by K.Z. Freeman
I share half of my winnings with Ty, who buys himself the sharpest-looking knife I’d ever seen. Never mind the fact that he’s hungry, he was born to a different set of priorities.
“Can’t kill without a proper weapon,” he claims.
“That’s more useful for skinning,” I add.
“What’s useful for skinning is useful for killing,” he grunts.
The knife is a fine piece of steel, its length nearly that of a man’s forearm. The smith smiles at the purchase and says, “You know, it’s one of those weapons that can make the air bleed.”
Ty slashes and feels the weight of it, then looks at the man. “I see what you mean, Daren. Fine work.” And that’s Ty for you, making friends and remembering people’s names when he feels it may give him what he needs. If he remembers your name, he must like you for some reason.
We spend my share on food, water and some drinks. The bar is fairly well kept, but scarcely lit, with people sitting behind tables and on stools. We toast and drink something that looks more polluted than the waters that flow in the city of Parez. The thing burns as it goes down. But it has a kick that could better be described as a flailing mace to the face. After four glasses of the stuff, Ty is jabbering and talking to women, flashing his smile at all who are willing to see it. The sight amuses me, but I feel nothing, the alcohol seems to have no effect on me. All I seem to feel is emotions towards her. Calyx seems to be enjoying herself, getting more than one man on her heel, trying to get her to talk. I catch her gaze now and again. I am interested in someone else, however, watching me from the corner of my sight. A man in a hood, a heavy-set man with eyes gleaming beneath the dark shadow cast over his face. His eyes never leave me. I take a sip of the drink, look into the ice of his gaze, and time stops. Literally. Drinks are held in a half-sip, eyes stand unblinking, smiles are plastered to faces. Sound becomes nonexistent. Only the man in black moves. He refills his black, short pipe and takes a long, heavy intake. Pale smoke dances in front of him. My mind pulses, his lips move soundlessly. Yet I can hear him. “Beware of the deceivers. Dreams are not mere dreams.”
His voice is smooth and melodic, old and fragile, laced with hidden wisdom. The kind of voice a man gets when he knows too much, has seen too much and, most of all, has smoked a bit too much. He gets up and walks out of the bar, the people within still frozen. I follow him as fast as I can. He walks slowly, almost too slowly, yet I can never seem to catch up to him. We reach the edge of town and he disappears before me. His shape shimmers as though he had walked into a mirage and he vanishes. I am left standing in the dark.
I head back and find Calyx looking for me.
“What happened?” she asks. “You were there one moment and the next you weren’t.”
I explained to her what happened and it seems she’s not the only one who saw me disappear. Eirik too finds us outside the bar, his voice calm.
“So, you met the stranger, have you?”
“Aye. I think I might have,” I nod. “Who is he?”
“I wish I knew. For the longest time, those of us who had seen him believed him to be a ghost. A specter trapped in a place between time and existence. Who knows, he might be just that.”
“You saw him in the bar?” I ask.
“He only shows himself to those he wishes. Did he tell you anything?”
“Aye,” I nod.
“This place is strange,” says Calyx. “This town is, I don’t know, it just ain’t right.”
“Tell me, Eirik,” I eye the man with purpose. I need to know. “What date is it? What is the actual date of this world?”
“I cannot tell you. Supposedly, only the Templars and another man knows this, and we haven’t managed to get the other one talking. He’s not the talkative sort, you see. At least, we haven’t been able to make him talk much sense.”
“Can I see him?” I ask.
Eirik thinks about this for what feel like too long a time. “Right. Okay. Why not?”
The man’s chambers are lit by light whose source I cannot see and no shadow is cast. My movements leave tracers in the air, as if three more shadow-hands were following mine. The room is not decorated by anything, the house has nothing but doors. Eirik had lead me and Calyx to one of them. The room has nothing in it but a box. A black floating box the size of a man. A coffin. The hum of it is distracting, but not oppressing. It wobbles up and down above the floor. The walls are grey like old metal, tarnished and worn, the ceiling is black, the floor blacker.
“So, em… what now?” asks Calyx.
“Now we–“ the box releases a hiss of depressurization. “Right. There we go,” says Eirik.
A mist rolls out of the thing. It reeks of decay.
The heart is the first thing I see, pulsing and loud. I can hear it, I can feel its sound filling the room. The man within is a corpse, shriveled and old. His lips are stretched over his teeth. Cables and tubes run down his frame, and when the stench of the mist hugs the floor and stays there, I can see the man is badly mangled. He is but a torso and a head. His cranium so thin I can see the veins of it, the outline of his brain.
