thirty-two #3
When Mira looked at the door, all she saw was wood and old, faded enchantments that barely reverberated in the air anymore. Not whatever her father saw in his memories.
“Your mother had been acting strange, but I chalked it up to wedding anxiety. I was mostly removed from the preparations, you know. I left it all up to her and our mothers. So, I didn’t know… well, I didn’t know she was pregnant again, for one thing.”
Nerilis turned to his daughter, letting the unsaid hang between them.
With me. After dozens of miscarriages over the centuries, Joiya finally carried to term right after her wedding.
“She had stopped telling me of every instance of pregnancy. I guess to absolve me of any guilt I felt for my involvement.”
In the five hundred years Mira had known her father, that was the closest he ever got to admitting he had marital relations with her mother.
“I should have paid closer attention, though. She was going through something I had never fathomed, despite having spent the majority of my life with her. Because when I woke up in the middle of the night, she was gone. And she had done something to keep me asleep so I wouldn’t follow her.”
“You mean with sorcery?”
“I’m still not sure. Your mother has abilities I’m still not aware of. As the centuries go by, she hides more from me, but probably for my own good as High Priest. We are talking about a woman who has a dozen pocket dimensions she maintains at any time.
It’s where I meet her when we want to truly be alone for a few hours in the evening.”
“Including recently?”
Nerilis smirked at his daughter’s insight. “Yes. Your mother cannot be tamed by a mere tattoo. She remarks upon it as if it’s a bug bite. Itchy, but she goes about her life doing as she pleases. Including teleporting when you’re not looking.”
“Yeah, I knew it. But she at least didn’t flaunt it in front of me.”
“You were curtailed, yes?”
Her ears were red to be asked that. Yet as she took a deep breath, she admitted, “I’m nowhere near as talented as you two. I know it disappoints you.”
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“You were still one of the most talented at the Academy when you attended. You still passed your priestly training with flying colors. In any other family, you would have been a wunderkind all the same.”
“Well, I’m in this family. You’re my father, and she’s my mother.”
“Yes… sometimes I wonder if your soul finally taking hold in her was why events transpired that night.”
“What do you mean?”
“It took a lot for me to fight whatever force had kept me trapped in this room in front of us. When I finally broke through, it was because I heard your mother calling for help. Whatever happened, it was against her will—like she was being abducted by the Void itself.”
“Ba…”
“Follow me.”
He retraced the path he had followed that night when he chased down his soon-to-be wife, answering her pleas for help.
While I was already inside of her. Mira knew it was impossible to remember her time in the womb, but she wondered if somewhere, deep in her DNA, there was an imprint from that moment.
Whatever incident reshaped her mother’s life.
“We followed her this way.”
Mira stopped at the top of the stairs leading down to the back path toward the heart of the High Temple. “We?”
Her father glanced at her over his shoulder before motioning for her to keep following. “Ramaron was with us, yes.”
Of course he was. He had implied as much over the years, but Mira knew she would never get details. Until now, apparently.
“Everything here was filled with this… substance.”
Nerilis gestured to the walls that now closed in around them as they descended the stairs.
This passage was mostly used by support staff and priests in residence getting to their assignments.
Even Mira didn’t know much about where some of these passages went, since the only time she came to these dorms was when she was dating someone.
“A fog. Some kind of liquid flooding the halls. I don’t know what it was, but it was dark and cursed me for following.”
He stopped at the bottom of the stairs and turned to his daughter.
“All I could hear was her calling for me, though. I had never heard her so scared.”
“Ba, what’s going on? Why are you telling me this now?”
He walked on ahead now that she had caught up. “Because after what has happened recently, you have a right to know about that night. If not from your mother, then from me. If it angers her, she can take it out on me.”
“What happened, exactly? It’s like the one thing I can’t ask her about.”
“Your mother…” Nerilis hesitated, arms wrapped behind his back as his daughter instinctively reached out to steady herself against his shoulder.
They so rarely touched, especially intimately, that she was always surprised at how angular his limbs could be.
Not so different from me, after all. Mira’s mother was soft and feminine.
Finally, something else she had inherited from this man who seemed to come from another bloodline.
