Divine Madness

by Harmon Cooper

  “You have quite an extensive library downstairs,” he told Lhandon, “but there are books that you are missing. Before I delve into an explanation of the Way of the Immortals, and how it relates to Nick’s power, I need to know one thing.”

  “Anything,” Lhandon said under his breath.

  “How old are the two of you?” Baatar asked the spirits behind us.

  “I died a thousand years ago,” Tashi said.

  “Four hundred years ago,” said Gansukh.

  “Since you are the older of the two,” Bataar said as he looked at Tashi, flames reflecting off his eyes, “what have you told them thus far?”

  “I told them how the characters used for runes were based on ancient forms of combat.”

  “Good, and did you tell them where those forms of combat came from?”

  “The Immortals.”

  “And did you tell them who the Immortals were?”

  “No,” Tashi finally said.

  “Then that is where I will start. Nick, your power comes from the fact that you passed through a portal from your world to our world. You aren’t the only one that has received a power. The four people you passed the portal with also received the power.”

  “They did?” I asked.

  “I believe so, yes. And I will explain why. Over two thousand years ago, five people passed from your world to ours. These were the original Immortals, which the various paths were based upon.”

  “Were they considered Golden Ones?”

  Baatar nodded. “They invented the term, so sure, you could call them that, but most people simply called them the Immortals.”

  “My dakini said there was only one.”

  “And perhaps to her, there was only one true Golden One, but if you asked a different dakini, they would likely say a different Immortal was the Golden One. So for our purposes, we’ll call them all Golden Ones, or simply, Immortals. As I was saying, there were five of them, and each was gifted a unique power. Padme Lung, a woman, was able to bring things into reality. She generally could be found with Ganbold, who was a master of combat, and Kenzo, an intellect who was a master of script, able to give power to characters.”

  “And what about the other two?” I asked. “You said there were five, right?”

  “That is one thing that is different from what happened between you, and the people you came with. At that time, over two thousand years ago, there were two portals that opened up. Padme Lung, Kenzo, and Ganbold came together. The other two came at a separate time, and their rifts tore what we now know as Lhasa and the greater kingdoms apart. The final two who came were Thupten, who was able to control people’s minds and introduce corruption to them, and Misake, who was able to whisper to plants and animals, the woman using her power to find new ways to harvest narcotics and cause plagues.”

  “And they warred with one another?”

  “That they did. Eventually, Padme Lung, Kenzo, and Ganbold overcame Thupten and Misake. However, the damage had already been done, and while the two were banished to the Underworld, they were still hailed as Immortals because of their powers. Because they were venerated, various sects started to worship them, harvesting what we now know as negative karma.”

  I nodded, recalling Sona mentioning negative karma a couple times.

  “Thus, the last two thousand plus years have been a battle between light and darkness, good and evil. And as it goes, people have forgotten many of the details of these battles, aside from the heroic songs, and more importantly, the origins of the Immortals have faded with time, the knowledge only held by a select few. I’m guessing you didn’t know all of the Immortals,” he said, looking to Tashi and Gansukh.

  “No,” Gansukh said.

  “Never their names, only their deeds,” came Tashi’s reply.

  “The knowledge has been lost. This book,” he said, picking up the tome that he’d laid out on the cushion, “is one of the only ones in existence that details what it was like when the five were active, and their battles against one another, as well as some of the lore of that time. I have brought this copy for you, Lhandon.”

  “Thank you, Eternal Hermit,” Lhandon said, the excitement of receiving such an important work making him tremble. He bowed for what seemed like a full minute.

  “It is called the Book of the Immortals, and for purposes that may soon become clear, I have also produced a handwritten copy that I’ve hidden away. Have you ever thought about the kingdoms of this world, and why there are five?”

  I looked to Lhandon, expecting him to answer. He merely shook his head. “All I know is the story of the five friends.”

  “Ah, the creation of the kingdoms based on animals, yes, that is a common story,” Bataar said. “What about you, fire spirit?”

  “Lore,” Tashi said.

  “It would make sense. The original Immortals came a thousand years before you were born,” Baatar surmised. “But to be clear: the five kingdoms were established as an early peace treaty between the Immortals. Of course, the treaty ultimately failed, yet the countries remained. Thupten the Corrupted established this kingdom, the Kingdom of Lhasa; Misake the Whisperer established the Kingdom of Rinpunga; Ganbold the Strong established the Island Kingdom of Jonang; Padme Lung the Virtuous established the Kingdom of Paro; and finally, Kenzo the Written established the Island Kingdom of Tsirang.”

  Baatar paused, allowing a moment for all of this to sink in. “Now, just because they established these kingdoms doesn’t mean they have gone on to uphold their virtues. Quite the opposite, for that matter. Sure, the Kingdom of Lhasa is corrupt, but the Kingdom of Paro isn’t much different. All the kingdoms have their various levels of deceit and corruption, social decay, if you will, which is why so many people have taken an interest in your appearance. Your friends as well.”

  I nodded.

  The dots were starting to connect, and while I wasn’t sure of how I would correct the course that this situation seemed to be careening toward, I was ready at that moment to do my best.

