Maker of Fire

Emily, Healing Shrine of Mugash

Four rotations after I died, I woke up with Kayseo sitting next to my bed. "Good morning, Emily," she smiled brightly.

Was it my imagination, or was Kayseo bigger than I remembered? I wanted to make the writing motion for a tablet to ask if she had gotten taller. When I tried to move my hand or turn my head, nothing but pain happened. I could not move. I guess my distress was immediately obvious on my face because Kayseo looked at me sadly.

"I'm sorry, Emily," she stroked my cheek softly. "I wish you could sleep through this too but you can't. You've been immobile for 42 days. Right now, you are very weak and some of your muscles are also not completely healed from the damage done by the hemorrhaging. It's going to be very hard for you to move for a while."

This did not sound very promising.

"You probably won't be happy to hear this, but you'll still be using a catheter until you can at least sit up. You must sit up on your own before you can use the necessary. Now, I remember how thrilled you were when we had to feed you after your eye injury. Well, until you can manage to hold your cutlery, you'll never guess what?"

I guess the gimlet-eyed glare I was giving her told her all she needed to know about what I thought about being fed.

"Pffft!" She clamped her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing. "Now I know you're on the mend if you can look like that. Put it this way, Emily. It's better than the feeding tube."

Did they use a feeding tube on me? That was pretty sophisticated given this civilization's current technical level.

Now Kayseo was looking at me with a serious expression. "You have got to eat a lot, Emily. You were too thin before and now you have lost more weight. You are dangerously underweight, so I don't care if you don't like being fed. You have to eat. You are so thin that your cheeks are sunken in. You can't get your strength back if you don't eat more."

So that was the Kayseo lecture, followed by the Twessera lecture, the Thurofosi lecture, the Lisaykos lecture, and the Asgotl lecture. That last one was special since Lisaykos carried me into her study just so Asgotl could give me his own little pep talk about eating more.

Asgotl wasn't able to fly yet. Wolkayrs and his family built a shelter for him on the balcony because he too was recovering. The splints on his wings had just come off right before I woke up.

In many ways, I was happy Asgotl was around. He convinced the people at the shrine that the way to my stomach was paved with good bread, liver pate, truffle mushrooms, smoked salmon, grilled trout, and lots of sweet butter.

It took a visit from Hessakos for the shrine to discover the importance of scrambled eggs with cheese, onions, and bacon served with fresh sourdough bread with lots of chewy crust. Even without the food advice he gave the folks here, I was happy to see him. He was thrilled that I could say a few one-syllable words almost loud enough to be heard more than an arm's length away.

Lisaykos said he visited when I was still asleep. He became angry at how badly I was injured. I am under the impression he is not the only one who was piping mad at Aylem. The Queen was only alive because Mugash stipulated her terms of punishment in front of witnesses.

I admit that I'm not happy with Aylem myself, but this was what Mugash wanted. The gods can't replace Aylem, not without creating a significant set-back in their long term plans if I understood Mugash correctly.

Kayseo, who loves a good gossip, told me Lisaykos made Aylem follow her one evening so she could see me when I looked the worst, with the whites of my eyes turned red, and almost every inch of skin some shade of blue, purple, or red. Aylem took one look at me and closed her eyes. Lisaykos got so angry that she cast compulsion on Aylem and forced her to look.

It took a rotation to get rid of the catheter: that's how long it took me before I could sit up. It took a half rotation beyond that before I could eat without help. Along the way, I "invented" the straw, or in this case, the glayon vine, which behaved like stiff tubing when left alone but bent and took on whatever shape the fingers chose when pulled gently. It made it easier to stay hydrated since I could now leave a ceramic beaker on the side table next to the bed and use the glayon vine to drink from it.

I still couldn't walk far. I started to walk on my own because I got tired of all these overgrown Cosm carrying me everywhere. At first, I had to sneak my way out of bed. The first time I did it, I managed to get down the little stair next to the bed but was so tired by the time I got down that I couldn't get back up. I got lectured by Kayseo for that. She's well down the path of becoming a mother hen. And yes, she had grown and was now as tall as Twessera and Thuorfosi.

Twessera told me that Kayseo would probably end up as tall as Lisaykos since she was a prodigy of healing magic. I kept forgetting that she was only 16. She was more mature than your usual 16-year-old. Thuorfosi mentioned one evening that Kayseo grew up very quickly after her entire family died in some horrible natural disaster a couple of years ago. It was only recently that her character began to brighten up again. Poor kid.

Two rotations after I woke up, I could make it as far as the hallway. When I started walking farther, Asgotl followed me. He stayed by my side and walked with me. He then would find someone to put me back into bed when I could go no further. Lisaykos said I was trying too hard, but she's not the one stuck in bed dying of boredom.

My skin was mostly back to normal, and I no longer had horror movie eyes. I was slowly able to speak short words intelligibly. Diphthongs and the w-sound were still a challenge. As soon as I could speak and go downstairs on my own, I knew I had to deal with Aylem. I wasn't looking forward to it.

Mugash wanted me to forgive Aylem and didn't want me to put it off. I found this to be difficult considering how badly Aylem injured me. I was angry with her. I was disappointed with her. There was this huge knot of resentment toward her inside of me. She was the agent that had drastically altered my life in ways I would not have chosen for myself. Yes, Aylem was not on my list of favorite people right now.

