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There are various observations that I would like to make upon what has come to
be. But there remain certain outcomes, if such they may be called. The cahndor
maintains that little of life may be neatly tied up, and even less of those
particular events with which I have here concerned myself.
None will know, Chayin is sure, what disposition the fathers made of Khys. And
yet I saw him, when we sat with the hulions in their cavernous temple.
Luminous veins riddled the rock with greenish trails that seemed to pulse. The
only other light was that of their eyes pair upon pair of glowing pools, all
shades from palest yellow to brooding red. Their rumbling, magnified and
returned to us by the subterranean vault, might have been that sound a sphere
makes, turning. I was visited, while kneeling among them therein, by a number
of truths. Among them was a sense of Khys s presence. Since that time, I have
doubted his demise. Though for his sake I hope that he achieved it, that
passing he so concertedly sought, that inalienable freedom to which we are all
entitled. Those teachings he so venerated, those masters whose works he
emulated, bespoke it far better than I ever might: all come to the abyss,
there to partake of the definition of life, the catalyst death, that beginning
toward which all life labors.
Still, in my mind, he lives. Upon all of Silistra he thrives, through the
metamorphosis he has brought about. Where men erect yristera boards and throw,
is Khys. Where the children are conceived, does his spirit rejoice. Upon the
chalder s anvil are his blessings ever forged. In the Day-Keepers schools and
the Slayers hostels and about the waists of wellwomen and pan-breeders and
weaponsmiths and pelters one may see him. Sereth weighed him, and found him
mad. It may be so. A relic from a long-dead age he was, in truth. Those
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teachings that he gave unto us were not those that he had learned. In a way,
he was never of us, but only with us, he who was a Stoth priest even before
the holocaust. Perhaps, as said Sereth, he never truly partook of that
morality he taught. I have presented him, to the best of my ability, as he
presented himself to me. I make no judgment upon him. In accordance with that
Stothric tradition into which he was born, he lived. And in a Stoth manner, he
sought his death, not in flight, but as a fitting resolution to his life.
They judge me recovered from what he did to me. I wonder if any of us might
ever recover. That which one experiences is not other than oneself from that
moment ongoing. I no longer cringe when a hand is raised unexpectedly within
striking distance. I have made some progress in excising from my behavior the
fear and timidity he taught. But I yet bear his sign upon my flesh, and in my
heart also. If it were within my power, I would change his ending, if it be
death or confinement or the anguish I sensed when I knelt amid the convened
hulions of Silistra. Why they deserted his service and turned their absence to
Sereth s aid, I know not. Nor why they held service in his honor and sat vigil
for his spirit, do I know. Suffice it to be that such was the case that it was
done, and I was present, and Sereth and Chayin were also there. And we each
gave up, in that cavern with the deep-throated hulion hymns vibrating the
stone upon which we knelt and the bones of our bodies, what recollection we
had of him, into a pool of communal reliving. And when that pool had no bottom
and no surface, when all ever known of him had been entered therein, the
hulions walked one at a time, with measured stride and solemn demeanor,
through the harvest of his years. When my turn came to enter that darkened
depression in the circled mid-cave, it seemed to me that I stepped into cold,
fast running water. Down the unsteep incline I proceeded, at each step the
tingling chill of immersion rising higher up my body. As I had seen the
hulions do, I stepped onto the down-spiraling ledge and followed its
ever-tightening course until I stood at the pit s center. But I saw it not.
Rather did I see Silistra, her copses and groves, her precipices and seas. I
saw her burned and steaming, oozing foul putrefaction upon the land. And I saw
all those years of her tending, that she might once more raise bountiful eyes
to the sun.
And he came to me there. First it seemed he bestrode a lake sheeted with ice.
Across it, toward me, he came. The sun lit the ice tawny. Where he lifted
foot, deep tracks appeared, as if the fire of him melted the surface beneath
his flesh. And he held out his hands to me, his face becalmed and peaceful, as
the ice began to rumble and creak. With sounds like bones snapping, in an air
turned dark and awful with crackling chuckles, the surface of the lake broke
asunder. As if some great sea beast desired exit and beat against the ice
sheet from below, the cracks spread and heaved, whole chunks the length of a
man rearing up into the air and crashing down to smash what ice remained. He
danced, scrambling for purchase. With more than man s effort, he leaped and
scrambled. I saw him fall once, feet first, into the ice. Hands, clawing,
seized the chunks afloat. He struggled upon one and lay there, his face turned
away. Beneath him, it crumbled. And I saw him swimming, first desperately,
then sluggishly, then a mere flailing of hands. And he met my eyes once with
his. And then he was no more. There was only the lake and the tiny crystals of
slush that floated gray upon the surface. That, and only that, was revealed to
me, as I sat with the hulions, of the fate of Khys, once dharen of Silistra.
Of my son, all that remains is a name: Jehsrae.
We went, upon the first first of Decra, by hulion out from that place. It was
a set later we stood upon the plain of Astria, Sereth and I, unscathed, as I
had so long ago hested. And indeed, I could not excise the crawling, mewling [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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