?” I whisper to him as I plop down on the bag. It doesn’t feel nearly as plush as I thought, as if it was filled with very dense feathers or something. I don’t want to speak too loud for fear that she’ll hear us. Who knows, she might be sitting right there at the opening listening to our every word.