fourteen #2
The trio of Joiya, Ramaron, and Nerilis was equally dedicated to the Temple and the metaphysical research they conducted within it.
Mira would rather spend her life doing almost anything else—and she used to be a priestess!
Ramaron used to be a priest, too, before he had to leave the Temple on the eve of his first assignment due to his mother suddenly dying of the julah plague.
But after acclimating himself to the title of Master Marlow, he and Joiya began deep research with the Temple’s approval.
Both of them had their names attached to some generation-defining metaphysical research, and that recently included the Process, which was an intentional reincarnation cycle a dying soul entered.
Before Mira was convicted of murder, there had been talks of moving on to human test subjects.
I had to go and wreck it all, huh?
“There’s something your father has asked us to research in your absence, my heart,” Joiya eventually said. “When we had to suspend our research into the Process, we ended up softly investigating the concept of parallel worlds.”
“I thought that was a given.” Mira sipped her tea before it got too cold. “That multiple worlds exist nearly identical to this one.”
“Yes, but we know next to nothing about them. Such as whether we can even visit these other worlds, or how much change there is between them. For example, from the infinity theorem, we can postulate that there is not just one, but multiple worlds where you were never born, my heart. Or me,
for that matter.”
“Or me,” Ramaron interrupted.
“How does that change things? Can we find out? How do these ripples affect the universe as a whole? Do they all originate from the same Void, or are there multiple Voids? Did the Void create these multiple universes? Or does it go back to the unknown creator?”
Mira thoughtfully chewed her sandwich. “See, this is the difference between you and me—I never contemplate these things.”
“I can’t help it. And I drag people like him into it.”
“To be fair,” Ramaron said, “this is basically what I trained for in the Academy. If I weren’t destined to be Master Marlow, I would have gunned for a life of academia.”
“That’s right. You’re the one who should replace Master Obello in the Academy when he finally retires.” Joiya accepted the sandwich her daughter handed her, but didn’t eat it. “Don’t you think he’d be a terrific lecturer?”
Mira shrugged. “I honestly don’t know if anyone can be better than Master Obello.”
The one thing Mira shared with the people who raised her was that they all had the same adviser at The Academy.
For her mother and the others, it had been a matter of course—Master Obello was the head of the Spiritual Studies department, which concerned itself with theoretical metaphysics and intense inspections of the Void, the state of the soul, and the origin of julah sorcery.
For Mira, there had simply been no other department that gravitated toward her more.
And Master Obello liked her. And Mira was a powerful sorceress in her own right.
It just happened. He was one of the very few people beyond this table who knew about Mira’s imprisonment and had sent her letters of encouragement while she was serving her time.
“It’s not about being better,” Joiya said. “It’s about who is the best replacement.”
“God, I am always second best in everything, aren’t I?” Ramaron mused.
“Aw. You’re first in my heart as my favorite male,” Mira said.
“Now, that’s a high honor. Don’t let your father hear, though. He’ll get jealous of me.”
“I think it’s safe to say that Nerilis already knows,” Joiya said, before finally realizing she had food in her hand. “What is this? I don’t recognize the sauce.”
Mira didn’t want to say it, but she was pretty sure it was the local Arrahite “equine divine,” which was a mix of horse spit and vinegar. They put horse in everything here. Most of the cafés and restaurants had it on the menu.
But since Joiya loved horses, both Mira and Ramaron pretended they didn’t know.
“So, why did you two need to be here to do this multiverse research?” Mira asked while her mother ate. “What does that have anything to do with what you saw yesterday?”
Ramaron also looked like he wanted to know that answer. Yet he dropped everything when Ma said to come now. Granted, Joiya wasn’t the type to cry wolf about these things, so…
Joiya swallowed. “Don’t worry about the details, my heart. It just has to do with the strength of those auras in a place that has a thinner veil between the mortal world and the Void.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Don’t you know? This part of Arrah is rumored among Temple scholars to have one of the thinnest veils to the Void. Let alone in the human world.”
“That so? Arrah is completely colonized by the Federation, right?”
“Yes, like the Terras and Qahrain, they are original Federation colonies. There are no known humans to have lived here pre-Federation.”
“Interesting,” Mira noted. “Unlike Cachaya.”
