thirty-three
Shaken and exhausted, Mira decided to sleep in her old room in her parents’ apartment instead of going back to the inn. And now that she had some rapport with her father, she might even move back in for a while.
Yet as she fell into deep sleep—some of the deepest sleep in too long—she was haunted by a recurring presence.
“Can’t you leave me alone?” Mira was back in that darkened, suffocating world where every turn presented her with more of what she saw behind her eyelids.
It forced her to acknowledge the glowing blue eyes in front of her, never mind the voice penetrating her head.
“I’ve been through a lot. I just lost my soulmate. Do you know what that’s like?”
Rahara slightly tilted her head in Mira’s direction. “Yes.”
“Well… well, sorry.”
“She took him from me.” Was that a chuckle Mira heard bouncing around her head?
“I didn’t think I would tell you this tonight. But, yes. My soulmate was stolen by Her. All of my plans were destroyed. I had never felt such heartbreak, such betrayal. And yet…”
Another smug chuckle, this one dripping with a woman’s scorn that Mira was all too familiar with now.
“I still serve Her. I was created to serve Her.”
Mira had a hunch she knew who this “Her” was, after all. What she didn’t like were the implications that the Dreamwalker brought. “How about me? Was I created to serve Her, too?”
“You are something else entirely. The child who should have never been born.”
“My father suggested as much recently.”
“Your father…” Rahara’s bright blue eyes flickered.
Was she losing concentration? Would she disappear from Mira’s dream before this conversation ended?
All because she brought up her father? “He is the High Priest in your time, yes? Surely, by no accident. The Void knows what it wants. What it needs, even.”
“Do you visit him?”
Rahara hesitated. “It is difficult for me to travel so far into the future and find one single person. Now that I have tethered to your soul, it is a little easier, but still energy-consuming.”
“So, that’s a no.”
The woman with the blue cadence approached, her celestial arm brushing up against Mira’s.
Yet she felt nothing, as if Rahara truly had no corporeal form in the dream world.
Indeed, why would she? Even what little Mira knew of Dreamwalkers implied that they were like faded memories echoing across the world.
“She gave me a mission.” Rahara’s glowing blue eyes glanced in Mira’s direction.
“There is a reason I have come to find you, Mira Dunsman. What is millions of years ago for you was only a few hundred for me, yet her message was clear: find Her aberration, even if it means traversing the coils of the Void.”
“What does that mean?”
“The Void is and is not a singular entity.”
Rahara gestured around them, asking Mira to contemplate the construction of impenetrable darkness.
“It spreads. It echoes. It sails a sea of stars and the blood through your veins. She is the very manifestation, yet it is the Void that is omniscient. It sees all, knows all, and courts all through every year of existence… and iteration.”
“You’re talking about parallel worlds.”
“Yes. Perhaps I come from your world. Perhaps I am the Rahara that walked, loved, and practiced millions of years ago in this universe. Or, mayhaps, I come from another. I do not doubt that following your exact fingerprint will take me to strange places.”
“I don’t follow.”
A cascade of shimmering blue and silver followed Rahara as she stepped a lap around Mira, long, slender fingers tickling her throat as she tucked her head back and tilted her chin to the blackened sky. “What do you know of the Prophecy of the High Priestess?”
Mira didn’t like that this was being brought up again. “There is an ancient prophecy—perhaps from your time—that states the High Priestess will one day be incarnated and herald an apocalypse. Well, I’m leaving a few things out there… a few steps…”
Rahara took her time answering again. Her finger remained lodged against her throat, blues and golds now glittering around her effervescent skin. “Yes. An ancient prophecy. From my own time. I know this because I am a prophetess. It is my prophecy.”
Mira struggled to speak.
“Of course, She took credit for it. In a way, I suppose it came from Her. To me.”
Rahara lowered her arms and clenched her hands behind her back.
“I am not one of your ancestors, but I suppose our families intersected at some point. But I knew yours. Both sides. I was there when they founded their Houses alongside mine.”
“Who are you? Really?”
“I am Rahara.”
“Rahara, who? My mother said she knew you. That you were one of the First Sixteen. But that’s impossible. Nobody knows the names of the First Sixteen who founded our Houses.”
“When I was born…” Rahara held her hand before Mira’s face, the image of a humble city forming from the wispy clouds and glittering golds in her palm.
“There were no Houses. There were no names. I was—am—known as Rahara bah Acillia, the first child of Acillia. It was all we needed in those times.”
