I was with my parents and siblings somewhere warm and green. Papa walked beside me, little Leta bouncing on his broad shoulders. He smiled down at me. “Come along boy. Your mother’s prepared a fine feast for us, and we mustn’t make her wait!”
“Hurry Papa, hurry!” Leta cried joyfully, drumming at Papa with her heels. He laughed and began running ahead, Leta’s squeals trailing behind them like falling leaves. Beyond, I saw my mother spreading a blanket, a heaped wicker basket of food at her feet. She waved and called out to me, but I couldn’t hear her. She shook her head with a smile, and motioned me toward her. I turned and saw my older brother walking next to me, and he looked at me, his face open and honest.
“I am sorry for mocking you, brother – I knew no better. I hope you will forgive me.” He took my hand in his, and I felt buoyed, lifting toward the light. Surrounded by the voices of my family, filled with their presence until I thought I would surely burst, I drifted up and up and up…
I awoke like a bubble bursting. My family. I never had good dreams of my family, only nightmares of emptiness and loss. Never something of warmth and light… Blinking, I found my face damp with tears.
Rubbing them aside with my sleeve, I looked around in some confusion. I was in a dark room, familiar yet not my own, much like the cot I lay on. There was the smell of ink and parchment, of tallow candles, and the sound of voices. I searched for my last memory before sleeping, and, after some groping about, managed to find it. I was in Arkigos Touraj’s room, where they had left me to rest with –
I sat up, looking for the girl. To my relief, I saw her immediately. She was crouched by the door on her hands and knees, face to the floor, peering through gap underneath into the outer room. Or she had been; the cot creaked as I pushed myself up and she sat back on her haunches. She was still wearing my robe, which pleased me for some reason. The girl smiled at me, her skin moon-pale in the darkened room, and half-scuttled, half-crawled over to me, taking my hand in hers and tugging insistently.
“What is – ”
I was cut off by her pressing a warm hand over my mouth. She looked at the door, then back at me, and placed a finger to her lips. Where did she learn that… I wasn’t given time to wonder though, as she dragged me off the cot and over to the space beneath the door, placing a hand on my head and leaning down herself until we both had our cheeks on the floor. In the room outside, I heard Touraj and a few of the Elder Brothers talking.
My first instinct was to move away, to pull her away. It felt like breaking the rules, eavesdropping like this, and that always led to trouble. I might have followed that instinct too…if I hadn’t heard my name.
“She will be fine with Dhavi.” It was Touraj’s voice, and it was followed by a heavy silence. I couldn’t see anything but feet, robe hems, and the legs of chairs and desk, but there were three other Brothers in the room. I could almost feel them exchanging pointed looks.
“Respectfully,” someone ventured, “are you sure that is wise, Arkigos? The boy is only an Acolyte, not even an ordained Brother yet.”
“And he is something of a…distractible Acolyte at that,” another voice muttered. My cheeks burned like embers, and I resisted the urge to turn away right then.
“Being ‘distractible’, as you say, is something we were all guilty of once,” Touraj answered. “It is merely the character of a boy his age; it does not mean that he is unreliable, or untrustworthy with serious tasks.”
“Yes…a boy his age…” This was the third Brother. I recognized the voice as Brother Kafsar, always rather fiery and passionate about his beliefs. An Acolyte could earn a quick cuff to the ears from him for any perceived blasphemy or misdeed. There were certainly members of the Brethren who favored his particular brand of devotion, but over the years I had learned to avoid him. And right now I didn’t like his tone at all – it hinted at something ugly. “A boy who is at just the right age to participate in the Pairing Ceremony at the Spring Meet, if I’m not mistaken? A boy young enough not to have learned the, ah, proper self-restraint?”
“Brother Kafsar!” Touraj’s voice was raised only slightly, but for a man who never shouted it might well have been a war cry. I felt the weight behind it, and everyone went silent. “Acolyte Dhavalos has shown himself to be a good lad with a kind heart, and has never taken advantage of anyone. I will not have you dripping poison into anyone’s ear about his character.”
