The Hierophant (Book 1 in The Arcana Series)

by Madeline Claire Franklin

After a long moment, Trebor says, soberly: “You're probably better off for that.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because they wouldn't have appreciated what you are.” He looks sidelong at me. “You're different. They can't explain you. Surely you've learned by now that your kind fears what it doesn't understand.”

  “My kind.” I scoff as we cross the street, winding our way deeper into the village, towards the wooded state park that follows along the creek. “I don't have a kind. When I think about being human, I think about how my heritage has made me different from everyone else I know. When I think about my heritage, I think about how my heritage rejected me. Sometimes it feels like I have more in common with the Sura than anyone else in this world.”

  Trebor stops me in the middle of the road, hands on my shoulders. He looks me square in the eyes. “Don't ever think that.” He's so serious, it's alarming. “The Sura are not your friends. They won't welcome you with open arms. They will tempt you with power and freedom, and then they will crush your spirit with the chains of darkness.”

  I put my hands on his and slowly remove them from my shoulders. “Don't worry. I was just trying to point out the irony of the situation.”

  Trebor stares, then nods, shoves his hands in his pockets, and we keep walking.

  We've walked pretty far already, crossing the road that bridges over the creek. Naturally, we turn down a path that takes us into the woods, as if we've both already agreed upon a destination.

  But we haven’t agreed upon it, and I have to keep reminding myself that I shouldn’t trust this inexplicable ease I feel with him. It’s just hard not to trust what you absolutely feel.

  “I know what it's like,” Trebor says after a while. “To feel so different that you're certain you're just...alone in all the world. Or worlds, in my case. At some point, you will learn to let others in, if that's what you need. But before then, you get to enjoy a lot of your own company. Which is nice, because you’ll always be your own greatest teacher.” He barely smiles, and it fades fast. “And anyway, even surrounded by hundreds of loved ones and loyal friends, when you're lying on your death bed the last voice you hear will always be your own, even if only inside your head. In life, we try to connect and to trust. It seems like maybe that's the purpose of all of this—to learn to love, and to forgive, and to be vulnerable. But all of us mortals are, ultimately, alone. People like you and me, who actually stand apart from the crowd to see the big picture—we just figure it out a bit sooner than at the end.”

  I blink at the forest floor, watching grey leaves and spring debris vanish underfoot with each step. “Wow. How incredibly bleak.”

  “Well, it might also be incredibly wrong,” he laughs. “Maybe I just haven't found my tribe yet. Maybe there is at least one person out there whose brain I can mash with my own, so that when the time comes, and I’m lying on my death bed, it's their voice I hear inside my head instead of my own.” He looks both wistful and doubtful, mouth crooked in an expression that almost was, eyes focused on something not of this world. “My people tell folk tales amongst each other about the havati bashrat. There is a plethora of lore about the phenomenon. They supposedly have a bond like that.”

  “What does it mean, ha—havati bashrat?”

  “It’s hard to translate. ‘Havati’ is a title, it means something like whole-spirited, or whole-hearted. ‘Bashrat’ refers to the people involved. It means ‘piece of the soul.’” He shrugs. “It’s just and old wives tale, though, as your people might say.”

  Regardless, I try to imagine that kind of connection—loving someone so much, knowing them so well, that their thoughts are your thoughts, and vice versa. At one point, that might have described my relationship with Kyla. But the love between childhood girls is far different from the love between two women finding their own places in the world. Anyone else, though, I cannot imagine letting into my head. The idea frightens me.

  I feel a pang of loneliness ricocheting through the empty spaces in my heart. “What is it that makes you feel alone?” I ask quietly.

  Trebor looks up, caught off guard. “I have…very different opinions about our way of life from most of my kinsmen. I see our world differently. I've seen things that I can't un-see, and until others see them, I'm alone in my knowledge of them.”

  “Like me,” I realize, and didn't mean to say out loud, but I did. “I mean...I don't know what you saw. But I see the Sura—and I see you—when no one else can. And that makes me different, right?”

  Trebor analyzes me as we walk.

