Keeper Stout patted Gemynd on the back of the hand. “Only you can decide who you are, my boy. I cannot help you with that one.”
Gemynd opened the book in his hand, thumbing through the well-used pages until he found the drawing he sought. “The Iturtian pit, for the purposes of training new warriors.” Gemynd read the caption of the page aloud.
“You want to recreate the pit?” Keeper Stout didn’t try to hide his alarm.
“It’s a good place to start,” Gemynd said, scanning the cavernous room. “I can think of no better location and it will give me something to focus on while I make my decision.”
“What will be the point of it? You have no warriors to train.” Keeper Stout’s voice held an edge of desperation.
“In the event that there are Iturtian warriors who wish to join me, I will have a pit ready for their training.”
Gemynd ran his finger over the drawings. The measurements were precise and had been created specifically for the pit that was the foundation of the Iturtia built beneath the red sands. He would have to do calculations to make the measurements fit this particular area.
Keeper Stout stuck his face in front of the book, looking up at Gemynd. Worry had replaced the usual cheeriness in his eyes. “Are you quite certain this is a wise idea?”
Gemynd closed his eyes. No, he was not certain. He was not certain of anything. “I will build the pit,” he answered. “It’s all I know.”
When Gemynd opened his eyes again, Keeper Stout was gone.
“I do not blame you for leaving,” Gemynd said to Keeper Stout. “Come back anytime. I always enjoy seeing you.”
Gemynd carried the book of building plans to a nearby table and sat down. He noticed a wooden box on the corner of the table and his heart swelled with hope. “Is this what I think it is?” he asked as he pushed the lid open. As if knowing that someone might be in need of food there, Numa had left a box full of aged hardbiscuits.
“Thank you, my love!” Gemynd swallowed the first biscuit in two bites, then bit into the second one as he opened the book to the drawings of the pit.
The first drawing was an overview of the entire pit. The second was a rendering of the spiral staircase that led into the pit. On the next page began the drawings of each of the individual training stations. “Perhaps I should begin by trapping rats,” Gemynd said, recalling how they’d had hundreds of them in Iturtia. “I will also need to collect a substantial amount of wood.”
“Numa could make the wood for you. In fact, she could make the entire pit with a simple thought,” Molly’s voice sounded in Gemynd’s mind.
Gemynd gritted his teeth together and he set the book on the table. He stood up, pushing his fists hard against the table, trying to silence his mother’s voice from his mind.
“The pit is not the answer to your troubles, my son,” Molly insisted, coming into form across the table.
Gemynd looked her in the eye, a furious heat filling his gut. “Out!” he exclaimed, pointing randomly down the tunnel. Molly didn’t budge.
“All is well, son,” she said, her smile strangely genuine.
“Get out,” Gemynd repeated, this time in a growl.
“I understand that you have to hate me in order to not feel the full weight of your guilt,” Molly said. “You killed your mother. The only way you can bear that is to hate me. But surely you must know that I am not really here with you. I am a conjuring of your mind and, therefore, I am you.”
Gemynd inhaled sharply, remembering the experience he’d just had in the tunnel. “If I hate you, then it means I hate myself and have not accepted my own Oneness.”
“You don’t need to hate me.”
“You killed my father!”
“I made my choices out of love for you and for Numa. I feared Golath’s power over you and I wanted you to be free of it.”
Gemynd felt drops of sweat run down from his temples. What Molly had said at the outset was right. If Gemynd did not continue to justify what he’d done with hatred, he would have to feel the guilt of killing his own mother.
“And, again, my son, I feel I must remind you that I am not really standing here. I am a part of your mind. So if you can imagine me saying that I made my choice to kill Golath out of love for you, then a part of you believes that to be true. Use that belief to release your hatred. Let yourself feel the guilt so that you can release that as well. Do not fight any part of yourself, including your feelings of guilt. Choosing your own Oneness means accepting every one of your feelings too.”
“One of my feelings is hatred for you,” Gemynd pressed. “I recognize that it partly protects me from guilt, but the feeling is genuine. You killed my father and I feel hatred because of it.”
Molly nodded. “You are, perhaps, the wisest being in all of Todor. You are right, my son, accept the hatred as well as the guilt. Accept every feeling that you experience. It is all part of Oneness.”
Gemynd pressed his fingers against his forehead and took another deep breath. “I accept what you are saying, Mother, and I will work towards accepting all of my feelings. Right now, I accept that I feel as though you are not welcome here.”
“I will go,” Molly said at last and kissed Gemynd lightly on the cheek. “I have said all I need to say.”
When Molly vanished, Gemynd felt his knees weaken and took another bite of biscuit as he sat on the stone floor next to the table. The book of Iturtian Building Plans toppled over the edge of the table and fell into Gemynd’s lap, opening to a page with drawings of a great, stone tower. The caption on the page read ‘The Iturtian Keep’.
“You had plans to build a keep in Iturtia?” Gemynd asked the Golath inside his head. “You never told me about that.”
“Those plans were from long before I was Director,” Golath answered. “I had enough sense to know that the Iturtian desert was no place for a keep. The ever-shifting sands would have buried it in a week.”
