889. Season of change, 3
(Selya)
The dawn on the world. All my senses and my sight first discovered anew an environment with innumerable details, beauties and perfumes. Enough beauty in all the living patterns of manufactured materials, woods, plasters, decay, metals, papers and varnishes eroding. All the elements of the room and things beyond felt fresh as new discoveries to me.
Everything felt a little cold and hollow, as I was clearly alone for a good while around. I felt a little sad still with all this. But at the same time I felt the nice sensations of waking up magnified a few times over. I felt rested and without any pain whatsoever. My body felt good, cold on the touch, but healthy and strong from within.
My fingertips were more sensitive to every details to the touch than they ever were, like the breathing of air around me and the dusts brushing me. I felt so well, everything was different.
I sat and then stood up from the rotting bed without feeling any dizziness or vertigo.
The different pressures along the moss and mould released clouds of humidity loaded with varied smells. Cold, earthy, nice.
I experienced everything in much nicer ways, reminding me of a time before all this happened.
Things were simply nice, and I was happy.
Now my eyes can see so far...
My mind still is a little foggy around the details, but I’m thinking slowly and calmly. I feel far more serene than along the time when I was suffering.
I don’t feel like I gave up or lost everything. I still have some sadness in a corner of my mind for many painful reasons and memories. But I’m mostly feeling calm and peaceful right now.
What have I turned into I wonder?
~
I spent maybe hours sitting there, focusing on the millions of details around me in this room with the senses I have and could control better than ever. I was feeling a little odd. I didn’t understand much.
I recalled I had forgotten things, probably even people I had known for a long time, but obviously couldn’t quite say what or who anymore. But I felt fine.
I checked my hands again, and through my tummy too. I realised the ability to see through things and at lower scales between fields and particles wasn’t exactly coming from my eyes themselves, but was perceived and interpreted by my brain as if it came from them as well.
I suddenly looked aside, looking at the propagation of sounds as something fell down from the roof on the other side of the wall. I looked at the scattering ripples, like the surface of water after a rock, but much faster and across every direction of space.
It’s visible? No it’s something else again, which I’m not used to, but could focus on sometimes.
I remained there, puzzled for a long while, discovering my surroundings as if I had just been born.
At some point my memory made me realised I was still in that house by Majbrit’s lakeside.
Except that everything had been abandoned and decayed.
She’s gone, and she left me behind.
In her defence, I probably appeared dead by every imaginable metric.
I should want to think further about it but my focus shifted toward something else.
A chest in another room, standing maybe in the middle of the house and its room.
That was out of place and intriguing.
I walked to it, feeling tickled by the sensations against the skin of the palms of my feet.
I swiftly ventured through the now damp and rotting corridors, to reach that oddly placed chest.
My hands brushed its wooden surface. It crumbled down, revealing a thick metallic layer inside. That’s also why it looked weird. I opened it, lifting its lid open with both hands. I heard and saw the creaking noises it made. I saw how some wild herbs in the room reacted to the vibrations around. The window had been left open here oddly. The sunlight outside blinded me for a moment when I looked there.
Inside the chest I found another box more preserved, and various clothing bagged in sturdy plastics and more metallic sheets. Things meant to last?
How long have I been asleep?
I think I forgot the name of the person I used to live with here... And the house had the time to crumble down and rot a lot. I don’t recall it looking so bad. Did something accelerate the aging of it, or did I really sleep for a long time?
For now I have many questions and doubts and no one to help me shed them.
I opened the envelope visibly left in one of the bags. The paper had oddly turned amber in colours. My fingers brushing its fibres could recognize the marks of artisanal man-made papers like that. It contained too much salt and tannins. It was familiar looking and feeling.
Remembering a few things like that shed some light on the aspects I’ve forgotten a lot about. But it rekindles some curiosity inside of me.
Feeling melancholic, I unfolded the letter addressed to me to read it.
Amna it was, right. She wrote to me with some affection about a few things that happened here in the past, but it mostly started with some kind words of encouragement for me. Perhaps she expected me to return someday.
I left the paper float away after I read it, moving to the next page. The characters were better drawn than I’ve ever written any of them. They had thin and accurate regularity hinting at maybe thousands of hours of hand writing in the old lady’s life.
When she dies, all will vanish and be lost I thought for a moment. Everything she had accumulated over her long life will be lost. It will melt away.
Looking around, I noticed more clearly how most books left on the shelves and exposed to humidity had already began decomposing. It’s all melting and fusing into an expression of the past.
History and memory dissolve. They just vanish over time.
Amna explained how a tired man from distant lands had come to talk to her, while Iwas already dead.
That ghastly looking man had still come to talk to me, about what I would become and need to do.
He seemed preoccupied, concerned, but also confident of what would come.
Since I was dead, albeit my body didn’t decompose as expected, he entrusted the old lady with his words instead.
He had confirmed the omen from Eschran and every Aïsshea, in the most sombre of realities and outcomes.
I had been chosen through necessity, and the plan rushed into its second stage in urgency. However they believed in the right choices made during the first stage. I had been apparently watched over carefully since my creation. My turning point had been an accident, but not my selection...
Aïssheat rarely spoke to me and was mostly dismissive of my curiosity as a child. This had been a lie?
This old man... The one I looked up to, didn’t he know or notice?
I moved to the next page of the letter. It was more philosophical.
The odd man and maybe Amna herself wanted me to become the bridge between the wounded earth and the strange source out there. To keep it safe. So there wouldn’t be any other tragedy. No more cataclysm...
I was recruited as a safekeeper. Nothing more, nothing less.
My life was destroyed by a mishap in that tern plan for a tern objective.
I’ve lost my past and been changed without a voice in it, body and soul for that sole goal.
To protect what remains on either side of the wall, to keep things as they are today... Not for revenge, not for restoration, not for change... To preserve a situation and nothing else.
In their delirium, what they want me to do is to head toward the source now. This only goal for me now is to find the Tamźródlo and keep it safe.
I’m feeling distant and cold about their ambition drawn over my dead body.
The last page was about Aïssheas.
The sword now stained from mould and corrosion lying behind.
All I see is a deformed skeleton.
The visitor thought of taking it away, but hearing how much I had kept it with me through my days of transformation, he changed his mind.
He told Amna, and he told me through her, that I might need that weapon again someday.
That figure expected some hostile challenges to stand in my way. And I should be armed?
Everyone is scared of what could be. Me too. And I think they were scared of me too.
Because the last notes are about how he advised Amna to leave this place as well. To abandon me behind and go.
They were scared for me if I were to wake up maybe, but they were also terrified of what could be once I return...
Some hazy memories float around me. I see fire, I see hatred. I hear myself yelling.
I feel my hands twitching, as I want to hold it again.
At least the Aïsshea didn’t leave me behind. They died protecting me. I’m feeling lonely and resentful now.
The antepenultimate sentences are repeated warnings Amna took to heart.
That she’d better leave this place where I lied, and around where other forces might oscillate. For her to leave this continent behind and go as far as she could muster the strength to.
To the eastern ends of Asia or southern ends of Africa. Who knows.
And Amna did leave me behind... I’m feeling a little betrayed.
The last sentence was about the source, where a powerful storm was gathering.
If I were to wake up someday, I should head into its heart to stop it. Before it’s too late. Before it causes something no one else would survive. My destiny?
That was what they all wanted from me...
~
