Alium, page 20
“‘Stubborn girl! How do you know that a rock is not alive?’ Nubes looked almost comically offended, and I could not help but smirk. It was easy to picture the old wizard conducting an industrious conversation with rocks.
“‘Rocks do not think,’ I said at last.
“‘Sometimes yes. Did you always think?’”
‘“Well, not before I was born. And after I die thinking will be impossible. But then there is no ‘I’ to do any thinking.’”
“‘Aha! But isn’t it the goal of your meditation to dissolve this ‘I’ and surrender to its source? What then is left of the ego? Certainly not thinking.’ As he spoke Nubes tossed the rock up and down, emphasizing his words.
“Now I looked at the rock more suspiciously. ‘Perhaps the rock was once alive, but the self which animated it has gone. So then, we aren’t rocks right now, but could, say, over millions of years, come to share their structure? Perhaps when I die my decomposing body could be wrapped up in some sedimentary formation and it could be said that I was a rock.’
“Nubes sighed. ‘While that is entirely possible, rocks are quite alive despite any lack of thought, and without your help. This rock is conscious as you and I and the drops in the stream, and everything.’
“‘But souls and matter, they are entirely different. I had always thought of the spirit as a thing apart, inspired in us alone by God, and not… rocks.’
“Looking up I nearly screamed. Before me sat in ponderous tableau an utterly lifeless stone carving of an old man, draped in haunting red robes. What had been the lively, ruddy skin of Nubes was now hard and grey-brown. Friable gravel delineated his formerly light and airy beard in an uncompromising frieze of hair flowing in a nonexistent breeze. I scooted away in horror as a crack in the effigy of his face grated open, spilling dust, and began to utter hollow syllables.
“‘I am Nubes,’ it said, ‘and I am rock. You underestimate the notion of Oneness. The clumsy philosopher might say that technically this is possible because there is no true difference but time and the arrangement of fundamental particles between my chemistry and that of the rock. But really it is this: I recognize no difference at all. I am conscious that the entire universe in which we live and breathe is merely the expression of one ultimate, unified field which is called: the Fabric. So I find what thread my flesh shares with this rock, and taking it up I stitch their folds together as they once were in the dawn of time. Now I let go!’ As though I had blinked, all was in an instant skin as before, and Nubes winked most pretentiously. ‘Now I hope you never speak too openly in front of rocks again!’ He picked up the rock which had dropped from his suddenly stone hands, and flung it into the stream, which issued a loud ker-plunk. ‘That is, until you can listen and know what their intentions are.’
“I watched where the rock had disappeared. As the ripples expanded from the little fountain of its plunge, with each broader ring there pulsed a greater sensation of life—life all around me. Like a child I had thought myself prescient for surrendering to the universal self, but now I saw that even in dissolving this one duality, I clung to another far more primitive in my parsing of bodies and boundaries by an arbitrary, narcissistic alienation of animate and inanimate. Not only was every atom of the stream and cavern, and of my flesh and bone, and of Nubes’ robes, and of the air particles all through the cavern each a living node of consciousness and perception, but so too were they inextricably involved in every soul, abstracted concept, thought and dream, whatever I had thought non-physical should mean, and all of them, everything together with myself, my body and mind, was called the Fabric. ‘Don’t worry,’ Nubes said casually. ‘Rocks can’t drown.’
“It was this comment that broke me, and I doubled over laughing. The wizard contained his mirth quite well, but soon joined in. For a long while we cackled and giggled and ultimately just sat again listening to the stream. At last I said, ‘Wizard Nubes, can you speak to the rocks then?’
“‘In a way. It takes a patient consciousness to sew the Fabric. But then,’ he smiled warmly in the pale light, ‘you have been practising for a long time.’
“That evening will always be my defining memory of Nubes—a grinning golem in a red hat and robe. But there were many more significant nights to be had. We travelled through labyrinthine tunnels seeming to have no business with Novare, more and more of them quite enormous and perfectly round, as if they had been bored out by some godly drill. Somehow the wizard knew where to go at every turn. Only once did he seem stumped at a quartet of diverging mouths, but really he had just fallen asleep on his feet!