“Your mother values being alive more than anything else. From the moment I first met her, when she was barely thirty, she had a plan. She would go to the Academy, become a priestess, get married for love, and become a mother. She wanted the ultimate womanly life path,
but it would be under her terms. None of it was easy. She had to fight for every step. My family was adamant that we never marry. And as for being a mother… well, you know about that.”
“Yeah.”
They slowly continued down a wider hallway.
Mira realized they were heading toward the Temple proper, where her father held his sermons, and many julah had married.
From the signs of things, there would be a wedding in a few days.
House Pilah and House Sanarah. Mira could not remember who was high-ranking enough to warrant a High Temple wedding.
“So, when I heard her cries for help like that, I knew her life was on the line. She would do anything to avoid death. Especially with our wedding in the morning.”
Mira held her breath as they entered the main Temple, where the largest voya-yantrak on Yahzen hung suspended from the ceiling over the stone altar.
Rows of pews held a few hundred people at any time, but tonight, it was empty.
Either Nerilis knew nobody would be in here now, or he had done something to “encourage” everyone to vacate of their own volition.
I bet he’s been erecting wards of disinterest this whole time.
Nerilis probably did it whenever he breathed—just to have some privacy.
Her father did not stop in front of the altar, however. He continued, passing through another door that led to one of the most restricted zones in the Temple.
“Ba…”
He nodded, a silent allowance to her.
“By the time we reached her,” he said, “she had made it this far.” Nerilis pointed toward the end of another hall. “Do you know what’s that way?”
“The Sanctuary.”
“Yes. The source of all life, and the thinnest veil between here and the Void.”
He continued walking. Mira couldn’t believe she was allowed to follow. The only people allowed this far are the High Priest, the Keeper, and the highest-ranking Premiers. Her parents checked two of those boxes.
“Are you sure it’s okay?”
Nerilis snorted. “I’m the High Priest, aren’t I? If I say it’s fine, then it’s fine. Honestly…”
He ran his hand along the wall, which was decorated with vintage paintings depicting some of the most beloved images in Temple doctrine.
The Creation. The First Dance of Life. The Founding of Garlahza.
The Consecration of the High Temple. The Birth of Humans.
The First Sixteen. All acts from the First Epoch, which were written into the holiest texts, might as well have been legends.
Mira also rested her hand on the image of The First Dance of Life, which depicted the unknown creator—as a woman—dancing upon the virginal earth, flowers springing from her steps, and the breeze forming through her hair. As the picture continued, the flowers slowly morphed into the first julah.
“I’m afraid it doesn’t look special.”
She turned her attention back to her father, who escorted her to the door at the end of the hallway. “I’ve seen photos of it, of course.”
“So you know. It’s nothing special. We just don’t want people in it.”
With a wave of his hand, her father unlocked the door to the inner rooms that led to the Sanctuary.
Mira inhaled again, knowing that this was the most sacred thing her father, the High Priest, had ever shared with her.
Yet right now, he felt less like a father and more like the Temple mentor who wanted to test her mortal fortitude.
“Ah…”
Nerilis was right. The Sanctuary was nothing special to look at, yet Mira instantly felt the weight of its importance upon her angular shoulders.
As she stood next to her father in front of the holiest altar in the universe, she beheld the stone-gray walls, the singular light source above them, and the delicate linen laid upon the altar.
Along the edges of the off-white cloth were hand-stitched runes that were supposedly the written form of the Harmony, the language the ancient julah spoke and wrote in the First Epoch.
“Your mother restitched these runes,” Nerilis said. “It’s one of her duties as Keeper. She’s the only one allowed in here by herself. Well, and me, I suppose, but I rarely have the need.”
Mira knelt before the altar, slowly extending her hand to the runic fringe in case her father forbade her. But he said nothing, and Mira brushed her fingers along her mother’s needlework.
“She once told me that these are the same runes that have been stitched here for as long as our recorded history,” Nerilis said of Joiya. “Even the cloth is ancient. The Keeper uses sorcery to maintain its integrity. Your mother is quite serious about it.”
For the first time since leaving Arrah, Mira was properly distracted from her pain. “What do they say?”
“We don’t know. Even if we could transliterate the runes, we don’t know how to speak the Harmony anymore. Our ancestors did not find it pertinent to record these things, apparently.”
“Ma would say that something probably happened to prevent them from doing so.”
“Indeed.”