Gemynd studied the drawing. It was a round tower, made entirely of stone. Unlike the Tolnick keep, this one had no windows, not even arrow slits. There were no openings in it at all. “It must be completely dark inside.”
Golath appeared to materialize and looked over Gemynd’s shoulder at the drawing. “This must have been meant as a fanciful drawing and nothing more. It is not a design for a real building. For one thing, there is no way in or out. It is merely a cylinder of stone, closed at both ends.”
Gemynd touched the page, tracing the bottom of the keep. “Perhaps it is entered from below, from underground.”
“Even so, what would be the point of it? Without windows, it could not be used as a watchtower. Without battlements or arrow slits, it could not be used for defense. Entering from below, as you suggest, renders it useless for grain storage. Truly son, I think this was only the result of someone practicing his drawing skills.”
“But what if its purpose is a sort of reinforced gate?” Gemynd wondered. “To keep the outside world from reaching what’s underground, or to keep what’s underground from reaching the outside world. How long do you think it would take a Zobanite to punch through stone walls this thick?”
Golath looked at Gemynd. “An army of Zobanites could knock it down in minutes, but it could take a single Zobanite enough time for the people below to ready for battle.”
“Using his mind, an Iturtian could dismantle it in only a few moments, an Empyrean could go right through it,” Gemynd surmised. “I think this was designed specifically to keep Zobanites out, or at least slow them down.”
Golath nodded slowly. “You may be right,” he said. “Still, it would have been a foolish thing to build in Iturtia. It was better to keep the entrances to Iturtia as small and unnoticeable as possible. Even if a keep had managed to stay unburied, it would have been like a beacon, alerting the Zobanites of our precise location.”
“Of course it would not have worked
in the Iturtian desert,” Gemynd said. “I think this was meant to stand above the original Iturtia, where the Tolnick keep is now. And I also think it would be ideal in Aerie.”
With his finger, Gemynd traced the stones making up the front of the keep. The fact that it was wholly featureless gave it an elegance that was lacking in the Tolnick keep. It was beautiful. Stone upon stone, put together perfectly. Just like Numa was put together perfectly.
Gemynd imagined her face in the shapes of the stones and his heart trembled with longing. “What is my life without you?”
Golath sat down next to Gemynd. “And what is Numa’s life without you? You are starting to realize what it means to choose your own Oneness. You must also come to understand that your Oneness includes your love for her. You, Numa and Soman have known since you were children that you were better together. You must choose your own Oneness so that you may then choose the Oneness that is the three of you.”
“If I don’t make the choice to sustain my own Oneness, I will destroy them.” Gemynd felt as though the concept of Oneness made sense for the first time.
Golath was silent for several moments, then looked at the book in Gemynd’s lap. “Are you planning to build a keep in Aerie?”
“I had thought I would build my own Kingdom of Aerie, separate from the rest of Todor. I could live out my days in peace here and keep my mind occupied with various building projects.”
Golath raised his eyebrows. “You are not a builder, my son.”
“I cannot properly plan for a future that I cannot see. All I know is that I don’t want to destroy Numa or her Todor. As for what my life will look like, I cannot say. And so I will focus on one stone at a time until I have made my next choice.”
“Perhaps it is possible to get pushed into a corner so small that the only choice you can see is to destroy that which you love. Few have the strength to make that choice and, instead, perish in their tiny corners. You, my son, have that strength. Time and again you bear the burden of destroying something you love because you believe in your heart it is the best choice. You know that burden well. You know it so well, in fact, that you choose to bear it alone. You would not wish the pain of it on anyone else.”
“Whether it is strength or something else, I know that I am capable of destroying even the things I love.”
“The tenth Truth says that to make a choice to sustain Oneness brings Joy. It does not say that choosing to sustain Oneness means an end to destruction.”
Gemynd pressed his hands against the sides of his head. “You are making my mind buzz with such thoughts. I want to choose to sustain Oneness. I want to accept my own Oneness and that of my loved ones. The challenge I face is that I don’t know how.”
Golath stood up and looked down upon Gemynd. “You can join me here, with the Viyii. I always have room for you beside me. We could be together again. You would not have to think anymore. You would not have to know how to choose Oneness. You would simply live it with me and the Deis.”
It was a tempting thought. The ease and freedom of it felt like the very thing Gemynd sought. But he also knew that for him, in this moment, choosing death was not the same as choosing Oneness.
“Whatever I decide to do, I must come to that decision on my own,” he said to Golath, then smiled at the irony of the situation. His father was not really there. Any decision he came to would, indeed, be his own.
Still, Gemynd had to admit to himself that his imaginings were only more distractions from the work of choosing his Oneness.
“Father,” he said and stood to look Golath in the eye. “When I was a boy, a man mysteriously drowned in the lake that’s right above us. I ended up standing next to his widow at the lamentation and I tried so hard not to hear her words of anguish, but I could not block them out. She cried at the unfairness of it, that she would yet have to live many years without her husband. But what I remember most was her saying that she was terrified of forgetting his face. The idea of this has always haunted me. Would it be possible to ever forget a loved one’s face, even after decades?”
