10 knowledges concerning initial contact

[recoals]

10 Knowledges concerning Initial Contact.


One is rarely one. Two are rarely two. They are always millions.

When first, he’s told the story behind his first fire manifestation, a few of the other boys overhear and immediately, the story circulates the temple like wildfire, following Otanius everywhere he goes. He blew up his mother’s pig, they say and they laugh which is no true precedent, not when you know how the rest of the story goes. Otanius, age three, asks Mother Lith whether the pig might’ve possibly survived somehow, whether it might not still be roaming his mother’s garden, searching the dirt with its great big snout?

Mother Lith looks at him and smiles. There’s something a little sad about the way she does it.

“Perhaps somewhere beyond us, there is a world where the pig lives,” she says and pats him on the head. “One day, you’ll see enough to know.”

Otanius, age three, thinks about different worlds where things happen differently and when he’s older still, he’ll learn about dimensions, about the vastness of the sky and mysteries spanning countless scenarios and lifes and possibilities - and honestly, none of it speaks to him any clearer, no matter how many words they offer him.

The pig, he knows, is dead.

I killed it and it’s dead.

*

There is comfort in complexity.

Once Otanius reaches the tender age of six, he’s learned not to make things explode. Before that, he reigned himself in with the help of his mentor, Adraxis but he never quite learned. At the age of six, he understands the difference, the change from ignorance to awareness seemingly as sudden as gaining back your vision after blinking water from your eyes. Maybe it isn’t any more complicated than that. Maybe it’s just a matter of getting old enough.

So Otanius swallows his anger when Marcus, four years his senior and willfully obnoxious, taunts him for his scorched fingers during dinner time. Can’t even light a little candle without setting yourself on fire, huh? Why are you even here? You don’t belong in this place.

The others are quiet. They’ve had their dinners - plates, meat, sauce, bread loafs - explode often enough that the experience has lost its novelty.

He feels the heat brewing beneath his fingertips, sparks waiting to be ignited, to be released. But Otanius, six years old, has learned the difference, has learned not to simply hold it back but to abstain and consequently, Marcus’ dinner goes unruined whilst his own goes uneaten.

Before bedtime, Master Adraxis comes by with a fresh plate, warm and comforting. Otanius isn’t hungry but even so, he eats.

*

Withdraw, and lose contact.

When he’s ten, Otanius ignites a candle too quickly and the spark soars, flames burning the ceiling twenty feet above him and scorching his eyebrows. He jumps backwards, out of reach, and stares at it, at the sheer marvel of it, like a spectator standing outside the cage of a ravenous beast.

Master Adraxis hurries over, puts his hands on Otanius shoulders and pushes him forward.

“Handle it,” he says, voice tight from urgency. “It’s yours. Handle it.”

At this very moment, Otanius is a stranger to the flame, his Master and the temple itself. He stares at the flame as it burns, hungrily, and it doesn’t feel like his, it feels like he’ll never get it back.

Master Adraxis takes his hand forcibly and folds it around the metal holder. “Handle it,” he repeats, his voice shaking and Otanius burns his palm and his fingers, lips parted in terror until suddenly, the pain sparks.

The fire, too, flickers.

Otanius, age ten, feels the pain throb beneath his skin along with the undulating fire tongue, licking at the wooden rafters above. He shuts his eyes, breathes in deep and tastes ozon on the back of his tongue.

Then, he swallows it. Again, again, again and again.

Less than two minutes later, the flame is tiny and his hand is sticking to the candle holder in the places where his skin has loosened. He spends weeks with the healers and eventually, as is typical and true, his life resumes.

*

Never panic at the thought of multitudes. Breathe.

Otanius is twelve years old when his new teacher, Master Ranius, takes him on a trip through the forest up north during the late summer. They scale hills and mountain passes, camping when night falls and eating freshly caught fish or salted meats from the temple kitchens. Ranius is twenty-five, a new priest, and his methods are unorthodox. He’s tall and long-limbed and his eyes are dark brown, warm and steady and solid.

On the third night out, they camp by a small creek amidst the dense forest. Their two horses are grazing nearby and the open fire has been reduced to burning embers and coals, emanating heat into the cool evening air. Otanius has burned his fingers, lighting the fire. It never bothers him anymore.

He looks at Master Ranius through the shadows and because Otanius is only twelve and all of twelve at the same time, the spark of heat in his abdomen frightens him a lot more than the thought of his skin melting.

Master Ranius, in turn, smiles. Nods and raises his hand, pointing upwards.

“Look,” he says.

Above them, hundreds of tiny lights are flickering and fluttering about in the dark. In seemingly erratic patterns, they travel through the shadows and Otanius stares at them, stares and blinks and stares.

“Try to feel what the fireflies do,” says Master Ranius and when Otanius looks at him, baffled, his smile, warm and encouraging, makes his stomach flutter, too. He swallows heavily and looks up again.

Then, he shuts his eyes and lets himself feel it, finally, one echo after the other, until there are a million small sparks of corresponding energies rushing about within his body. He wants to scream. He wants to hide or curl up or maybe look at Master Ranius again just to see whether that one, strange sensation might just override the rest.