He knows my name but speaks another. “Nomad,” he croaks. The voice is old, feels older than the earth. I am certain that, had I the ears to hear him, truly hear him, he could tell me how the universe began.
But he doesn’t do that. Instead he just stares. His eyes are closed, I can see them behind the hair-thin pupils. Their color is the color of night and a star shines in the middle of each.
“Fate,” he breathes, “is a strange thing, is it not? Inexorable.”
I have no idea what he’s talking about. “Fate is a concept,” I tell him.
“A concept on which you tread. Inexorable.”
“Who are you?” asks Calyx.
“I am he who sleeps. I am the Sleeper.”
“Obviously,” says Calyx.
“He’s the only living person who was born before the great war,” says Eirik.
“I thought you said he doesn’t talk sense,” I say.
“Small sense,” says Eirik. “And only sometimes.”
I look at the man in the box. He looks old like a tree is old. The kind of old you wonder how it can still be old but not dead.
I didn’t know why my next question felt so important. I just needed to know.
“What year is it?”
The man drew as smile. And when a corpse smiles, you know something must be amusing, and maybe it’s just me, but I cannot figure out what that something might be. “I have foreseen this day. Inexorable. I have waited for it. I have dreamt of it. Yet I thought you would ask me a different question. Curious.”
“Aye. I still might,” I say. “But first tell me how–“
“The year is 4345.”
I forget to breathe for a moment. It couldn’t be true. The old man must be lying. It couldn’t be true because he couldn’t be that old. It couldn’t be true because the war couldn’t have been that long ago. And it couldn’t be true because it simply couldn’t be.
“You look taken aback,” he says at length.
“How? What was the nature of war humanity waged?”
“Still not the correct question. Curious indeed. Quite curious.”
I caught on his accent then. It had somehow eluded me before, overshadowed by his ghastly countenance. His words twist in a way I haven’t heard before, clean, lean, proper.
“What is the correct question then?” Calyx asks with Eirik standing behind her, quiet as the grave.
“Indeed,” nods the man inside the box. “Not even I know. I shall know it when I hear it. And by hearing it, I will pass from this world, my knowledge finally finding its place.”
I know the question. It had vexed my mind. It had vexed that indefinable thing that men have searched for and claimed to know. It vexed my soul. It scratched upon its surface to reveal a blaze within, a need to know. I ask.
“What is the nature of being?”
His eyes flash and I am sucked into their
vortex. I cease to be myself. The world twists and the mountains melt, fuse with the ground like glass. I hear the end of the world. But at that very moment, the end swallows me, and its white gaze is all that remains. I am all, and the man is there too. But he is in the box no longer. I decide to ask all the right questions. Yet I know even after the last question will be asked, I will still be able to fill a book with all the things I wish I’d have asked instead.
“Where are we?” Not the right question.
I know what is coming. An answer veiled in something that isn’t an answer.
“There is a group in the mountains,” he begins, “Mystics. Tantrics.” Three sentences in I already wish I hadn’t asked. But he goes on, his voice youthful, his bearded face joyful. “They say our perceptions of a place existing in time are inaccurate, false. For beyond and within this illusionary reality is the void. It is a region where a concept such as time ceases to have a meaning. There is another group of men. Enlightened men. Those who follow the noble eightfold path, who say that, in the sphere of the spirit, such divisions of time, of the future, present and past do not exist and that all of these have contracted into a single flicker in the present where life quivers in its ultimate sense. What you perceive is a linear and sequencual experience of past, future, present. Yet time is not so absolute, it is a construct. We have destroyed the perception using what we call science. For you see, nothing ever happens in the past or the future. All is the present. Yet we have found all that you see is actually one thing. Something moving forwards in time is the same thing moving back, but named differently. Yet our mind cannot easily accommodate that there is a realm of our universe which might exist beyond this prison of time.”
“So we are outside time itself?” Not the right question.
“We live a curios existence,” he says. “I have slept and I have dreamed. Nothing, however, could truly prepare me for your coming.”
“Why am I so important?” Still not the right question. “You make it sound like I am something I’m not.” And I’m asking all the wrong questions.
“You alone can do it. You’re the only one who can.”
“Do what?”