As the gold settled into the small fog and revealed the familiar turrets of the High Temple, Mira recognized Garlahza, the first and holiest city.
“Much like you would be Mira bah Joiya in these days. We were distinguished by our mothers’ names. My child…”
She squished the city in her palm, bringing its shining people close to her heart. “Would have been named after me.”
Mira didn’t pry into that meaning. She makes it sound like it was a child from before the Founding…
For all she knew, childbirth was different back then.
The julah certainly sounded more powerful than they were now, and it still took a year and a half to gestate someone like Mira. A year to form; a half to infuse.
“We founded our Houses at Her behest. We scattered from Garlahza, sixteen of us with our closest companions and most dedicated followers. Those who stayed in the city knew the Temple would one day mandate that they join a House.
Those who asked to join mine looked to me as a goddess—a powerful sorceress who had known Her. But… She also founded a House. She hand-selected the ones to follow Her. The fact that I could not follow… that was Her second greatest betrayal to me. She took the one I loved,
and She made me love Her as well. For I was created to serve Her. A part of my soul was entwined with Her holy aura.”
Rahara lifted her arm. A snake slithered down, wrapping around her limb before circling her midsection and slithering up her chest until it rested on her neck.
Mira didn’t want to mention it, but it was certainly familiar.
Who else do I know with a serpent in their aura?
And who had an aura that made other soul-seers go blind?
“Am I from one of those Houses?”
“You are descended from Her House, yes. The name she chose means Divine Brotherhood in your modern speech.”
Mira had expected it, yet her heart still stammered when she heard Rahara utter Lerenan.
“Do you understand yet?”
Of course she did. It was like the Void itself screamed into her ear until she understood no other language.
Yet Mira would not give up her knowledge so quickly.
She knew little about dealings with Dreamwalkers, let alone ones so ancient that they were a Founder, but something told her to keep a hand close to her heart.
She could not let Rahara know everything that she knew.
There may be more knowledge to glean from the woman who had seen the First Epoch.
“Who is She?” Mira carefully asked. “This woman you love so much but also disdain.”
“Shouldn’t it be obvious?” A scoff tickled the flaccid air.
“I speak of the unknown creator’s avatar. The one who incarnated in my time to bring about the end of the First Epoch, and to give Her decrees to our people so we may begin preparation for what was to come. When I had my great prophecy,
she interpreted it to mean that the next time she came to the mortal world, it would be the end. That is the Prophecy of the High Priestess.”
“My mother…”
“Mm. She is the selfish one. She knows her mortal sin. She denied the call. Now this world is doomed.”
“Is there anything that can be done?”
“You see, that is the thing. The reason I was sent to you in this particular world—for do not assume that Rahara bah Acellia comes to Mira Dunsman in every iteration of the mortal world. Indeed, there are many, many worlds where Mira Dunsman does not exist.”
She grunted at the woman before her. “Because I am not meant to exist.”
“Indeed. Your soul in the body of a julah is an abomination. You were meant to be half. Had your mother Ascended, you would have been born to another, and the pieces would have been in place.”
“Well, guess I don’t live in that world, then.”
“It is why you lost your soulmate. She was not meant to live that life, either.”
Mira did not appreciate the sudden reminder of what she had lost. “Then what am I meant to do? Suffer through the apocalypse?”
“Well, I was sent here for a reason. There must be some way for you to salvage this world until you can truly rejoin the Void.”
Normally, Mira would question what she had to do with any of this. But for the second time in as many days, she had a revelation about her mother that told a tale about her own soul.
I’m not just my parents’ daughter… I am Her daughter.
Tangles of time bit at her nose and nipped at her feet. Soon, Mira would awaken, and any answers she could curate from Rahara would be gone. Already, she courted renewed purpose.
“Just tell me,” Mira said, “what to do.”
Yet before Rahara could respond, a wall of anger slammed into her, knocking her hapless form to the ground and nearly disintegrating her malingered spirit.
“What the—”
Mira experienced the next wave of power for herself, tossing and turning in her own mind as her dream world threatened to drown her in its lucid waves. As she was torn away from Rahara to another corner of her mind, a voice bellowed between one ear and the other.
“LEAVE HER.” Tendrils snaked up Mira’s shaking legs and pinned her to the ground. Above her, two floating red orbs read her soul to filth. “BE GONE, INTERLOPER.”