fourteen #3
But, mostly, soul-seers serviced other julah who wanted to know who they should marry, assuming their parents weren’t forcing them into something, regardless of how compatible the couple was on a spiritual level.
“Soulmates are defined by having identical auras,” said a scholarly article that had been translated from Temple sources.
It also included a graphic depicting a man and woman standing side-by-side, their auras glowing green with red particles.
“Most soulmates are prime for romantic partnership, but there are rare instances of family members being soulmates as well. Also, there are records of same-sex and opposite-sex soulmates who have a platonic relationship that have been known to unite disparate families and spawn successful business
endeavors.”
That was what interested Sulim the most—the fact that soulmates could be same-sex.
Something about us upset Lady Joiya… That was all Sulim could think as she scrolled through images depicting “auras that are similar enough to inspire close friendships and successful marriages, but are not soulmates.”
I wonder what it was. Graella and her fiancé had not set things off.
It was Sonall who had noticeably excited the priestess.
Then me…
Anything Joiya had said after that was very much of the yeah, yeah variety, as if she merely told everyone what she knew they wanted to hear.
Well, Sulim had walked away from that knowing that she and her husband were not soulmates.
Which was fine with her. It would have blown her away to find out that not only was her soulmate a man, but she had met him!
She said Graella’s soulmate was present… Joiya had not confirmed it was Lewin. The more Sulim thought about it…
“Now what are you doing?” There Sonall was, startling her.
Yet this time, his wife was not up to something she’d rather other people not know.
She brazenly kept the windows open on her screen as he removed his outer layers of clothing and sat on the couch in his pants and a light pullover sweater.
At least he didn’t smell so strongly of horses this time.
“You know me.” Sulim focused her sight on a throwaway comment someone left in the discussion section of the article. “Always snooping on people.”
“As long as you’re not snooping on me. Wait. Have you snooped on us before?”
Sulim ignored him. She was engrossed in the words before her.
“No mention that every time a soul-seer has tried to catch a glimpse of Lady Joiya’s aura, they go temporarily blind?”
There was one reply. “This article is from before she was born.”
Sulim looked up Lady Joiya’s birth year—impossibly long ago, of course—and looked for a more recent article that might cover this. She included the keywords Joiya and blind.
She found one hit in Basic.
“…The Soul-Seer Territa Lashav later relayed the blindness she suffered when attempting to see Joiya Dunsman’s aura. ‘It’s known that we can’t see each other’s auras, but we can catch a glimpse. A hue of color. Maybe a hint of glitter or something. But with her…
all I saw was some entity pushing me away. To not see what mortals are not meant to behold from the Void.’”
The article continued with more quotes.
“She went on to mention Lady Joiya’s daughter, who was only fourteen at the time. ‘The Young Lady Dunsman, though, had a gorgeous aura. I was grateful I saw it first before pushing my talents too far. It was this gauzy,
foggy red with whole galaxies of gold stardust and a qahpin perched atop her head with its wings spread out, as if it were about to launch into the sky.’ It was as gorgeous as her father’s, which is famous for having a live snake coiled around his throat.”
Naturally, Sulim looked up what a qahpin was.
“A mythical bird made of fire, said to extinguish itself every ten millennia only to be reborn again,” Sulim muttered.
“Said to represent the cycle of reincarnation from the Void. The Hellenic tribes of Earth call them phoinix, where they are depicted similarly and represent similar motifs to the ancient julah creatures of myth and legend related to the First Epoch.”
“The First Epoch, huh?” Sonall’s voice almost made Sulim leap out of her chair. She had no idea he had come up behind her. “Sounds like a stupidly long time ago.”
Sulim’s hand remained over her heart. “Probably a few million, yes.” She had read about the Epochs of the julah calendar more than once. “The First Epoch ended around the time of the founding of the First Sixteen Houses and the creation of humans. According to the julah.”
“They don’t have records of how we humans were created. Why would they know that?”
“Some knowledge survives across millions of years. Some things don’t.”
“I’ll take your word on it.” He turned around again. “Since I love you.”
She did not respond. Sulim was instantly sucked back into the world of research.
When she beheld a modern artist’s rendition of a qahpin, she lost her breath.
It’s truly beautiful. Bright red plumage, gold feathertips, and beady black eyes that, when she peered closer, contained the motif of an entire universe within them.
The caption remarked that it represented the infinite lives one could live in the reincarnation process.
Sulim looked up what such creatures represented in julah soul-seering. Unfortunately, nobody really knew. They only referred to what such creatures represented in the Temple, such as the qahpin, or phoenix, for reincarnation and the transient nature of the soul through the Void.
The snake, however, represented the creation of the universe and the first breath of mortality. It was often depicted eating its own tail to signify the endless expanse of the universe. After the triangle, which represented perfect balance, the circle was the most sacred shape.
“The three sides of the Temple triangle,” she read out loud again, this time with the hope that her husband couldn’t hear, “are often depicted in religious art using common sets of three. One such example is the three primary colors—red, yellow, and blue.”
“I like blue!” Sonall called. How the hell could he hear her?
She looked up what blue represented in Temple tradition.
“The Blue Line of the Temple triangle is the outermost layer of the Void. It represents the mortal world, such as pleasure, art, language, and the bounties of being alive.”
Sulim sat back in her chair. Hadn’t Joiya said something about blue in Graella’s aura?
“Those with blue auras are associated with mortal matters and tend to be grounded in making merry, indulging in pessimism, and moving forward instead of dwelling on the past.”
There had to be more to this.
“The Yellow Line represents spiritual matters and is the link between the mortal world and the origin of the universe. It’s associated with the Temple, the bodyless soul, and the personal connection one has with the Void.”
Only one more to discover.
“The Red Line is the Void. It is the matter of the universe that unites spiritualism and mortality. It is often used in religious art to represent the unknown creator.”
Sulim clicked on something else.
“Those with red auras are said to be deeply connected to the fabric of the universe.”
She went back to the first article she read about Joiya’s aura. There was another quote from a soul-seer who claimed to have gone blind for several months after Joiya asked her to try.
“Red. So much red. But gold. Blinding gold. Such force pushed me away, as if one all-seeing eye angrily condemned me for looking above my station. The eye was… it was red. Scathing, bloodlike red. All the blood flowing through the universe.
And all else I remember is a tinge of blue emanating from Lady Joiya’s body itself.”
Apparently, Joiya had read this and commented on it.
“‘As it so happens, I love all three primary colors.’”
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Sonall said when his wife got up from her chair after turning off her monitor. “Everything okay?”
She didn’t move. “There’s some weird shit going on in this house. I bet on it.”
He shrugged. What else was he supposed to do while Sulim thought back on that description of Mira’s aura? There’s a phoenix in this house. She didn’t quite know what that meant. But she knew it felt familiar.