Sometimes, I watched from the railing around the Atrium opening on the fourth floor as the shrine staff escorted Alyem to her daily penance in the Well of Mugash. She looked beaten down and unhappy. I guess that was the gods' intent. She needed to find her bottom, like an alcoholic walking into AA. I amused myself by imagining a twelve-step program for overly-powerful Cosm mages. I hoped the gravel bit into her knees until they bled. Lisaykos made a special order for gravel from a cinder cone on the edge of the lava plains: it was full of scoria and sharp glassy edges. I considered the special gravel a good measure of how angry Lisaykos was with Aylem.

I was finding that forgiveness was hard. I kept running Mugash's revelation in my head, trying to find a path to forgiving Aylem. I finally just wrote it out in the hope that I might find the answer by looking at the written words:

Forgiveness does not condone wrongdoing nor should it ignore it.

Forgiveness does not excuse wrongdoing nor does it grant pardon.

Forgiveness does not erase wrongdoing nor should it deny that it happened.

Forgiveness does not reconcile but reconciliation can not exist without it.

Forgiveness has nothing to do with justice and cares not for punishment or restitution.

Forgiveness has nothing to do with pity. A wrongdoer may be pitiful but acts of wrongdoing deserve no pity.

Those were just the best bits, or at least the most quotable. There were a bunch more like that. It was some heady stuff and got very zen in places. In other spots, the concept of forgiveness overlapped the definition of love from St. Paul in 1 Corinthians. I did tighten up the prose and fixed Mugash's grammar.

"Emily, this is amazing," Lisaykos gazed at the wax tablet I had used. I didn't even hear her come into my bedroom. I guess I was a little too focused when I was writing.

"Is this your revelation?" she asked, sitting down next to the bed where I was resting. I nodded yes.

"May I take this?" she studied the writing thoughtfully. "Wolkayrs can write out the copies that need to go to the other shrines. I wondered when you might reveal your revelation. But given that you're not completely well, I didn't want to pressure you, but here it is in my hands. It's beautiful but..."

"What is it?" I managed to say slowly.

"It is strange. 'Forgiveness can not be earned.' It is something I would never have thought. It is a completely new way of looking at forgiveness. It's almost a new definition. It will take a while to understand this."

"Mugash told me," I had to pause and get my tongue placed correctly, "that I m..m...must fo...forgive Ay...lem." I took a deep breath. This was the most talking I had done outside of my daily practice. "She said w...when I un...derstood it, I wu...would forgive her."

"Forgive Aylem?" Lisaykos looked at me oddly. "Did you talk much with Mugash?"

"M...more than the oth...ers."

"You've been talking to the gods?" Lisaykos looked worried.

"Just when I wa...was pu...put to sleep after dying and af...after Mueb too.

"Who besides Mueb and Mugash?"

"Stink fi...fish!" I had forgotten but now it flooded into my mind. Tiki told me when he took me bar-hopping in Vegas, right after we went to the Mama Mia musical. I would never have pegged him as an Abba fan.

"What?"

"It's phenol!"

"Emily, dear, you are not making any sense whatsoever."

This was frustrating. I tried to reach a blank tablet at the foot of the bed, but Lisaykos just shook her head, pushed me down against my pillows. She handed me the tablet and she didn't even have to unbend her elbow to reach. Damn Cosm.

So I wrote: "Talked with Gertzpul, Surd, Mueb, Landa, Tiki, Mugash while recovering. Mostly Mugash. Tiki said that if I chose to return to this life after Aylem killed me, he would tell me where to find phenol for making phenolphthalein in the revelation. And it's stink fish. Stink fish have a gland that stores phenol. Phenol is why they stink."

"Emily," Lisaykos looked upset, "the gods gave you a choice?" I nodded yes. She pinched her nose and shook her head.

"Did they tell you what awaited you, how badly Aylem had hurt you?" I nodded yes.

"And if you decided to stay dead?"

"I wu...would go on to wha...whatever comes next when you d...die."

"And you chose pain? Why Emily? Why did you choose to suffer so badly? What did they tell you?"

I looked at her face, full of a need to understand. I didn't know what I could tell her or even if I should tell her.

"The expression on your face is disturbing, little one," Lisaykos said softly. "You are too well-grounded and practical a person to choose hardship and pain over the possibility of a new and fresh future unless there was a compelling reason. And no, stink fish doesn't qualify."

I shook my head. I didn't think it would be good to tell a high priestess that the gods wanted Aylem to destroy the crystal in the Well of Landa so that the enslaved races could one day be free. I myself didn't even know how or why that would work.

Lisaykos' face acquired an expression of frustration with just a hint of impatience, "you know I could read it from your mind." She sounded serious about the possibility but by now, I had her measure.

"M...n...no, you won't be...cause you are Lisaykos whose n...name means integ...teg...tegrity."

"Oh, that was cruel, Emily," she gave me a lopsided evil smile. And then her smile fled, "it's just that I too am trying to solve the riddle of Aylem and why the gods spared her. No one at the shrines would have. We don't know what it means. We also don't know how to deal with her once you decide to release her from punishment. We have not released many details about this incident because we do not know what to do with Aylem since the gods put her fate into your hands."

"I can te...te...tell you two things."

"That implies there are more than two," she looked at me askance.

"Yes." I didn't think I could tell her there were five things.

"Alright, two things then."

"I will m...make iron and steel new crafts."

"That's one."

"Landa has a...a...revelation for m...me."

"Emily!" She was shocked.

"I do not know the f...future ex...ex...exactly, but I know the gods' intentions."

"That's three things," she was disturbed by what I had said.

"What should I do with Aylem?" she asked, looking for answers she could use.

"Forgive her," I said without thinking. As soon as I said it, I knew it was the right answer.

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