by Gwen Benaway
“Pardon? What if I want to stay where we’re going then? You gift me the elixirs and I return to this outer world.”
“To live in the nonreal?” The priestess sat forward on a chair leaning on a dark staff. “No outlier ever likes their home world when they return and find it for its bankruptcy. I will connect you with this garrison I know well. They’ll take you in. If you’re going to be in my home, I’d ask you take off your weapon. I can show you to your room where you can keep it while we conspire the adventure.”
The Lady’s words had the effect of triggering pathways in Violet’s brain she long hadn’t connected—something about the tone and content.
“I’m sorry … your ladyship … how far have we travelled?” Violet was short of breath. “I feel an exhaustion I have never known. You’ve told me things I’m not sure about. I had my guard up with you and it’s now gone.”
“Slow yourself outlier, slow … hold … yes slow your breaths … focus on my words … we’ve travelled two centuries give or take.”
For a moment Violet was a floating consciousness above an immense forest. She felt as if she was moving and time was blurring.
Violet then awoke in a comfort she never knew before. Violet was wearing a long, hooded cloak in a colour she only vaguely remembered from her dreams. She was in a dimly lit, modest-sized bed, a canopy walling her in. Through the grey, silvery fabric Violet focused on a candle. She imagined the flame in her mind. She focused until she was completely absorbed by the vision of the flame. The light getting brighter, she moved the curtain aside.
Violet could now see a chamber, bare except for the bed, night stand, and candle. Exhaling she fell into the bedding, the sheet a pale sky blue, the blanket the vaguely familiar colour. Violet decided to name it star shower and leave it at that. She focused on the situation at hand. She was hungry, and in her anxiety, she’d forgotten to even inquire as to what the job entailed.
She questioned how desperate she really was, pushing her transition this far. Would she even have come if she knew she’d be travelling centuries across the Ocean? The old woman did not exactly guarantee the elixirs. Violet had gained audience with a Gatekeeper of the Realms , mother to an entire element, here. Violet assumed she was in the Blessed Realm, the loved realm, the world that the ancient formers shaped with an unconditional warmth and care and hope.
Violet felt a distinct presence of oak coming from the door—but not from any world she knew. She fumbled with the latch, which then opened with no sound. There was a luxurious warm hallway that defied explanation. It was far from symmetrical. Her shadow was against the wall, which met the floor at an inward incline and rounded curve. The walls were a pale yellow shade which reminded her of a certain flower with petals that had flecks of red that could be ground down into a rather pungent spice. It was of some island or moon left of yesterday … or was it some dream? The ceiling was a pattern of circles connected in triangular formations and strange illegible symbols.
Her olfactory sense alerted her to the covered tray on a lower table next to the door. It smelled like her third spring of training with an old friend. It smelled like hope and home and aromas that became a synthesis of inner visions of fields and strangely dressed folk gathering and singing.
That’s when the shadow she unconsciously thought was hers decided it would walk away from the situation. The shadow wasn’t hers in the first place. She chastised herself for being so unaware.
She stooped slightly with her knees bent and noticed a note as she picked up the tray. The script was beautiful of course, which was expected, Violet had to attune her mind to the key she noticed between the centre two lines. Visualizing the key twisting until she figured the right alignment, she hummed and breathed strangely.
The note unlocked and spoke in her mind: Don’t mind the rogue, they don’t speak too much. I believe, if my insight is still working these days, you will find this food enjoyable. I am attending to matters currently and will meet you at the beginning of the waning of the first moon. We’re only a night into the second moon’s dance, so you’ll have time to study up. The library to your left a half-gallows should suffice for the study needed in the meantime. I trust you not to poke about much further elsewhere. My rogue shall show you the grounds and attend to your every need.
Still tired that morning, she fell back into sleep after eating. Once again, she saw the immense forested area, felt life beneath it—as if an entire population of beings existed there.
Violet learned she was residing in a villa built half way up into the side of a smaller mountain. Over the next three months that followed, Violet spent time in the library and in a room for meditation that displayed the sun’s greeting and the passing of the two moons. She learned to communicate with the rogue whose form was always and only a shadow. The rogue led Violet around the grounds over time, showing her various things. At times it seemed the rogue would betray themselves and show emotion. Sometimes the rogue would lead Violet somewhere when their form would shiver or vibrate and then she’d be led somewhere else. There were baths built into the lower levels and Violet suspected the villa went deeper into the earth than the Lady would want her to know.
Violet would sometimes meditate with the rogue nearby and spend her focus on trying to feel out the rogue’s energy. In a way it just felt good to feel the presence of someone else, her life as an outlier was always marked by loneliness. She had to be careful though. She knew that the rogue could probably sense this, and she didn’t want there to be any suspicion of her intent. She needed to know where the rogue was. She intended to do exactly that poking about which the matriarch warned against doing.