“Many planets have been forcibly annexed by the Federation,” Ramaron said. “Only a matter of time before they do it to Earth.” He glanced at Joiya. “Probably in our lifetimes, once they’re done studying it.”
“But they can’t fully annex Yahzen,” Mira pointed out. “We have a treaty.”
Ramaron laughed. “Even without it, I’d like to see them try.”
Joiya put down the rest of her sandwich and stared out the window.
When she rejoined the conversation, she repeated, “We’ve got a lot of work to do. The easy part will be convincing that family to let us stay there indefinitely. The hard part will be conducting our research without tipping them off.”
“You two could always move in with me here,” Ramaron offered.
“The Temple apartment only has one bed, Ram.”
“Never stopped you before,” he said.
Mira sighed. “Are you two gonna be like this the whole time we’re here? Because I can only stomach so much heterosexual flirting.”
“Take that word out of your mouth, young lady,” Ramaron said with absolutely no serious bite whatsoever. “I’ve got a reputation to protect, just like you do.”
Joiya finally loosened up a little when she told her daughter, “You can stay with him instead, if you’d like. Nobody would ever think anything is going on between you two.”
Bet so. Besides the age difference that inspired more assumptions about a guardianship than romantic—blech!—both Ramaron and Mira were known around the julah-sphere to be…
Not interested.
“I’m fine staying out in the country,” Mira said. “It’s far more interesting than town.”
Joiya glanced at her, but it was Ramaron who peered right into Mira’s visage and tried to act like he wasn’t dissecting her every thought. Was he on to her? Did he know about the cute girl who lived on the country estate?
Did he know that she was married?
“We’ll sort it out once we figure out how we’re going about this,” Ramaron said, refocusing on Joiya. “Now, I’ve got availability for a while. All I was doing back home was reading and playing with dogs.”
Speaking of…
“Don’t be surprised if the Temple here doesn’t let you keep him around.” Mira pointed to the tan dog sleeping beneath the table. “You might be able to keep the humans in here from caring, but that priest is something else.”
“Who is the priest here?” Ramaron reached down to pet his dog on the head. “I haven’t even looked into it since getting here.”
“Oh, it’s Kanhith.” Joiya grinned, as if either of them should know who that was. “Kanhith Narath. This is his first assignment, so he’s quite young.” She leaned in across the table. “And one of Obello’s, if you know what I mean.”
Indeed, that meant he would be inclined to let Joiya and Ramaron have the run of the place, and not just because of who they were.
And he is pretty young. He was around Mira’s age, so for him to have a position as priest in one of Arrah’s bucolic Temples meant he had impressed the right people.
I wonder if Master Obello had anything to do with it.
He often had the ear of Mira’s father, the High Priest.
And what the High Priest wanted in his ranks, he often got.
“You still haven’t explained why everyone’s auras had you in such a tizzy. Let alone what they have to do with a thin veil to the Void or multiple universes.”
Joiya patted her daughter’s arm. “In due time.”
Of course she would say that.
Sulim spent the afternoon on her computer, researching as much as she could about the events happening around her.
She had the room to herself, since Sonall was out in the nearby pasture and Graella was distracted by her fiancé. Last time I saw those two, they were running off. Sulim didn’t want to think about it, but she was happy for her sister-in-law, who had a lot of pent-up… energy.
So, without anyone to bother her, Sulim opened a notebook and wrote down anything that sparked her interest.
Such as who the last chief of Second Tribe had been, and who it was now, since Mira left behind a power vacuum she didn’t care to claim.
Sulim barely knew about tribal political structure on Cerilyn, but by the end of the afternoon, she knew plenty.
She also did as deep research as she could into auras and what the Temple let the masses know… which wasn’t much. Either because they don’t know much themselves… Or, Sulim surmised, there was a lot that the julah didn’t want the common human riffraff to ponder.
It wasn’t unusual for wealthier humans to pay for a soul-seer to analyze their family, especially when it came to courtship quarrels and inheritance conundrums.
But the poorer dregs (and that included the Gardiahs, who were wealthy by Arrahite standards but hardly so within the grand scheme of the Federation) had to rely on begging their local priests, which only worked if they were a soul-seer.
One thing Sulim found was how rare it was.
And it’s always women. On top of detecting soulmates and prosperous business relations, they could also see if someone was pregnant and the state of the child’s health.