  I was also curious as to what powers the others had been given.

  If Bobby had a power, I hadn’t seen it when I met him. The only thing I witnessed was his slow spiral down into addiction. Perhaps Evan had some sort of marksmanship ability, considering he was able to kill Roger so easily.

  I squeezed my fists together thinking of Evan. I had plenty of other things to do, but there would be a time for revenge, and regardless of who I was supposed to be in this world, I would take that opportunity.

  “What I told you here, and what you will find in this book, should help you better understand your role as leader of the monastery,” he said to Lhandon, “and your role as one of the rare beings who has passed through this portal,” he said to me. “I realize this is a lot of information, so to make room for it inside our minds, I would like to take this moment to meditate with the five of you using a technique I have developed over the last two years. Let’s allow this information to sink in, and then we will continue our discussion.”

  “Breathe to the back of your skull, then down to your stomach. Hold it and repeat. While you do so, imagine you are breathing through a tunnel that weaves through your mind. It seems simple enough, but your mind has probably wandered in the amount of time it is taking me to give you these instructions.”

  I sat next to Lhandon with my eyes closed, doing what Baatar suggested.

  At times, I would think that I had it, that the breathing technique was working, my focus strengthening, my thoughts absent.

  But then I would recall something, perhaps the weeks I spent locked up underground, or a memory from my past like jogging through the streets of Worcester, somehow always ending up at Bancroft Tower, and my mindfulness would dissipate.

  Even as Baatar instructed us, I couldn’t help but think of my friends, how a part of this journey was about them, and how it had already grown into something larger than friendship.

  I focused deeper and a barrage of fleeting images came to me, people pi
nned to trees, tropical fauna, epic rainstorms, brightly colored fruits.

  I stopped, letting these thoughts play out again, trying to understand where they came from, and what I was seeing.

  I’d never been somewhere tropical before; I couldn’t help but think that what I was foreseeing was the Island Kingdom of Jonang. The kingdom was clearly where we were heading next, in search of the Exonerated One’s reincarnation, and to see if the rumor that Hugo was there could possibly be true.

  Was this a glimpse of what was to come?

  “Focus on the breath, one-pointed mind, a gentle, stale breeze blowing over the shell of a snail, the limbs of the tree motionless,” Baatar said, the hermit taking in deep, slow breaths. “All the way to the backs of your skulls, spirit and man alike.”

  I tried to imagine my breath as an energy, the inside of my nostrils flaring open, my breath lightly flickering at the back of my eyeballs, entering my brain, and from there circulating out, cascading all the way down to my stomach, where I held it in for a moment before letting it out.

  And just like that, I was back to examining my thoughts.

  So if the Immortals had come two thousand years ago, and there was a second attempt to bring more from our world through a portal that had failed a thousand years ago, then it was really a toss-up as to how the people I had come here with would handle these roles.

  And no one had said anything yet about any of these people actually going back to the world from whence they came, which was a concern of mine.

  I still wasn’t convinced that I was a savior type, and if someone had flat-out asked me what I would do to better Lhasa, aside from ending slavery, I didn’t really have an answer. I didn’t know enough about the place to make a judgment.

  But what was I doing?

  I let this thought bounce around inside my skull for a moment as I remembered some of the fights that I’d been in, from Fist of Force to the battle against the catmen, to the ultimate showdown at Mabel’s Plantation.

  What was I actually accomplishing by going around stirring up trouble, even if the trouble I stirred up had a purpose, even if the trouble came to me?

  I shuddered, trying to return to a more meditative state, one that wasn’t too critical of the actions I’d taken in my past.

  My thoughts drifted to the snow lioness, Saruul, and how brief our time together had been, how there was an instant connection between us. I still knew we would meet again at some point, I just didn’t know when.

  “Focus,” Baatar said, his voice breaking through the surface of my mind.

  I blinked my eyes open to see that he was looking directly at me.

  “Sorry,” I said under my breath.

  “Care to tell us what you are thinking about?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Does it have anything to do with a lioness whom you just so happened to fornicate with in my summer cave?”

  I saw Lhandon smile out of the corner of my eye. He quickly tucked his chin to his chest and focused again on his breath.

  “Among other things,” I finally said, hearing Gansukh mumble something to Tashi.

  “If you want to see your snow lioness so bad, why don’t you call upon her?”

  “It doesn’t seem to be the appropriate thing to do at the moment,” I told the hermit. “And that’s not the only thing on my mind right now.”

  “So your mind is just jumping from thought to thought, never truly examining anything, correct?”

  “I don’t know if I would say it isn’t truly examining things. I just think about a lot of things at the same time, and it goes back and forth. I think that it’s natural.”

  “It is indeed natural,” Baatar said with a toothy grin, “and it is precisely why you can’t control your power. You have been given a unique power here, have you not?”

  I felt defeated in that moment, my thoughts echoing to the high ceilings of the monastery, the wood hardly absorbing the mental chatter. The things I thought came right back down to me, reverberating in my head. I suddenly felt foolish for not knowing more about my power, for thinking about Saruul, for not being able to focus on my breath.