The rogue would sometimes express a lot for a voiceless shadow. Violet learned much of what she only knew as the cult of Zywqhh. In the Blessed Realm, where they were gaining greater dominance and control, that term was very rarely known, they were more commonly simply referred to as the Glowing Ones or, more formally, the Opal Monarchy. It was only throughout the past half-millennia that the Glowing Ones began creating a larger and rigidly organized set of alliances with a multitude of realms with the goal of further spreading resources and mutual aid. Of course, the Monarchs were quickly growing in their dominance and control and making decisions with mass impact for good or for ill. The collection of realms represented mostly by self-governance were falling under control of the Monarchs. This was achieved, Violet learned from the rogue, who often failed to mask certain details, through means that were far from ethical.
Time and time again Violet travelled in her meditations or in her sleep. It wasn’t always the forest that appeared to her beckoning with intrigue. She sometimes visited nightmarish realms that reflected her inner turmoil—lands scorched of life, places of ruins, fields of mass battle and death. Other times she visited a city she couldn’t recognize and was surrounded by noise and transports that indicated no source of what pulled them. There was poverty, she witnessed, and riches all in the same panorama.
The Lady returned one evening without warning. The rogue appeared in Violet’s room, which was completely out of character. Following the anxious shadow from hall to hall, Violet passed many a strange sight until they were in a grand ritual room that screamed with its size and its emptiness and its lack of windows and its elaborate architecture and symbolism, a room Violet would come to know.
Unusual for a room of such a nature, there were two shabby and ruined-looking couches in the very centre facing each other. There was a table covered by all kinds of paraphernalia and so many empty bottles of crafted glass.
The matriarch was beyond any sense of inebriated, and probably not completely just from alcohol. There were other drinks and there was also a pipe, a tin, and a mirror.
“You know I was inducted in this room a scant ten millennia ago? We moved our ceremonies to a larger facility in the upper provinces six or seven millennia past, give or take.”
“It was a
bout four or five millennia past I decreed a wider policy on the induction of new daughters. A more inclusive policy.”
“You could become a daughter. I could work around your whole … nonexistence.”
“You desire the elixir.”
Violet didn’t know what to say. She was tired as she hadn’t slept well the previous night. She’d been in one of the gardens the entire night reading up on the ability to go through solid matter.
“What of the job? Are we still doing the job?”
The Lady decided it would be in her best wisdom and for the benefit of securing of a job properly done that Violet would begin undergoing training without induction. It was something that Violet had to keep to herself. The Lady told her of another library and that she could explore as much of certain subject matter as possible. She gave Violet a list of strict rules and made her swear she would pay strict attention to the her guidance and instructions.
She spent months that grew into years of waiting and learning and waiting and studying and practising under the Lady. The Lady would disappear for many a passing of the two moons and then return abruptly. Violet would spend some mornings on the two couches as if she were one of the Lady’s close confidantes or sister, drinking tea and speaking of endless gossip and lore that expanded the three realms. Violet learned so much more of the cursed realm that she called home. The matriarch didn’t speak much of the forsaken lands. The job entailed going to an outer world beyond the far reaches and knowledge of the average commoner. This world apparently was Violet’s home, a world she had forgotten as she transitioned through life. Violet learned of her own nature as an outlier, apparently all this information necessary for the job. She learned of her nonexistent existence. How her being wasn’t really being. She should think more of herself as an idea or concept that comes out of a conversation between two people or possibly a group of people, something that was missing that those people shared that needed to be filled. This sort of abstraction had been given form or became form but never really ceased to be its original emptiness. The matriarch said at times the outliers were born out of negation or as a reaction. They would simply cease to exist outside of the context that gave them their apparent existence. Though thought to be rare for an outlier to escape their original context, their original home world or realm, there had been an infinite number, continuously and exponentially growing, of outliers who had escaped their original context.
The Lady would stop every so often in her elaborations and reassure Violet that the knowledge was all very necessary for the job. She also would tell her never to share any of it with anyone living, dead, existent, or nonexistent. The actual details of what they would be doing in Violet’s home world were always shirked out of the conversation and Violet began to suspect the matter was deeply personal for her royal majesty.
Violet began to understand the original image she saw of the Lady, the one visibly aging into decay, ruled by an addiction and its accompanying possession of the liver. Something about that image scared Violet. It took a while for the actual details of the job to come to the surface, and Violet was correct in her growing suspicions. The matter was of a deeply personal nature for the high priestess. It concerned some of the Queen’s daughters; closer daughters that she held much love for. They’d been disappearing over the passing years and the mystery went on for quite a while, the old woman said, until it was found they were being abducted. Someone witnessed an abduction of three of the daughters at once. The matriarch sipped her usual drink and continued speaking and not really looking anywhere except out toward somewhere Violet couldn’t see.