  “Because of my upbringing, and the things I can see, I have a perspective on the world that no one else understands, and it makes me feel…separate. Even Kyla—well. She believes me—I think—but she can’t see what I see, and that will always make us separate from each other.”

  He’s still watching me while I speak, bottle green eyes flecked with amber as they catch the unexpected sun. I can’t read his expression, but I feel a pulse from him that’s warm and anxious—unless that’s just me.

  I shrug and scratch my arms, feeling that old familiar dance beginning in my bones. “Maybe. I don’t know. It could be completely different for you.”

  “No, you're right. Awareness is one of the hardest crosses to bear.” He holds a branch out of the way so I can pass.

  We move deeper into the woods, feet crunching over twigs and sticks and old leaves, squishing in the occasional pocket of mud. The world feels fresh and new around us, brisk breeze carrying the scent of new growth and rushing tree sap. I look around at the budding tree branches, the twittering birds, this strange man—Irin—next to me, and wonder if maybe things aren't so bad.

  Then it dawns on me that I don't recognize these woods. We're in the park—the same park that Kyla and I trailblazed and explored from the time we were old enough to walk—the woods that have been witness to some of our deepest secrets and darkest moments—but I don't recognize these trees, this old growth, these vines and lush green, more and more lush the farther we walk. There are flowers here—it's too early for anything but snowdrops and crocuses—and butterflies there—that’s impossible—and the ground is suddenly dry and firm and carpeted with moss. I stop, whirl around, and see the path we’ve come from has completely disappeared.

  I grab Trebor's arm and stop him. “What is this? Where are we?”

  He cocks his head. “Don't you like it?”

  The breeze is warm now, the sun is out. It's full spring here, as if our typically long wind-down from winter has been completely forgotten about. “I...I mean, of course. It's beautiful. It's just—this isn’t real, is it? What's going on?”

  Trebor laughs. “It's called a loka. It’s like a pocket, inside of reality. There are millions of them in your world. We created them a long time ago, to hide from the other worlds. Humans were hunting us, demons and angels were bringing their war to Iritz—Earth. I'm actually surprised you’ve never stumbled into one, given how much else you see.”

  “I never knew to look for loka. Maybe I'll get lost in them more often now that I've seen one.” It's a joke, but part of me wonders if it's true. Looking around at the lush forest that has unfolded before my eyes, it doesn't seem like it would be so bad. A safe, warm place to hide from humans and demons? Yes please.

  Trebor pries my fingers from around his arm, and takes my hand firmly in his, sending a chill up my arm as our fingers interlace. “Come on,” he says with a gentle smile. “I want to show you something else.”

  — 25 —

  “Welcome to the Crimson Oak,” Trebor says with a flourish.

  The red tree before us is the embodiment of the word immense. Its bark is so old that time has worn it smooth, its roots so wild and tangled that I wonder if a giant squid was flash-petrified instead, caught in a moment of writhing to escape before the base of the tree trunk dropped on its head. The tree itself is red, like a thousand post-storm seaside sunsets have been captured in its sap, coloring its bark. Its leaves are long, many-pointed
, green-gold and reaching for the sky.

  I'm surprised when Trebor pulls me forward, climbing over the massive roots, towards the trunk of the tree. It seems a sacred object—a deity even. Are we allowed to touch it? Will the profanity of our mortal vessels pollute it?

  Climbing over roots, I notice the silvery pools of water trapped between them, like a honeycomb of harvested dew. Each puddle looks different—each holds its own reflection, separate from the others.

  I stop and see my reflection looking back from the watery depths. Trebor stands opposite; when he kneels, I kneel. Both of us gazing into the pool, the tops of our heads appear to brush. Trebor reaches down, reverently touching two fingers to the glassy surface, hardly causing a ripple. With half-closed eyes, he raises his fingers to his third eye, his throat, his chest—anointing himself. I feel like an intruder watching this sacred act, but can’t look away. After hearing his bleak perspective on dying alone, to see a person as cynical as Trebor give himself to something holy, something bigger than himself, almost gives me hope. At the very least, it gives me relief.