“The end of all things. The end of this world, a fresh start. When oceans collide and stars die, we are reborn through endless fire. We breathe and we battle our minds, we struggle and lunge forth in ever-increasing strides. When that which was deemed sought after is achieved, we see the divide and realize this object was not our true desire. When our hearts turn sour and we think of what we need, we find only more fire. But its flames are of no color that we can see, no color that this world can craft for you, or for me. It as an indefinable thing that we are after in the end, realizing this only when there is nothing left for us but the hereafter, the bitter end. And when in the grip of dying we draw our last breath, life reveals to us and we realize, there is no more time left. The process continues through lifetimes, through infinite heads of the same thing.”
“Why me?” It must be the right question, for at that moment it feels like the only one I should be asking.
“Your path follows a set of patterns that will lead you to such an end. Who knows how and why such a path has been set and by whom. It has been long coming but, eventually, everything connects.”
“But the future,” I say. “It stands with its back to us. It’s a stranger. Who knows what it might bring? What if a small event changes my course?”
His brow creases. I notice we are surrounded by a place between realities. Surrounded by lushness and life. I can see the sun for the first time. It is beautiful and bright beyond description. A few days ago I would have even said it to be the most beautiful thing in existence, but today I know a beauty of a certain someone trumps it and leaves it in the dirt.
“You must know your mind first,” says the Sleeper, the Guide.
“How can I know my mind when my thoughts are inconsistent?”
“To see the mind as it truly is, consider it like you would a tree. It grows and expands. Its roots go deep, hidden and out of reach, and to cast them out or truly examine them, you risk wounding the rest. The question then is, are you willing to take the risk?”
I consider this for a while, lost in the flames of thought. My answer, however, comes in a torrent of conviction. “I was made ready by this very world.”
The Guide nods in understanding, smiles.
You know the type of smile that disarms you? The type of smile that makes you believe everything? That’s the type of smile he has.
The undergrowth bristles as our footfall passes. In silence, we walk through the trees and up the hill. Despite the slope, my breaths come easy, slow. The rise is steep and obstacles many, but we press on, higher, slower with each step, until we settle on a steady, calm pace.
Golden rays greet and stroke our faces. Light flickers between the color-rich leaves. The winds are gentle as they lick the soil and awaken the greenery with movement and excite smells of fresh mornings. It somehow seems I can remember what everything is, what it smells like, even though I had never experienced it.
“You are in my mind,” he says. “Experience is through me.”
Atop the hill, a glade, caressed by the distant spirals of the sun. The divine engine fills me with awe, furnace hot upon my face, infinitely molding the Earth's flesh into an image, into life. I feel its pulse. My bare feet tingle.
We stand there for a while, basking in the glory of a thing so mighty, so unattainable – like the true workings of the mind. I gaze up the lone tree swimming in gold and watch as the sun and the tree suddenly become one. No end of one, no start of the other, but both admixed, like an alloy, embracing the light.
The Guide averts his eyes, looks at me, and I know what words shall follow, for I would ask the very same of the ancient tree before me...
“Do you ever sleep? Truly sleep? Is the time between days sleep for you? Or as the season and its stillness takes you, is that sleep for you? Tell me, do you dream then? What do you dream about?”
“Freedom.”
There’s something behind the trees. I have seen it before. It’s like an image from a forgotten dream. A luminescent man with a wide-brimmed hat. But it’s not a hat – it’s its head. A mushroom-shaped head. My eyes lose focus as though in some deep thought gazing out at something but not truly seeing it. The head slips back behind a tree that looks too thin to conceal its frame. I lose sight of the man.
The guide plucks a small, white flower and hands it to me, seemingly oblivious to what I had just seen. “What do you see?” he asks me. I look at the thing handed to me and imagine my face as one of perplexment. I know he wants me to see more than the obvious. But instead of seeing what is truly there, what I ought to see, my mind breaks through and depicts solely my sensual perceptions.
“A flower, brightly colored and scented,” I say.
The Sleeper looks at me. Wind rustles his robe in tune with the lush green beneath our feet. The tree above plays in the breeze, shading us.
“Is that all you see?”
I look again. Nod. “My eyes see what they see. Yet my mind tells me I should see more.”
“The flower is but an expression. Just like you. An expression of this world. Yet unlike you, it lets things be, it doesn't try and analyze why things are such and how they could be different, why the winds blows and the grass sways. All it ever wants to be and wishes to have, it already is and has. Freedom is that.”
“But I have a mind,” I object. “This flower has no mind. No mind to wonder, to ponder, to think and to feel.”