“I’m sorry Arkigos.” The words were clipped. “I only meant that to leave a boy that age, regardless of character, with a beautiful young girl is to invite…complications.”
“That ‘beautiful young girl’ is a divine being,” Touraj said. “It seems that you are not giving either of them enough credit for their ability to make their own choices. Do you feel that the Holy Ones, who stand in the Light of the Great Fire itself, are unable to choose what is best for themselves?”
“Of course not!” There was fire in his voice, and I heard the rustle of robes as several Brethren made the Holy Sign. When he spoke again, his words were controlled, in the way of a vicious dog on a chain. “I only meant that… The Holy Ones are not impervious to harm, Arkigos. The Seven Lords of old, beloved and wise, still fell before the Darakos… And if they can be hurt, then it is our responsibility to see that this blessed being is protected!”
“While I do not share Brother Kafsar’s apparent scorn for the young Acolyte,” the first Brother – Emand, I think – chimed in, “I do share his concern for our…charge. Though he may be a fine and respectable boy, he is still only a boy. Things are going to become very complicated surrounding the young lady, and very quickly I think. You know this to be true. And whoever stays close to her will bear the burden and the risk of being an agent of great change, the kind of change that, however the stones may fall, will probably not be accepted lightly. I would hesitate to ask one so young as Dhavalos to shoulder that responsibility.”
“They are right Arkigos,” the third Brother supplied. “We will face many difficult choices in the coming days. Perhaps it would be best to leave older, wiser heads to decide what to do with our blessed guest.”
I heard Touraj tapping the desk with his fingers, a habit of his while thinking on a problem. “Brothers,” he said at last, “I hear your worries. And Brother Emand has the heart of the matter: she brings change, and it will not be easy. Great Fires shine on us, it may even be dangerous. I understand why you are hesitant to accept someone as young and untried as Acolyte Dhavalos for a place so close to her.” My heart actually stopped beating for a moment, my breath frozen in my chest. “However…” His chair creaked as he leaned forward.
“I think you forget our position. She is not a pet or a prize or a child, to be told what to do and with whom to keep company. She is of the blessed race, one of the Holy Ones themselves – and she has surely come here for a reason, with a purpose of her own. Brethren, we are not here to decide what she will do. That is up to her. And for the moment, she seems to have decided to keep Dhavalos at her side.” There was a silent space, and I could almost see him looking at the Brothers, daring them to speak otherwise. Touraj was a kind master to us all, but her was far from weak. The chair creaked again as he at last leaned back, satisfied, and I swore I could hear them release tense breaths. “We will respect her wishes. Yes Brother Kafsar,” he said quickly, cutting off protest, “we will certainly use every precaution and resource to protect her on her calling, whatever it may be. That is our responsibility as an Order, and no, we will not leave it to Dhavalos to bear alone. But neither will we separate them, especially since she seems content in his presence.”
“Arkigos,” Brother Kafsar growled through gritted teeth, “you saw the state she was in. Holy or not, she does not know what is best for her; we must make the best choice to keep her safe.”
“You presume much to say that you know what is best for her, Brother.” Touraj’s voice was edged with steel. “She will be as safe with Dhavalos as with any being in this world,” he said firmly. My chest felt as though it would burst with pride. “He will not harm her, would not harm anyone, and he is connected to her in ways that, whether we understand or not, we must respect – my Atash speaks this clearly to me.”
There was a moment’s silence filled only with muttering and coughing. Rightly so. The Arkigos is chosen through a ritual meant to reveal the will of the divine – though it is enacted my men, the selection is made by the Great Fire itself, that which forged the universe and shines in all things. If the Atash of an Arkigos cannot be trusted, well, there would be little left of the foundation of the Ankorite Order. They couldn’t say whatever it was they were thinking, so they said nothing. One does not become an Elder Brother without wisdom, after all.