“For several days Nubes guided my meditations upon the Fabric through the philosophizing of some new object—a stalactite, a blue glow worm, even a pile of droppings—or concept—the staleness of the air, the echo of our footsteps. But in time he gave me one task which, he said quite adamantly, I must learn on my own before my work with the Fabric could truly begin. ‘Make light from the darkness, Sylna, and then you will be a witch.’
“It was only on the final night of our journey through the tunnels that I completed this first and apparently simplest stitch. I knew that in the inky darkness all around I could find a common thread with light itself, yet still the idea confounded me. I had attacked this notion for many changeless days with great frustration—light was made of darkness, and darkness made of light. At last I realized that I was not truly meditating, but coming at the problem intellectually as Nubes had warned I favoured overmuch to do; but this time he had not said anything while I floundered and cursed in the dark. Now I took up my bow, drew back the string, and imagined that all states of darkness and light were like the multiplicity of infinitely flexing bowstrings. Only for an instant—as when those forces of tension and resolution are somehow one—I really did believe that these utter contradictions were connected, and therein—as through an opened seam in the reality I had so far known—I beheld a woven universe of infinitely folding and self-transforming colour, always renewing, always complete, always the same.
“Among the endless weave of that vast art, one shadowy thread streamed from a manifold so black and lightless in its fluctuating dimensions that it could only be the essence of the dark. Yet following as it unspooled in hue to a silvery, now a golden white, far away in the lifting, falling, surging medium I saw where this one same thread entered upon another manifold which was opposite in nature to the first, and blinding to my being. In the moment I beheld this link, it was as though my bowstring were released, and as an arrow fired forth I hurtled into the Fabric. I slipped first through the manifold of darkness like a sewing needle now threaded on this single strand, pulling all those moving quilted shadows behind me as I flew to pierce as well the distant light. Such was my speed that in an instant I had passed through that opposing form, so that now my flying spirit swung round and back, high over the massive folds of light and dark leaning out over fabric abysses one towards the other. With the added, sudden tug against my eyelet speeding overhead, the Fabric folded upon itself, and at last the light and dark surpassed their gulfs, and were sewn together. As by the same motion I was pulled back into the cave, where a jewelled bulb of luminance had appeared like an egg floating precisely in the aim of my bow. I was shocked and cried out, and at once the light disappeared, but in the flash of its brief existence I saw the pride on Nubes’ face, for he had stopped and turned to watch even as I took out my instrument.
“In the morning we came out of the mines on the far side of the mountain, and before us was the Crater, and further along, far below, over many miles of steeply sloping rock and snow, shrouded in mist, lay Pivwood, and at its centre Zenidow the High. In one month we achieved the edge of the forest, and Nubes led us to a clearing where he began building the tower that stands there today. There we have lived for the last twelve years, though Nubes long ago departed for Lucetal over the sea and left me with this task of sewing now the storm I spoke of before.”
*
When the tale was told, Sylna and Muewa reflected each to themselves, listening for a while to the wind-rattled trees, the twittering and chirping of birds, the drop of dew from branches and leaves spread out beneath them in all directions, and the rush of clean wind here on the high, bare hill. The witch had taken her hand from her bow, and now it rested in the cool grass.
Muewa spoke when she was ready. “Your quest is one of knowledge. Yet you are wise to see the dangers in that path. You, Sylna, who saw that understanding is surrender, yet accepted your lesser role for love: I am happy to continue your learning. Though,” she laughed, wings fluttering, “I’m afraid it will be more of the same. There is a reason Nubes did not suggest your coming here. A storm is a complex feat of sewing indeed, but you need only reach the sky through the simple act of meditation.”
“I suspected as much, and have tried for many months since his leaving. Every day I search. But I cannot discover such matrices of Fabric as to shift the very weather. I can fold air into water and sew them with the wind, but no such heavenly unity as even the falling rain has come from my work.”