“It is the way. No mind. No thoughts to question why you feel how you feel. Even when such a task – not to ponder – seems impossible. Then, when there is no mind to dissect every nuance of the world, all that remains is the wonder, the experience, you are free to feel and to think, truly think. Because how your thoughts flow now is conditioned, by your perceptions, by your feelings, by your life-patterns and choices. All
of these things coalesce into what you think is the real you, what the real you feels it must maintain for it to be happy. Yet when you think you are happy, you are suddenly not content in just feeling happy, you want to feel yourself feel happy.”
“I can’t remember the last time I felt happy,” I admit. “Does anyone in this world? How can I be happy? How can I be free?”
“No man can remain in a constant state of happiness. It is impossible. The sooner you understand this, the sooner you will attain what you seek. A man can only stay calm, blissful. That, in itself, is the source of happiness. Serenity of thought brings happiness, a cantered mind brings happiness, and when these things are one motion, when you cease to search for your happiness and instead simply allow yourself to experience it, you will find yourself free. For you see, friend, true freedom is not without, it is within. You must first free your mind from all the patterns that control you, subdue and inflame you.”
My eyes water as I set my gaze upon the calm, understanding expression of the Sleeper, I bow low and say, “Teach me, master.”
“To free your mind is no easy task. For agents of control lurk everywhere. We breathe them, we drink them, we eat them. They invade our dreams and confuse our minds, implant symbols upon our every step and make us wonder; is this real, or am I a puppet. I will tell you this now and mark my words you should. You are a puppet. We are puppets. Sheep. Look at us. Look at what we do to this world, to ourselves, to others. Look and see instead what we can be. It is not naive to think we can all have a good life. It is not naive to believe we can all be happy. It is sad to think that anyone can make you believe that such thoughts are naive, unrealistic, laughable. Even when the world is as it is. We slither across our existence without thought of others, only our selfish desires propel us, most of us, and what we give we do not receive, until we say, “Fuck it, I am not giving anything more.”
But just think if everyone would give themselves freely, their time to you, their thoughts to you, their emotions... all to you, and you to them. What would the world be like then? No secrets, no hidden mindscapes of hatred and greed, because all you would ever want and all you'd ever wish to be, you would already have and would be, could be, could have and would have. The world would be ours, and it would be glorious.”
“So how can I be what I am? Truly am?”
“You must pass through the ultimate gate,” the master says. “Enter a bastion guarded by your doubts, your fears, your perceptions, memories, false imprints and conditioned things.”
Silence.
Thoughts bend my mind. A wind waves the tree line for a moment, spinning sounds that drift and sing with simplicity.
“What fire must I kindle?” I ask. “What source must I tap into to become calm, serene, blissful, happy?”
The master smiles, walks the clearing's edge overlooking distant hills and forests. I follow and realize I would follow this man into the deep ocean. I would follow him into the very depths of the earth. Yet I want more than just words.
“Analogies and riddles, questions and answers,” the guide laughs. “You speak of kindled fires, yet, would you ask the same fire how it came to life? No. Its source is already manifest. It is present always, all it needs is patience and something that knows how to light a spark.” Contradictions, I think, always contradictions. The evening's calm swallows the skyline, colors turn vivid and my eyes linger upon the transcendental beauty of the day – a simple play of calmness.
“Even as such a fire is lit," the Sleeper continues, “The wood burns and the flame moves, yet it is really the mind that moves - interprets, gives the flame life. The spark you seek, the flame, it is your mind. The kindle sleeps within. There is only one flame. One fire.”
”But what must I do?” I plead now. He doesn’t like that. He wants me to think, not to beg and squabble. Straight answers continue to elude me and my mind reels for instruction, I feel its search - its quest to find words that would inflame the cognitive processes. But the master only smiles and, sensing my impatience, says, “Follow.” And I do. We walk downhill, past trees both ancient and young until, at length, we reach an open grotto, lush and hidden, surrounded by trees overgrown with moss. A waterfall streams into the clearest azure. We halt a while, fill our lungs with moist air.
“Where is the point where the falling water becomes the pond?” the master asks.
I think but for a moment and state, “The question is hard, but not truly impossible to answer.” I’m thinking rationally now, the mind taking over and I seek an explanation that would make sense.
”Tell me then, Dreamer, where do You end, and your Ego begins?”
“I…” we are back in the room again, Calyx standing beside me.
“Enough for now,” croaks the Sleeper. “Seek me out when you have slept on it.”
“What? But you haven’t answered anything!” Calyx objects.
“Sleep is what I require.” He says no more and the box closes shut.
CHAPTER 13
