thirty-five
Cerilyn; Federation Year, 4534
Her breath was caught in her throat as she jerked up in bed, struggling to remember where she kept her nightly glass of water.
Her hand vainly searched the table next to her, careful not to knock over the cup that barely had any water left in it.
Before she drank in the darkness of her cell, Mira stirred her finger in the water—it needed all the filtering it could get.
“Ah…” Her head throbbed as she sat on the edge of her bed, fingers digging into the single sheet she slept with. Even with the air conditioner struggling above her, it was far too hot to sleep with a blanket in the rudimentary Temple she called her own. “I’m still here.”
Her arrest. Her trial. Going to prison. Everything after.
It must have all been a strange dream. Why else would she be back on Cerilyn, wearing priestly garbs and choking on the humid air?
“Christ,” she muttered, evoking an expletive that was popular on Earth. Where do I know that from? Someone close to her watched a lot of broadcasts from Earth. They’re really invested in something called the Catholic Church. Yes, Mira knew of it. Her mother had been fond of…
Her mother. Who? How could she have known?
“Ugh.” She forced herself up, tapping her finger to her temple as she paced in her cell-like room.
The Temple in Shield Town, the village attached to the fortress of Second Tribe, was smaller than most outpost Temples.
She lived on the second floor, where wards and evocations kept the drunks and degenerates from bothering her, but she lived an austere life with minimal furniture and few windows.
Outside of her bedroom was a simple bathroom, a small kitchen, and a private office. To live here for years was to go mad.
Well, she had, apparently. Because she felt ill just from waking up early in the evening.
I need to go downstairs. I have things to do.
She thought that like a mantra, as if it gave her real direction while she sorted herself out.
Mira didn’t chance the stairs; she teleported down into the Temple proper.
The most muted of lights were on, and that late in the evening, few people helped themselves into the one unlocked door.
What an idiot. I left it unlocked? No. Not entirely.
She had erected a ward of indifference that only allowed a select few to pass through. But who?
Mira brushed some dust off one of the wooden pews.
She didn’t usually struggle to wake up this badly, but perhaps she had inhaled too much hedpah during service or foolishly tried someone’s drugs again.
The shit on Cerilyn is wild, but good. The barbarians here could get her any matter of snortable or edible.
Even injectables, but Mira did not deal in those.
“Hey! You up yet?”
Those words—that voice—froze Mira where she stood. No. What? Comforting. Confusing. Constructed entirely of dream worlds and heartbreaking memories.
“Yeah?” she croaked. “In here.”
It was like her throat was not her own, yet Mira was aware of forming the words and uttering the sounds. Through the side door that she had left unlocked came a feminine figure clad in mercenary black and a bluish-green necklace. Her blond hair preceded her.
Mira no longer knew who she was, let alone where she was.
“Wow.” The woman who slammed her hands on her hips and stood a few feet away from Mira chuckled to see how out of it she was.
“I’m gone for a few days, and this is how you treat yourself? I told you to stop experimenting with whatever those sad sacks give you. Just because you’re a julah doesn’t mean you should be setting a bad example for all the humans and their addictive personalities around here.”
Mira was still speechless.
“Did you hit your head?”
“It… feels like I did. I can barely wake up. You ever have one of those dreams that feels so real that when you wake up, you don’t know who you are anymore?”
She kept talking as the blond woman approached with a self-assured swagger that simultaneously made Mira fall in love and tested her own discernment of reality.
“I feel like I just lived another life. You were there, but…”
She said nothing as the woman encircled both arms around her, swaying them both in the middle of the aisle. “You were dead.”
“Ah, geez,” Sulim said, gaining momentum as they spun in a tiny circle with her in the lead.
“You have a bad dream about me every time I have a contract. Relax, I just got back from stealing corporate information on Terra III. Just a walk in the park for me. They still don’t know what hit them. Now…”
Those arms raised to her shoulders, and the feminine, giggly girl that Mira fell in love with the moment she came to Cerilyn reappeared.
“I’ve got some confessions to make, Priestess. You don’t even know what I’ve been up to these past few days.”
Her pout was real. Her laughter afterward was surely real as well.
Yet Mira still spun in that slow circle as if none of this should be real.
I was just in another bed. In Garlahza. The High Priest’s apartment.
But that’s impossible… I haven’t lived there since my father abdicated. Her mother had been there. But…
Her mother was gone. Mira had never known her mother. How could she have been there? So familiar?