“That is because storms are not born on Altum. They are sent by Caelare herself.” Muewa looked up into the light of the sun, shading her eyes with one wing. “There was a time when she lived among us and ruled all, but that was before even the sea was stained. Now she cares little for creatures of the land. Still, the weather of the world is in her wings. It is simple really, this thing. Seek beyond the world; seek the sun! For that is her house.”
Sylna was appalled. “Nubes told me to follow no thread which leaves the Fold of Altum. My soul could be lost forever!”
“Well I won’t say it isn’t dangerous. But I cannot show you what it is to call thunder and lightning from heaven. You must call out yourself.”
“I…” the witch murmured, looking up into the charged, blue firmament. “I suppose Nubes has modelled breaking many of his own rules before.”
“What other option do you have? You will sit on this hill until it rains.” With these words the Piv was silent.
Sylna nodded nervously, but anxiety began already to fall away as was its nature when she took up her bow. Drawing back the gleaming string, skyward she aimed the arrow of her soul. She cleared the mind, focused upon the breath—inspired by everything, accepting that all would expire—and held the infinite forms of tension and resolution in her hand like a confounding unity.
As always, the Fabric was revealed to her as through a seam in the air itself subtly split, now widening with totality, revealing the bottommost metaphysical truth of its reality. The last traces of three dimensional existence were passed over by the rippling lips of the great opening, and replaced with a surging tapestry of billowing Pivwood, the white mountains, the touch of exquisite detail that was little Muewa before her, Zenidow behind, the sky above, all stitched and folded and woven with a mastery of moving complexity that made the world she’d left seem as a crude carving on the wall of a cave. Now she moved the sight of her bow slowly over the texture of the heavens as seething blue began to swim with the gold and white. There was—as between all things—one thread connecting the tip of her drawn soul with the consciousness of the day star. That subtle line out in the great shifting material she soon found, for those things Nubes had forbidden she had often sought before.
Softly the bowstring twanged, and Sylna sent forth the manifold of her very consciousness from that of its mortal vessel in a silver needle streaming along that single, fine thread connecting her with the sun. Already the folds of the forest below were shrouded in distance, and only the endless contour of Zenidow remained. She calmed herself as best she could with the memory of Muewa’s blessing. In that thought the clouds grew thick and grey, and even the Great Mountain vanished so that she hurtled curving, diving, shooting upward through the stitching of the outer atmosphere. With a sound like absence itself she met the final membrane englobing Altum, arched along its surface, and zagged out and away upon her chosen string which led thereon into a total, depthless black which dwarfed all sensibility.
As the great purple and green sphere of the world, now vast, shrinking—too quickly even for its twenty moons to show in orbit—became a distant ball, Sylna found herself profoundly alone in an endless void of surging Fabric. As her soaring senses adjusted she saw that the eternal curtain of night was everywhere pricked by gleaming divine lights. These were the distant manifolds of stars, and some of them, perhaps, other worlds; perhaps one such light was Kellod. Lastly, yet most glaringly bright and growing only larger by the moment, there was the sun, Caelare’s palace. It was pure and perfect, immortally bright and wondrous, and more complex a manifold than any she before had experienced. Normally one could scarcely look at that enormous ball of fire, so brilliant was its majesty that it would melt the mind and blind the eyes. But as Sylna had taken the essential form of the Fabric itself, she was able to look on it insofar as it was another fold with which she shared the essence of her being.
The further she went from her body upon the far face of Altum in this way, the more vulnerable she was to severance, for there were—Nubes said—malefic and nefandous things which roamed these cosmic patterns; things which could feel the ripples of the distanced soul and rend it from the body. But now it was too late to turn back. The curvature impressed upon the Fabric by Caelare’s palace was such that Sylna was now inexorably drawn at increasing speed sliding down great satiny slopes of dark space into the centre of its well. The all-encompassing light of the great star rushed in an expanding pit of dazzling white brilliance to swallow her. With a noiseless boom the blackness of space was replaced with endless white. On went the shapeless, utterly pure light for a span of time which was lost to her in its vastness. Yet out of abyssal blindness there emerged at last the evening of distinct shades which became more soft to the senses. Though the divine light had never dimmed, through the gradient of growing gentleness she was able to see now the subtle delineation of a regal, white wall.