  The Eternal Hermit picked up on this almost immediately.

  “My intention is not to put you on the spot, Nick,” he began, “because that won’t help you improve your practice, to cultivate the Power. As I once told you before, you have all the makings of a Golden One, but the second part of that sentence, the part that I didn’t mention at the time, is that your friends do as well. Before you can make true change in Lhasa and the kingdoms beyond, if this is indeed what you plan to do, you have to make a true change within yourself. This doesn’t mean that you can’t have desires, as I don’t believe in celibacy in promoting enlightenment. Only, you should recognize your desire as a desire, and your memory or thought as a memory or thought, and move on.”

  He cleared his throat, taking a deep breath in.

  It was another minute or so before he spoke again.

  “Next time you try this meditative practice, which I hope you do before you go to bed tonight, I would like you to label your thoughts and ideas as they come to you. It seems trivial to think something, and then just mentally say the word ‘thought,’ or miss someone and say ‘remembering,’ but it will help you codify, and later allow you to swiftly silence the things you are thinking. True stability is required for you to utilize your power, of this I am sure.”

  “But how?” I asked, feeling like it was just Baatar and me now.

  “How does your ability currently come about?”

  “It just comes when I’m in trouble, or when I need it. But it isn’t reliable. Like yesterday, it didn’t activate once we were ambushed.”

  “I see, and I’d like you to tell me about this ambush later,” Baatar said, looking to Lhandon.

  “Certainly, Eternal Hermit.”

  He returned his focus to me. “As easy as it sounds, it is incredibly difficult, Nick: you must learn to turn it off and on. Would you like to be able to control it?”

  “Yes,” I said honestly. “There have already been times that having control of it would have been incredibly helpful.”

  And at that moment I had a sinking feeling in my chest as I remembered seeing Roger shot out of the air, the bird spiraling toward the ground.

  If only I had gotten to him in time; if only I had been able to completely control reality to the point that I could have prevented Evan from firing on him.

  “That won’t help you,” he said, noticing that my fists had begun to tighten, my knuckles turning white.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “If you want to know how to control your power, the answer is simple yet incredibly complex: you first need to learn to control yourself, and I’m not talking about just your emotions. You are going to need to learn how to master the various systems inside your body, such as your circulation. Can you slow your heart rate on command? Can you increase the warmth of your skin? These are all things that you’re going to have to practice, among others. I believe Lhandon here will be able to help you as he develops the system to better codify the Path of the Divine, but I must be honest with you, Exalted One…”

  Lhandon looked up to the hermit, a thin smile on his face. “Yes?”

  “I don’t think codifying the Path of the Divine is something that can actually be done, though saying that doesn’t mean that I don’t think that you can do it.”

  Lhandon bit his lip.

  “The problem with turning what we do into a truly structured cultivation system is the karmic and meditative nature associated with the Path. Perhaps one of the other paths could be codified more easily. I don’t know. But I think the Path of the Divine—which is, in my opinion, the best path for all the kingdoms—will be a challenge.”

  “I understand, Eternal Monk,” Lhandon said, bowing his head slightly. His ponytail slid to the side, now halfway tucked under his chin.

  “But as I said, that doesn’t mean I don’t think you can do it,
nor does it mean that I haven’t already thought about it. There will be some luck involved, and you will need to borrow knowledge from everyone in this room to pull it off. To be honest with you, it is not a task that I would wish upon anyone, but you are the leader of this monastery now, and even though this is something that could take you decades, you must start thinking of your legacy now. In a way, this goes for you too,” he said, returning his focus to me. “Time is always running out.”

  Chapter Four: The Inevitable

  It was late, everyone asleep, the monastery quiet.

  I sat with my back to my bed, legs crossed, working on the breathing technique that Baatar had suggested during his earlier transmission.

  I tried to breathe to the back of my skull, tried to visualize my breath moving through me, hoping to be silent enough that I could actually hear my own heartbeat.

  It only worked if I popped my ears, but there were a few times that I felt truly still. Could I actually slow my heart? Could I breathe so slowly that I could feel my blood oxygenate?

  Thoughts came to me, I labeled them, and tried to continue.

  But no matter how hard I tried, I kept coming back to the time I spent in the underground meditation chamber, darkness all around me, hallucinating like I was on lotus.

  It had been a brutal experience, but once I had gotten used to it, once I had accepted it as my fate, the experience allowed for my mind to wander in ways it never had before.

  Through meditation, especially after I reached a certain level of oneness, I would be able to do the same thing I’d done in the underground chamber, to visualize an experience that was neither the future nor the past.

  But I had to remind myself this wasn’t the purpose; the purpose of my meditation was to better control my body to the point that I could turn my power on and off.

  I was just reaching a stopping point in my meditation when I noticed a creaking sound in the ceiling.

  I looked up, and as I did, a masked man erupted into my bedroom, delivering a knee to my chin. I scrambled to grab my sword; the man kicked it away just as I got my hand on the hilt.