The details worsened as the abduction occurred at a celestial embassy where the matriarch had sent them to petition for renegotiation of a treaty between three elements. There was a political scandal that followed. The matriarch had to put down a rebellion from within her own ranks over the lack of answers that could be produced on the matter. A faction rivalling for control of the realm, a cult formed between time shifters and an element simply known as the Glance, was initially blamed. It was believed they had been committing atrocities ever since the incident in retaliation for the accusations. The matriarch said she hadn’t been on good terms with the faction for quite some time.
It was one early morning before sleep was even had that the old woman broke down weeping a real ugly cry. She finally admitted all the details and that she knew of the source of the abductions a long time before anyone else. Violet was headed to an outer world where the captor was forming a stronghold of power. This captor was snatching up the Queen’s daughters to consume energy and life force toward said end.
Violet believed the old woman when she broke down telling Violet these heavy and personal things. Violet was holding the old woman in her arms while gently comforting the her. Between her gasps for air and utterances of words and slipping into other languages and tongues Violet didn’t know, she finally spoke clearly.
“I know the stealer of my daughters.” She breathed in a sigh. “I can only admit a close intimacy with the being. I’ve of course never met them because of the consequences of such a meeting. Whoever they are, they are my very other, whoever I would have become if I ever was formed in the womb of the cursed realm.”
Violet let the woman go. The Lady got up and collected her royal green velour shawl and left with no words.
The rest of the morning that followed was empty of sound for both the matriarch and the outlier. After Violet woke from a short rest there was a static feeling to the air within and without the mountain villa. Outside there was a dry heat, and everything looked on the verge of dying.
Violet decided to take one last walk through a nearby forested area. She quickly drew herself to a place where she meditated frequently, away from the presence of the matriarch. Violet came here to pretend that the whole matter of her being here wasn’t real and she was just passing through this wood from one life to another.
She sat on the ground and focused her mind into the places she found herself escaping frequently. She met many people in these travels she thought of as dreams. She couldn’t find anyone who knew of the three worlds or the cult of Zywqhh. She felt comfort in her ability to summon universes from some distant beyond.
When she returned to the villa, the sun was beginning to touch the horizon. The rogue greeted her and immediately directed her to the ritual room.
The matriarch had tea and set out a meal for the two of them; potatoes and hard-boiled eggs and a root vegetable that originated millennia past in the forsaken realms. It was a bit strange for the matriarch’s usual tastes.
Violet sat on the opposite couch, breathed in, exhaled, and smiled, unsure what to expect.
“We used to cook this meal before the final test before a daughter’s induction … an old inside joke that developed into quite the tradition actually,” the old woman spoke. “Eat up, I’ve decided you have prepared yourself well enough for the adventure … you will be leaving tonight. I cannot follow you of course. However, my rogue will be shadowing you.”
They ate the meal in silence.
Afterward, Violet went to her room now located in her own wing and gathered what she needed. She decided to wear a heavy woolen cloak over leather armour the matriarch had the rogue fetch her. Her hair was loose of braids except for one tucked behind an ear, the rest pulled back in a pony tail. She belted her weapon to her side. It felt different after so many years of not wearing it endless nights and days. While she tightened the bindings, she silently prayed, something she hadn’t done in many long centuries.
Violet felt the presence of the rogue approaching and uttered a last syllable and ended it with a long exhale of breath. The rogue led Violet to a wing she knew led to the lower depths of the villa, how far down she couldn’t guess.
The matriarch was wearing a cloak of green, as she turned away on the back there was an accented embroidery of a serpentine goat in that colour Violet had
named star shower. The matriarch began leading the way down a narrow hallway and spoke.
“The shrikikadian were interesting creatures from the forsaken lands now come to symbolize intuition and sowing of mischief,” the Queen remarked. “Not many know that latter meaning, and I felt safe enough to adopt the image as my seal.”
The Queen’s slippered feet were questionable on the smooth stone steps they began descending. There was no railing, but she walked down as serenely as she possibly could, Violet following down the narrowing path that delved further into the mountain. They went around now in a spiral deeper and deeper. Round and round. The tunnel seeming narrower and narrower. Violet sensed the matriarch was becoming dizzy and reacted just as the old woman fell. Violet sort of slipped but caught herself just as she caught the priestess. Violet looked into the old woman’s eyes and read only fear. After an uncounted amount of silent walking, they came to a simple unadorned room, somewhat larger than the common dining room. There sat in the middle two cushions and a tall star shower candle. The Queen took a seat upon one cushion and assumed a regal posture.
Violet was collecting herself. She wrapped her cloak around her as she dropped herself down on the opposite cushion, the candle between them. She listened vaguely as the matriarch began instructing Violet as to how to conduct the meditation to travel. The room apparently was directly connected to the outer world, and there needed to be visualized specific imagery for the rogue to accompany Violet. She didn’t care though. Violet was slipping into an altered state of reality and consciousness. She could already feel the distant outer world, already felt a vague familiar feeling of a home she had forgotten.
A dawn light came through the humid air and spoke upon the branches of the trees and trembled down onto a maidenhair fern. Small and trembling, the fern had a glow about it, barely grown but still thriving with that force toward life.