“Iturtians’ memories are superior to others’,” Golath answered.
Gemynd let his gaze move across every inch of his father’s face. “I remember everything about you,” he said, knowing that the image he studied was really inside his own mind. “Every feature. Every scar.”
“A particularly easy thing to do when you look just like me,” Golath teased.
“I remember every word you ever spoke to me. I needed to hear them all. I won’t forget anything about you,” he said, wishing he could hold his father in an embrace one last time. But it was too late for that. “It is time to let you go.”
Gemynd closed his eyes and felt the infinite stillness around him. He was alone and he knew this is where he’d find his path to Oneness.
After several moments, Gemynd opened his eyes and walked back down to the opposite end of the cavern. The mine entrance from Aerie was at that end and he leaned towards it, listening for the howling of wind. He heard nothing but the splash of the waterfall so he slowly ventured outside.
The air was completely still. Gemynd smiled, knowing that Numa had figured some way to make her land safe for its people once again. She was Todor’s perfect leader.
He turned back and looked at the mine entrance, which was simply a large hole carved into the rock wall. If he intended to make his Kingdom of Aerie, he knew he’d have to seal up that entrance. With ease, Gemynd used his mind to carve a piece of rock from the wall that would fit perfectly into the entrance.
“Now, is there any way to seal this that would prevent an Empyrean from getting through?” he asked himself. He frowned and shook his head. There was not a barrier in existence that could stop an Empyrean, except, perhaps, her own stubbornness.
Gemynd crossed his arms and rocked back on his heels as he examined his work. It turned out better than he’d imagined. In time, the shrubbery would entirely cover this section of the rock wall and this entrance to the mine would be all but forgotten.
Gemynd heard footsteps on the dirt path behind him and he reflexively wrapped his hand around the handle of his dagger.
“Peace, brother,” Soman said as he walked up beside Gemynd, eyeing his blade. “I’ve only come to talk with you.”
Gemynd relaxed his grip and let his hand fall to his side. “I have recently given up conversations with my imaginary friends.”
Soman gave Gemynd a sideways glance. “Probably a good idea. You always were a dangerous fool on the edge of madness.”
Gemynd smiled then, realizing that this was the real Soman. A figment of Gemynd’s own mind would never have called him a fool. “Last I saw you, you were a man with murder in his eyes,” Gemynd said, walking back towards the lake to keep Soman’s gaze from lingering too long on the entrance he’d just sealed.
“We were in battle,” Soman explained.
“Yes we were.” Gemynd clenched his teeth, fighting his mind to not recall a single image from that day. Especially not what happened after the battle. “You killed a great many of my people.”
“And you killed a few of mine,” Soman said quickly, lifting his eyebrows. “I know that we were both only doing what we believed was best. Can we agree to that and let the past be the past?”
Gemynd looked up at Soman’s face. He wished with all his heart that he wasn’t so filled with Joy by the sight of it. “Did you miss me, brother?” he asked, wondering if Soman felt the same.
“Aye,” Soman replied, sounding just like Archigadh.
Gemynd nodded and walked quickly to the rock wall. He had a good idea why Soman had come and he knew he needed to get the keep built right away. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “You can help me with some of the heavy lifting.”
Soman said nothing for several moments, walking silently next to Gemynd. He remained quiet as he watched Gemynd cut rectangul
ar blocks from the rock wall with his mind. After Gemynd had moved the tenth block to a stack near the Wishing Hut, Soman finally asked, “What are you doing?”
“I’m building the future,” Gemynd said, prepared for the question.
“You know you need to come back to Tolnick,” Soman said. “Numa needs you there. The people need you there to make her vision of Todor a reality.”
Gemynd continued cutting blocks from the rock wall. Each one he removed made a horrendous noise and cloud of dust that had to dissipate before the conversation could continue. “Let us not waste our time together arguing,” Gemynd said in between stones. “I am not going to Tolnick with you.”
“I know you believe you are doing this to protect Numa and that you are afraid you are going to destroy her,” Soman shouted rather than wait for the next break in noise. “You and I have had very different life experiences, but I also know that we had the same start. Somewhere in your heart you must still believe in the Truths as we were taught. You must still believe that you have the power of choice. You are not predestined to some role as destroyer. Look deep within yourself, brother. Surely you can recognize that you chose to destroy Aerie, you chose to kill your mother. You are not a victim of destiny. If you are truly afraid of hurting Numa, then make the choice not to, starting with coming back to Tolnick with me.”
“The thing is, I do not trust myself to always choose to sustain Oneness. My past choices prove what I am.”
Soman stood directly in front of Gemynd as though this would somehow stop Gemynd’s work. “Be honest with me, and yourself. You like being the destroyer, don’t you?”
For a moment, Gemynd stopped cutting the stone. “I’ve struggled with that question since the day I spoke with the carus, and I am unsure of the answer. I do not like harming others. I loath the guilt that plagues my heart. But I do like the power. I find solace in the notion that I am merely enacting my role and that destruction is a necessary part of creation. The carus instructed me to choose my own Oneness by accepting the destructive part of myself.”
Unity: The Todor Trilogy, Book Three Page 22