  He dips his fingers back into the water. “May I?”

  “Hm? Oh. Yeah.”

  I let him anoint me as well, and with each slight touch, a light flashes behind my eyes and a jolt runs down my spine, sets off fireworks in my blood. He leaves his fingers on the bruise over my heart one moment too long, and all it takes is a fraction of a second of eye contact to realize two things.

  One: he’s hiding something from me; and two: he’s afraid.

  I don’t know how I know it—I feel the knowledge, as if it is my own. I want to ask—I should ask—but the greater part of me knows just as surely that to know what he knows would not help me. And if it would help me, he would tell me.

  Trebor stands, pulling me to my feet.

  “All portals lead here,” he explains, turning me around to see the vast lake around us. The forest is gone. All there is for miles and miles is water, roots, us, and this tree. “Each of these pools is a portal, from your world, my world. All worlds. But hardly anyone knows about them—so it’s usually pretty quiet here.” He smiles at me.

  “Are we—I mean—are we still on Earth? In my world?” I touch a smooth scarlet root, next to my head, almost as tall as I am. The color, the wood grains—it reminds me of the red wooden box Kyla gave to me in her attic the other night.

  “Yes and no. We're in a world within your world.”

  “Right. A loka. A pocket.” I crack a smile. “It’s kind of like a portable secret clubhouse.”

  “That’s one way of demeaning my ancestor’s sacred space.” He chuckles as he says it though, hands on his hips like a lord surveying his land. “I used to come here a lot when I was younger. I had this idea that if you lost something out there, in the mundane world, maybe it ended up here. Maybe the tree took things sometimes—as a joke, or as a price. I’ve found a lot of strange, unexpected things stuck in her roots over the years, and I don’t think they’re things that have been left here. I’m one of only a handful of people who even know this place exists.”

  I trace a thin groove in the wood with my fingers, feel the pulse of the tree in its roots. Memories stir at my fingertips, the sensation of water trickling there, along the line I’m tracing, down to the pool. I can almost believe that the sense-memories are mine, but I know they are only borrowed, if not imagined. I lay my hand flat against the root, and I feel like an infant, wrapping my fist around the end of my father’s pinky finger.

  I turn to Trebor, feeling dreamy and surreal. “What did you lose that you hoped you would find here?”

  He’s looking up at the sky. I can see in the angle of the shadows that the light casts over his eyes that sunset is approaching. He looks at me, holds out his hand to me, and only after I take it, after he leads me over the pool and across a few more roots, does he answer.

  “I was looking for my brother.”

  The words are clear enough, and to listen to his tone alone you would think it was just a matter of fact kind of statement, the exact answer to my question. But one who has grieved for the inconceivably painful and premature loss of a loved one knows how to read into the language of one of their own. The way his voice softens at the last syllable, like weak knees finally giving out—the clench of his jaw before and after uttering the words—the quiver of breath more felt than heard. There are layers to his loss—to every loss such as his. And even though we may be alike in having lost, neither could ever truly understand the nuances of each other’s grief.

  I don’t want to ask him what happened, because to ask that question is to ask Trebor to relive the agony of it, if abbreviated. But sometimes knowing the other person might ask is enough to answer, just to get it out of the way.

  “He Fell.”

  The breeze is cooler off of the lake now, ruffling Trebor’s hair, snaking up my sleeves. Trebor’s hand remains warm and firm in mine, leading me up to the tree. Fragrant blossoms perfume the air, and birds are chirping high, high above us in the golden boughs of the Crimson Oak. I don’t tell him I’m so sorry, because we both know that sympathy means nothing, in the end. Instead, I squeeze his hand more tightly than I need to, to tell him only that I hear him, and that I’m listening.

  “At first, when the Malakiim told me he had Fallen, I refused to believe it,” Trebor elaborates, voice stronger now as we climb over the final root. “To this day, I’m not sure what I believe. But I would come here, hoping the tree had taken him. Or maybe he was hiding from something. I hoped I might find him in one of these pools, or sleeping beneath a root, or up in the branches.”