“For the moment,” Touraj continued at long last, “Dhavi has shown nothing but responsibility and compliance in an extraordinary situation. Until some evidence arises that he should not be allowed to stay with her as a companion, I see no reason to force them apart and distress a good lad and a holy being. I thank you for respecting my decision.” The last was pointed like a spear. “Now, if you will excuse me, I wish to be alone to consider this matter further. Go with the All-Light upon you.”
There was some muttering as the Elder Brethren rose and took their leave, but they showed their wisdom again in that none of the words were clear enough for the Arkigos or myself to hear. They closed the door behind them with a soft click. Then it was quiet but for the snapping of a candle. I held my breath so as not to make any noise, easing away from the door. I felt strange, as if they had been arguing over someone else and I were hearing about it in a story. The whole thing felt distant, as if I had simply stepped apart from it – probably because I didn’t know how to feel. There were Elder Brethern who felt I was too irresponsible to be near to someone? Who felt I would…what? Take advantage of a girl by force? And yet Touraj willing through his lot in with me, all his trust, all his faith, and that was no easier to come to grips with. Though sent a wellspring of pride bubbling up in my chest, it was still sobering. I didn’t feel worthy of that much praise.
And then there were the other words that had come up. The Holy Ones. Divine beings. Those who stand beside the Great Fire of Creation. My mind skittered away from them like gazelle from the scent of a hunting cat – but they were still there. Like the hunting cat, I could feel them hiding in the shadows just beyond sight. Waiting to pounce on me.
I squeezed my eyes shut as if I could block it all out. It was so much, I was worried that if I started thinking about it my head would burst like an overripe melon…
“Dhavi.”
I sat bolt upright, my heart slamming into my throat, praying that Touraj hadn’t heard me, that he was just checking, that it was a question even though it didn’t sound like one.
“I know you’re there. Come on out.” And just like that, my hopes were shattered.
The girl looked at me and scrunched up her face in a mock wince. I still wasn’t sure how she understood what was happening when yesterday she didn’t get a word, or even if she did, but her face reflected the feeling in my gut. And it was made a thousand times worse by the way he had just lauded my virtues to the Elder Brethren. If I could have, I would have crawled from the room into Touraj’s presence.
As it was, I couldn’t meet his eyes as I slunk past his desk and into a chair, willing myself to become invisible. She followed close behind me, a tentative hand on my shoulder as if to be sure she wouldn’t lose me. When I sat down, she did the same in the chair next to me. I waited in silence, bracing myself for the hammerfall of punishment… and nothing happened. After a few moments the girl began to squirm uncomfortably in the chair, and moved to sit on the floor instead, adopting a cross-legged pose and leaning back to watch the Arkigos. I noticed that she leaned against my knee ever so lightly. She seemed to make a conscious effort to be in physical contact with me.
I risked a glance up at Touraj. He was leaning forward on his elbows, watching the girl watch him. His desk was a carpet of manuscripts, scrolls, sheaves of parchment, and even bound tomes so old that the leather was cracked like the desert earth. The skin below his eyes was a bruise-colored shadow.
“Haven’t you gone to sleep yet?” I blurted. I immediately felt stupid, and bit my tongue.
He sighed. “It’s been a rather active night. And I’m afraid there won’t be a chance now; it’s nearly morning. And the day ahead is sure to have its own… complications.” The last was said quietly, more to himself than to me. Looking at him, he seemed to have aged years in the night.
“I’m sorry for eavesdropping Arkigos,” I said, hanging my head.
There was a long pause – punishment in its own right – before Touraj replied, “I think you can be forgiven, child. It involves you. And at any rate, we have bigger concerns now.”
Once again, he was looking at her. She had risen to her knees now, and was looking over the papers sprayed across Touraj’s desk. Slowly, I stood up and took a place behind her, watching over her shoulder. She didn’t linger on the text, which I guessed she couldn’t read, but she did seem taken by the pages with pictures on them, picking them up or moving them to get a better view. When I looked at them closer, I shuddered.