Master Ranius, meanwhile, waits. For him.

So Otanius controls his breathing and his shaking hands, ignores the dampness of his own skin and finally just connects, with all of it, with every tiny little thing that shines and glitters in the dark and just like that, the storm of insects burn brighter and brighter yet, like stars and when he finally opens his eyes, Master Ranius is smiling at him, wide and pleased.

The forest opens up around them, taller than anything.

*

Effect is just effect. Look beyond it. Listen beyond it.

He’s fourteen years old when Master Ranius asks him to sum up what he’s learned about the smaller things and aspects, about the pieces rather than the whole. It’s a difficult question, more than it ought to be. They’re outside in the garden to the south of the temple complex and the sun is low in the sky, the shadows correspondingly long.

“I’ve learned that there’s energy in the smallest, most unlikely places,” says Otanius because surely, he’s expected to say something. He isn’t quite sure his answer actually makes any sort of sense, not even to himself. Master Ranius purses his lips for a second, gaze gliding sideways in thought.

Otanius, accordingly, tries again because whether or not he’s learned what he ought, at least he’s learned something.

“If I touch it right,” he says, voice a little quieter, as it tends to be when Otanius is on the verge of drawing inwards, “I can make even the most minuscule elements look brighter?”

Sighing, Master Ranius looks back at him. Smiles, tiredly.

“It’s not always about what you can do to the world, Otanius.” He takes a deep breath. Above them, a flock of bright, blue birds soar past, heading for one of the tallest trees in the garden. “It’s what the world can do to you.”

He picks up a handful of gravel. The tiny granules slide against each other as he holds them, lightly, and Otanius can sense the friction waiting to explode between his fingers. He wets his lower lip. Stares, hungrily, ignoring the impulse to reach out towards all that latent energy, shifting a little on the ground instead, trying to make the resultant restlessness dissipate.

“You sense it?” Master Ranius lets the gravel slip through his fingers back to the ground slowly. “You sense what it does?”

He nods, does Otanius, though he’s fairly certain he doesn’t know. He can feel it. But he doesn’t know.

“Remember what it does to you,” says Master Ranius and closes his eyes. “It’s far, far more important than anything you’ll ever know, besides.”

*

Look for patterns.

He’s sixteen years old and though no other religions are permitted in Efith, he’s listening to a young man with a beautiful face who tells him about a fire god with a foreign name, a god who burns with cleansing rage, who tears down the old to make way for the new. It sounds like something born from beyond the southern border. Back at the temple, Otanius is alone, always - they keep their distance because no one wants to lose a limb the way old Master Berakus did when he tried to slap Otanius in a burst of anger and his hand melted off his arm.

Paradoxically, they all know.

Otanius controls his fire.

So they keep their distance.

The beautiful man is just a little older than him and he shows off his shoulders and his long, flat upper body, his narrow hips, staying close, touching Otanius fleetingly, just long, slow brushes of fingertips. Otanius thinks about Master Ranius who’s too old to engage in anything physical, who probably wouldn’t even if he weren’t, and then he touches the beautiful man back and listens to his stories, though he doesn’t quite believe, not really. He knows fire, after all.

There’s no one god who would lay a claim to all its complexities.

Regardless, Otanius is alone and Master Ranius is alone as well. He goes to bed with the beautiful man, sucks his cock and takes his arse, too, and the sheets are singed when they wake, the edges of the fabric smoldering in the faint light of morning. And Otanius returns, once, twice, until Master Ranius takes him by the shoulder after dinner and asks him whether it’s possible to believe in opposites, whether doing so isn’t exactly the same as believing in nothing at all.

Otanius doesn’t know how he knows.

His teacher sleeps with him in his bed that night, curled around him, breathing against the back of his neck and Otanius dreams about a fire that swallows up the whole world. He wakes up in an empty bed with dried tears streaking his cheeks.

*

When growth and destruction merge, you are one step closer to clarity.

He’s eighteen years old when Master Ranius dies. A blood disease, inherited from his parents, they say. His death is not entirely unexpected. It’s good to know, then, that the healers aren’t surprised, that someone isn’t. Otanius, meanwhile, can’t quite recognise the world beyond his windows when he wakes in the morning after the funeral.

The pyre was beautiful, he’s told.

For once, they praise his fire and it means exactly as little as when they were mocking him.

A few days later, once the urge to snap his fingers just to feel the friction release becomes too overpowering, Otanius acquires his first stone tablet and sets it up against the wall in his half-empty room. He stares at it for hours, trying to pick something of Master Ranius - his smile, his eyes, his hands - to replicate but it comes apart in fragments, the memories, the intent. He tries to latch onto something, anything, to reduce the complexity of complete and utter chaos but of course, this is how they want him, isn’t it, full of a thousand different pieces that can’t be read or seen or believed, mysteries, oh, but he can’t stand it anymore, he can’t –

The spark ignites.

In front of him, a heavy, black gash eats across one, whole diagonal of the tablet. It’s black and full of sooth. The stone, in turn, is red-hot, the minerals melting along the gash. Otanius breathes hard, rapidly, like he can’t remember how to activate the muscles in his lower diaphragm and then, all of a sudden, he feels the energy leave his body, again and again, and the stone tablet takes every hit and reshapes itself until the whole surface is covered in angry gashes, nothing that looks like anything. His own hand, in turn, is covered in blisters.