  I wonder how anyone would ever get up to the branches—if anyone ever has. They’re at least seventy feet over our heads.

  “Eventually, I had to accept it. Even if I never accepted that he had Fallen, I had to accept that he was gone.”

  “But…do you really think they would say he had Fallen if he hadn’t?”

  “Yes.” Not a moment’s hesitation.

  “Why?”

  We approach the trunk of the tree, balancing our feet on knots in the smaller roots that twine around the base.

  “Because,” Trebor explains. “The Malakiim don’t have any soft definitions of ‘Fallen.’ If he, say, stumbled, but didn’t quite Fall…I wouldn’t be surprised if they counted that as Fallen.”

  “But I thought to be Fallen you had to actually become a Sura?”

  “To truly Fall, yes. But the Malakiim don’t let it get that far. The second they catch wind of someone slipping, they take care of it. They execute the Fallen, or at least those they consider to be Fallen.”

  I suck in a breath. I had never considered that the angels might believe in capital punishment. I’ve spent so much time thinking about the Sura, I’ve hardly considered the beings of Shemayiim at all. “You think they executed your brother, even though he wasn’t really Fallen?”

  Trebor nods. “It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve done it.”

  “But…they’re angels. I thought angels were good, and just. You know. Angelic.”

  “They certainly believe they are. And they want us to believe they are. And maybe that is the truth, and we mortals are just weak-minded fools. Maybe we cling too strongly to mortal things instead of giving way to the divine. I don’t know.” He shakes his head and pulls us up as close as possible to the obtuse curve of the base of the tree.

  Then he smiles at me, a bit weakly. “But that’s neither here nor there. This is here.” He lifts my right hand and presses my palm to the smooth bark of the Crimson Oak.

  I feel her mind slip into me, like a billion sentient leaves fluttering through my body, whispering to things inside of me, parts of me that I had no idea were there. They murmur to one another in the secret language of lifelong friends and lovers, embracing, kindling more life inside of me than I knew was possible. And yet her contact is a caress more than an invasion, a gentle stoking of embers, blowing on coals. My hair stands on end, and every inch of me fee
ls open and electric. The heat of Trebor’s hand on mine is almost unbearable, until he pulls my hand back and lets it fall to my side.

  I immediately cradle my right hand in my left, as if it is a sacred object.

  “You’re welcome here now. Whenever you like. If you ever need a place to hide, or be alone, the Crimson Oak will protect you.” Trebor touches the tree and looks up at her, murmuring, “Thank you.”

  I look up, up, up, at the bright branches overhead, and feel as immensely small as the tree is simply immense. “Thank you,” I murmur too, catching a glimpse of what it must be like to be at peace with my own insignificance.

  Trebor takes my hand again, and I expect him to turn us around and lead us back the way we came over the honeycomb of roots. Instead, we just stand together for a while, feeling small and uncertain in the presence of such a mighty, ancient being.

  Somehow, with our hands clasped between us, it doesn’t bother either one of us at all.

  — 26 —

  It's almost dark out by the time we return from the Oak. The walk home seems shorter, even as nothing but a companionable silence stretches between us the whole way. I'm acutely aware of Trebor's arm, almost brushing my sleeve—his hand, separate from mine and tucked away inside his pocket—the coy, fluttering bounce of his ink-colored hair that hangs sometimes over his eyes. His head is down, eyes lost in thought, though sometimes they slide over to me, the ginger giant at his side.

  I'm not really looking at him though. I'm aware of him, in a soft and constant way like I've never been aware of anyone. I want to say, perhaps, that the Oak changed me—made me more perceptive. But I know that’s not true. Maybe it's just because of what he is that I can't ignore him, made of a magic far different than ours, like a bright sun-star among a billion distant lights.

  We cut through Glen Falls Park on our way, winding up a steep hill. The creek that runs through the village forms a waterfall here, cuts through the hill like a gash, spilling down to become the same creek that flows behind Kyla's house—the same creek that almost claimed my life this weekend. Watching the water gushing over rocks, rising in a fine mist over the creek, I see white lights beneath the churning spray.