“What’s going on?” Sulim asked, suddenly more serious. “Asha.”
That pet name brought Mira back to the moment. There she was—her Sulim. Who else could it be? She’s dead in her own pool of blood, on top of her husband. Husband? Since when did Sulim have a husband? Gardiah Estate. First Tribe mercenaries.
“I’m gonna get you some smelling salts,” Sulim teased as they came full circle again. Only this time, Mira looked up, over Sulim’s head, and toward the humble altar.
She nearly threw up.
There, where the voya-yantrak should have stood on the altar, was a life-sized statue of her mother with one arm held up toward the ceiling and the other extended to the viewer. The High Priestess. Mira’s mother, Ascended when she was born.
No, no, no, no…
She was there. She was elsewhere. Another life. This life. Mira understood now, and she had never been so enlightened.
The old world was gone. Now she was here, with Sulim back in her arms, but everything had changed.
Yet she knew this world as well.
My mother Ascended the day I was born. My father put me in the care of my grandparents while he rose in the ranks in the Temple.
When he suddenly became the youngest High Priest ever, he brought me to the High Temple.
My grandmother, Lady Lerenan, helped raise me there.
Uncle Ramaron was there, too. They were always so busy doing important research, but Uncle Ramaron always gave me attention.
I went to the Academy, where I was treated like divine royalty.
I hated it. I had no friends. Hardly any love life because people were scared of me, or thought I was too pure to be touched.
I look just like my mother. Just like her.
It scares them. She’s the holiest creature in the Temple.
I look just like her. I became a priestess to understand her. My father abdicated. He’s…
Mira didn’t think about that any further.
She looked into Sulim’s happy hazel eyes and merely remembered the day she first established herself in this Temple under an assumed name, and this young mercenary wandered in out of curiosity.
Not even a year later, she was in Mira’s bed, breaking every rule the Temple had bestowed upon Mira.
Because she liked doing that, didn’t she? Breaking rules.
“Oh, it’s good to see you.” Memories of Joiya in the antechamber, holding her daughter’s hand, began to fade. “I missed you like you can’t believe.”
Sulim bit her lip in barely contained excitement as she kissed Mira on the cheek. “I think I can believe it. Now, about my ‘confessions?’”
Mira had a thousand questions she needed answered. But for right now, she would embrace this gift from the Void.
Whenever work and extracurriculars gave her a moment to herself, Mira sank into the depths of her memory and realized that something strange had happened.
It was like two versions of her attempted to coexist.
For the most part, she went about her business, tending to the Temple, writing her sermons, communicating with the High Temple back on Yahzen, and hanging out with the people in town she had carved out as trustworthy, but it wasn’t enough.
She would go to the bathroom, take a tea break, or—Void forbid—go to sleep, and suddenly she was a Mira from another world, pounding down the door and screaming at the “her of now” to listen.
For one thing, wasn’t it bizarre that she swore she had a mother?
Mira didn’t have a mother. The woman who had carried and birthed her had shortly Ascended afterward, leaving behind a groom and an infant to figure out what had happened.
Mira didn’t remember most of it—and when she was old enough to live through some of the fallout of her mother’s Ascension, House Dunsman sent her away for tutoring.
They would have had me raised by the same three nannies and tutors on Sah Zenlit if it weren’t for my grandmother.
The mother of the Ascended, who dodged her own problems as she fixated her grief on her granddaughter.
Lady Yariah Lerenan had been Mira’s surrogate mother, helping her to understand what had happened and what it meant for their family.
Fame. Awe. Anger. Yariah bore the brunt of it while her son-in-law threw himself into the Temple with only brief visits to Mira, who barely recognized Nerilis Dunsman as her own father.
Yet it’s like there’s a world where I saw him almost every day.
Maybe not at the dinner table, but somewhere in her home, claiming a kiss from his doting wife and tolerating his toddler attempting to climb his long legs.
He used to lift me and pretend to drop me on the furniture. But he would catch me at the last minute. Toss me around in the air while my mother chided him. I loved it so much.
She had loved her mother so much.
“Of course, I love my mother.” Mira dithered between these two worlds as she sat in the first row of pews in her humble Temple.
Fans churned in the ceiling, but it took much of her passive sorcery to help empty the main room of the humidity that plagued Cerilyn.