Otanius puts the tablet away and acquires another.

From there, he continues.

*

Look for the truth in-between.

He’s twenty, five years away from the end of his student life. He travels beyond the temple with some regularity and though he doesn’t quite fool all his elders anymore, there are still those who’ll insist upon his right to seek enlightenment as he wishes, meaning they leave him alone.

Otanius, meanwhile, travels to the forests and the mountain stretches and he keeps the fire under wraps, walking through meadows and scaling cliffsides using just his physique, his feet and his hands. He’s not a particularly strong or broad man but he’s tall and he’s persistent. He gets where he wants to go, if only because he isn’t truly setting any particular goals for himself. Oh, he’s well aware. Though he walks and walks and walks, he isn’t getting anywhere.

Whenever he takes a break, he seeks out the other elements - the earth, the wind, the water. They tell him absolutely nothing except whatever his body manages to interpret on sensory basis alone and it’s a marvel, really, how deaf he becomes out there in the wilderness, how blind and unbothered.

Every step he takes, of course, he feels it still. He feels the friction. The unreleased potential. But he can pretend, Otanius, and at age twenty, he’s become so good at it that it actually relaxes him.

And of course, even at night when he goes to sleep under the stars, the urge to reach up, to grasp and to pull and to push, is almost overwhelming. Like if he wanted to (if), he could make the sky explode as well. The teachers would say that the sky belongs to the mysteries, that the stars cannot be explained away or reduced to anything simpler but there’s a part of Otanius - a rather large part, at that - that insists.

They are fire.

They’re made of fire and there’s nothing for him to do with that knowledge except to keep himself close to the ground or half-way buried in the river.

*

Fire alone will never restore. This is truth.

Age twenty-four, Otanius visits bars when there’s nothing better or more productive to do, usually in the evenings on no particular days. He likes most of them - he likes the drinks they offer and the dark, heedy atmosphere. He doesn’t mind people approaching him for sex, either; it’s another way to pass the time.

He sits there with his drink and listens to life happening around him, thinking about his temple room with tablets stacked as high as the ceiling against one wall and his bed, empty, a little too short for his body which has lengthened over the past fifteen years, enough that he’s now on the taller side. It doesn’t do much besides make him feel even farther away.

One day, he’s approached by an older man, older than Ranius had been, the beard on his chin streaked with white. Otanius greets him politely enough, giving him a quick look-over because why not, why wouldn’t he, when the other man simply scoffs and shakes his head.

“None of that, boy,” he says and nods towards the fireplace. “Starting to think you might be taken anyway, huh? I’ve never seen the fire do that to anyone else.”

Otanius raises an eyebrow, then looks.

The flames are trying to crawl into the room at large, billowing in his direction almost desperately. People aren’t noticing because it isn’t immediately obvious but Otanius can tell, he can hear them and when he waves his hand briefly, quickly, they fall back against the metal grate like a pack of dejected dogs.

“They don’t usually do that to me, either,” he says with a shrug.

The old man - who’s called Marcas, he’s later told - laughs, sounding sweet and younger than he looks and takes a seat next to him. “Every time you come here, they do. Trust me, I’ve noticed.”

They sit there for a while, side by side, until Marcas introduces himself and tells him that he’s a blacksmith, that he’s been blocked from acquiring wood for fuel for a long while now by a petty rival. Could Otanius possibly…?

(He follows Marcas home and lights up his business and other things, too, because no one ever knows what they truly want before they have it and it’s one less night spent in his room with his tablets and it feels like more.)

*

Don’t be fooled. When the flames roar, remember that you are deaf - when they burn, remember that your flesh is lifeless - they will not distract you. Be guided. Be still.

They say that those who control the fire must be deaf to it, let the pain of blisters and burns fade into the background. It’s what makes his peers so efficient, says the elders, at what they do - like Solares, for instance, who draws whatever he sees when he meditates in the stone cellars below the temple, talking about airy creatures without forms or features, about voices made of ash and air. Or Marcus who’s taught himself to breathe fire, scorching his lips and the insides of his mouth when he makes even the smallest misjudgment. It’s how things ought to be, they say. So long as you feel what’s beyond the fire, feel it and explain it.

Give it life.

Meanwhile, Otanius, age twenty-five and new to priesthood, lights the candles in the temple and lights up prayers for people when it is deemed appropriate. He wears gloves to protect his ruined fingertips though the fire doesn’t often scorch him anymore. They call him unmotivated (lazy), ignorant and immature but of course, they aren’t pushing him to be anything else (more) either, knowing what they know, what they have to know.

That when he meditates, when he sleeps and when he listens, Otanius feels every single available spark in the temple, around it and above it, and he lets every impulse pass him by, barely acknowledged. He knows what’s beyond the fire - nothing, except for endless, impossible potential, a destructive force grand enough to lay the world bare.

It’s nothing that anyone wants to know.

So as is true to him and true to the way of his life, Otanius keeps it to himself.


~