They were all images of yazata.
The Ankorites don’t pray to the Holy Queen Nuryana, as the rest of the Ekklesia do. While the Ekklesia see the yazata as the embodiment of the Great Fire made flesh, and beyond contestation, we see them as merely being closer to the source. Our holy epics, passed down for generations since a time beyond memory, tell that the Great Fire, or Holy Creator, forged the world from himself on the First Day. The land was made from his flesh, mountains from his bones, the waters and seas from his blood, the wind and clouds from his breath, the sun and moon from his eyes. He forged his body into a home for all things, filled with his spirit, and that spirit caused life to spring up in the world – plants in the morning, then the creatures who eat the plants in the midday, and the hunters who eat other creatures at dusk. Then, in the deepest dark of the night, the most precious race of all sprang up, to be a light in the darkness – the yazata.
But then the story becomes tangled. The Ekklesia says that man was just another animal until the yazata came to teach him how to live rightly, and that after the yazata gave him the gift of teaching him all the tools and skills to live, that man became jealous and angry and turned away from the yazata, taking his newfound knowledge with him. This, says the Ekklesia, gave rise to the Savage Age, a time of barbaric darkness marked by fear, ignorance, and the power of the Unclean Ones, the Darakos.
The Ankorite Order follows a slightly different story of events. A slight difference that led to their break with the Ekklesia long ago. We believe that mankind was descended from the first of the yazata. As the generations went by, those first yazata became further from the divine, and more and more mortal, gradually losing the knowledge and powers of holy beings. We still we retain our Atash, the spark of our once-divinity, but as that spark has been passed through the generations, it has been shrouded by mortal concerns and failings, so we must struggle to hear it.
But the true yazata…the Holy Ones… their Atash is unclouded, a burning, unfettered conduit to the All Light, the spirit of the Creator that still burns at the center of all things. Unlike us, lifetimes removed from divine heritage, they are torches lit directly from the Great Fire itself. And so we Ankorites pray for the Holy One, the yazata Queen, pray that she may listen to her Atash and hear the divine wisdom, and that she may stay safe and continue to lead Quarai.
Unlike like the Ekklesia, we do not see them as Gods, projections of the Creator in the flesh, so to speak. Instead, we see them as the highest of mortals; a race both mortal and divine. Beings that can stand within the full glory of the All-Light. Blessed. Holy.
I looked at the girl. In front of her, she touched a picture on the open page of a book. Because they believe the yazata are a manifestation of the Creator, the Blessed Circle do not allow anyone to look at Nuryana, or at the Seven Lords in their time, seeing it as blasphemy. This also means that they permit no paintings or sculptures of their holy rulers. However, yazata live a long time, if they even have a lifespan, and it has not always been so. The Ekklesia do not allow anyone but the ordained to read their holy books, but the Ankorites also have secret writings and manuscripts, kept hidden and passed through the generations. Including pictures.
She was staring at a picture of the Seven Lords.
I looked at Touraj. “Is she…” I felt my throat tighten a little, and swallowed hard. “…is this real? Is she really…one of them?”
Touraj watched her trace the image with a slender, pale finger. She was talking softly to herself in her strange language, intent on the picture. The Arkigos looked up at me and, with the barest movement of his head, nodded once.
I stepped backward and half-tripped, half-fell into a chair. “Are you sure?” I asked, barely able to get a whisper out. “I mean, how do you know…”
“We’ve been up all night going over the texts, the Elders and I,” Touraj answered, motioning toward the piles on his desk. He sounded exhausted. “We’ve been through every record, not just descriptions, but accounts of the appearances themselves, when and how… From the description you gave us of what you saw, and the reports of Brethren who went back into the hills and examined the site, it seems certain.”
“Then she is…”
“Blessed,” Touraj supplied quietly, watching her pore over the images.