The only feature in the heightless, white plane was an endlessly tall set of double doors, discernible only by the subtle cut of their oblong panels. There seemed to be no way of parting them, but when she changed the fold of her spirit from arrow into a hand outreaching, they swung slowly to, revealing a great hall within. A long golden floor spread forth beneath her, and now drooping from the thread yet connected to her distant, physical form, as an extension of purely spiritual fabric she touched down with folded feet. Down the centre of the hall yawned an open chasm of light, the very core of the sun exposed, yet her drifting feet met some unseen resistance over its illimitable abyss, and she made her way carefully through the room.
At the end of the blinding chasm was a raised platform, and a brilliant throne. In this great seat—brighter, yet more contained in brightness than all else—sat an elegant Novare woman, for Caelare favours the form of her chosen children. Her long blazing hair was the light of the sun itself, whose long tendrils kindled and burned as they reached far out into the radiant deeps all around her. She looked down on Sylna with golden-white eyes, clad only in a flowing ivory gown. Her expressionless face was smooth as starlight, but she held out her luminous arms in a sign of welcome.
“Great mother,” said Sylna, bowing low and kneeling before the throne. “You are Light.”
Caelare did not gesture for Sylna to rise, and neither did the slightest feeling seem to complicate her immortal visage as she placed her hands again upon the armrests of her heavenly chair. “Child,” she said, and her voice was like the ageless singing of seraphim in heaven. “You will accomplish greater things than you can know. I will not speak of that future, but I grant you this audience.”
Sylna lifted her head slightly, remaining on one knee, which shook against the brilliant floor. “I must call a storm.”
Caelare loomed without moving, her presence all that Sylna perceived. “You are mistaken to think this in your power.” The witch thought to meet Caelare’s bottomless eyes, but could not, and saw again the chasm below. “Your master is devious, sending you. I would not so meddle in the affairs of Teludei—known to you as the Alium—for one such as Nubes, but you… Sylna,” she said the witch’s name with grave purpose, “I cannot this time ignore. Listen then. Fire your bow. I will reach out over Occultash only once. Lightning shall guide the Nogofod Ogwold to the mountains; thunder shall obscure his footfalls; rain shall clothe him in chaos.”
Sylna forced her eyes upward so that she saw the goddess’ brilliant visage; still the suns of those eyes repelled direct contact. “Great Light, I know not how to thank you. But…” She steeled herself. “I would ask for your counsel in one other event. The ancient wood of the Piv is threatened.”
Caelare’s countenance at last assumed the form of an expression, and it was grave to behold. “This storm is all I shall risk on account of the Teludei.”
“Of course.” Sylna averted her eyes at once. “I swear to protect your world.”
Caelare was silent for a long while. At last she spoke, and with her words the light of the palace bloomed and drowned all. “You will do well.”
*
The flood of effulgence sent Sylna flying back along the endless thread in a great rush, arching against the black cosmic night, strafing and cutting through the atmosphere of Altum and sliding down the sky. When she returned to her body on the sunny hill in Pivwood, she could not open her eyes for some time. Back was the susurrus of wind in the grass, and back was the tittering voice of Muewa.
“Well, it’s about time,” said the little Piv. “On my count, you’ve been at it for three days and nights!” With a diminutive green foot, Muewa kicked a leafy sack of mushrooms down from her boulder. They spilled out like little brown ears in the grass. “Eat!” Opening her eyes, a gnawing hunger struck Sylna and she devoured the food at once. As she ate, a soft booming carried through the land, and Sylna saw that there were many grey vapours in the sky. Now these clouds huddled over the forest, and their dark bellies began to mist. Cool drops of water peppered Sylna’s munching cheeks, and she laughed as the rain began to fall in swift sheets.