I felt overwhelmed, and the old familiar tightness gripped at my chest. I leaned back pressed my eyes shut, trying to block out the panic in darkness. “What’s going to happen?” I heard myself asking.
“That depends. Some of the Elders feel that we should reveal her presence, even take her to Iysarav itself.” I’d have bet I knew exactly which Elders he was talking about. “However, something in me says that would be unwise… I am sending runners to the other enclaves of our Order. I will meet with the other Arkigos and Arkiganas, and we will decide how to go forward, and how we may best help her. I pray the Great Fire will illuminate our path. For now, she will keep company with you.” He paused a beat. “As you no doubt heard.”
Too numb to feel ashamed, I nodded. I didn’t want to ask the next question. I didn’t want to feel like the Elders might be right. But I did feel that way – and so I asked.
“Why me?”
Touraj waited, and I feared he might not answer at all, that he might have changed his mind and lost confidence in me. Now that the reality was washing over me, I wasn’t at all certain I had that much confidence in myself. But at last he spoke.
“Dhavi…there are many things in this world that seem certain to be intentional that, in the end, turn out to have been accidents. Coincidences. Likewise, there are things that on the surface appear to be random chance that have a deeper purpose. I believe this is of the second type. I believe that it wasn’t chance that you were the one up on the hillside, that you saw her entrance into this world. I think you were there because you were meant to be. You two are tied to each other; I see it as clearly as the sunrise. And since you’ve been chosen, you must live up to the gift that has been given to you. You must care for her, protect her. She is here for a purpose – it’s up to you to help her fulfill it.”
“But I…” I searched for the words. “I’m no one! I’m not a hero or a soenel or a saint, I’m not even a Brother! Why would I be picked? How could I be picked? I can’t help her fulfill some divine purpose; I can’t even go for a run without collapsing and my own body suffocating me! There must be someone else, someone better…”
He smiled. “Yet you didn’t run away from what you witnessed, when many men would have fled. You ran in bravely, found her, clothed her, helped her to safety. The fact that you brought her back here seems to say that you are worthy of the task.”
I shook my head, incredulous. “That was just helping her up the hillside! I don’t think that’s all she came here for, and I’m hardly a fit choice for anything but gathering herbs and scribing. She needs an escort! She needs a holy guard! She needs – ”
I stopped. The girl had turned around and was looking at me in obvious distress. She said something, asked something. I didn’t understand, but her voice was full of hurt. I hadn’t realized I was shouting, and I lowered my voice. “No, no, it’s okay,” I said quickly, trying to be soothing. “It’s alright. Just…” My voice faded away as she walked over to me, halting. Her blue eyes were wide as the sky.
“Dhavi…leave?”
I froze, and I saw the look of shock on Touraj’s face behind her. She spoke. Not gibberish, she spoke Quaraian! How? Yesterday she couldn’t understand a word. I was stunned beyond speech of my own – all I could do was stare.
“Dhavi leave?” she repeated in a tiny, sad voice.
This time I heard what she said, not just the words. I felt like an utter traitor, like I had just kicked a puppy. My heart felt like breaking. “No.” I chocked down the lump in my throat. “No, of course I’m not leaving.”
She hesitated, then carefully picked up my hand in both of hers. “Stay?”
“Yes. Stay.”
Her features slowly broke into a smile. She tugged on my hand, and led me back up to Touraj’s desk. Then with one set of fingers firmly entwined in mine – convinced, apparently, that I wasn’t leaving now – she went back to looking through the pictures.
Touraj looked at me. “You told me once, long ago, that it was better to be someone of care and comfort than of physical strength. That it was better to be someone who nurtures life than someone trained to destroy it. You chose that name, because that is who you are.” He looked at me, eyes bright. “She needs a friend, Dhavi.”
I looked down at her, fine blonde hair spilling over her small shoulders. I felt her tiny fingers laced between mine. I knew he was right. He was right about everything. And I knew I couldn’t say no.
