But that moment never came. Minutes passed. The acid feeling started to subside. Keveh tried again to breathe, more calmly this time, but still nothing happened. Keveh licked his lips and tasted blood and sand. In the back of his mind he tried to remember what the longest amount of time he had ever held his breath for, but his memories were deaf to his requests. Surely, however long it was, it was not so long as this, he concluded. Keveh felt his chest with a gentler hand, trying to feel for the subtle swell of life, but he could feel nothing. Less than nothing in fact. Neither could he feel his lungs working, nor could he feel his heart beating. Keveh checked his pulse along the side of his neck, and then again at his wrists, and felt nothing in either place.
“What in Veye’s name is happening to me?” He said aloud with a voice drier than the earth beneath him. A single thunderclap echoed in the night sky above, though there were no clouds in the pale, moonlit sky.
“That will probably be the last time you ever ask that question.” A soft voice responded.
Keveh jerked in surprise, not realizing there was someone else there. He looked around, and only then did his surroundings begin to register in his dim mind. He was outside, beside a small fire in a rock outcropping. The fire seemed to be an unnatural shade of violet, and sweet like a honeyed candle. Opposite the flames from him was a figure, draped in thick shadows and sitting on a low rock shelf, with nothing but rose red lips visible. Keveh had no idea where he was, or how he had come to be in this place. Some old instinct in Keveh told him that he should not be alone with a woman in public, especially one inclined to paint her lips, and, with nothing else familiar to go on, he acted on that instinct.
“Pardon me, woman.” Keveh cleared his throat and attempted propriety. “But I must be...going.”
“Where?” The lips said, and Keveh realized that this voice was completely different from the one he had heard before.
Keveh thought hard. He had the feeling that he should be elsewhere, but he could not call to mind where that was, or where he was now, or why he is somewhere other than where he should be. Keveh tried to stand, but a bit of the acid feeling returned and he settled for sitting with his legs crossed in a more dignified position.
“Where am I?” Keveh asked. “What…I am sorry, what is happening? Please. I am so confused.”
“He is kinder now than he was before.” The lips said, somewhat amused.
“There is much kindness in him.” Another voice responded and it felt like a caressing breeze on Keveh’s skin. “It will only take time to unearth.”
“As you say.” The lips concluded.
“Please.” Keveh said, watching a single, thin bolt of lightning arc across the empty sky. “Where am I?”
“You are a mile outside the Onevre culthouse.” The lips reported. “You crawled, all this way.”
Keveh stared at the lips in the dark and realized that the answer had done next to nothing to cure his confusion or his spiking anxiety. Keveh looked behind himself and off out into the night along the ground. Indeed there was something of a trail, of smoothed dirt and splattered blood, as if a body had crawled or been dragged.
“I…” Keveh swallowed and immediately began to cough. At first it hurt, but quickly the pain turned to profound relief as air was rapidly forced in and out of his lungs by his convulsions. When he calmed, he was able to breath again, but only with great concentration.
“You are a fast learner.” The lips said, again with a partial smile. “It took me a week to breathe again.”
Keveh did not like anything about his present situation, but his capacity to form anger out of his confusion had been misplaced, like a lost tool, and he found that he could conjure nothing but continuous pleading for answers.
“You know what is happening here? To me? I do not remember anything.” Keveh put his hands to his temples.
“You died.” The lips said, and in such a banal way that for some reason Keveh did not doubt it to be true. “And now you live again.”
“That is impossible.” Keveh said, though they were hollow words.
“Usually.” The lips agreed. “But you are no longer usual.”
“I am…” Keveh began.
“Yes?” The lips asked with a grin.
“I am...something.” Keveh looked down and saw that he was wearing the plain woolspun robes of a koh priest. There was a charred gash in the vestments, right at the level of his heart. Keveh touched it with probing fingers and a hot memory flashed in his mind. Disgust. Confusion. Pain. Darkness. The memory crumbled like a dried leaf held too tightly in one’s hands.
“I am koh.” Keveh said, though the guess was obvious in his tone.
“You were.” The lips said.
“I should not be here.” Keveh bowed his head and tried to stand and excuse himself again. “Not here. Not with a woman like...you.”
“There is nothing back there for you.” The lips replied.
“I am back there!” Keveh shouted. The sound echoed among the small rocks. Keveh did not know where his sudden anger came from, or even what his words meant exactly.
“Everything I am. Everything I was.” Keveh pointed with a fierce finger, but then again, his anger seemed to leak away from him and he returned to his knees.
“I think...I left...I do not want to leave…so much behind.” He was muttering to himself.
“I am Yafai.” The other voice declared, rumbling like a storm in the reaches of Keveh’s mind. “Aihalan of fertile growth and the storms that bring it. I held out my hand to you as you crossed from this place to the world of shades beneath the earth, where there is no rain and nothing grows, and you took my hand with an oath. I have raised you. By my hand and your oath you live again. That is who I am. That is who you are now.”
“Aihalan.” Keveh repeated and shook his head. “Yafai is a trickster demon. A creature of vanity. Parents tell their children stories about Yafai so they will not stay outside on stormy nights.”
The lips smiled and the voice inside Keveh’s head felt like it smiled as well.
“I am what I am.” The voice called Yafai said.
“You do not deny it?” Keveh ran his fingers through his blood matted hair, as though he might wring the voice from his head.
“A denial concedes the terms of the claim.” Yafai gave a prickly giggle, so innocent and sparkling, like dew catching the dawn light. “You will see what I am, in time.”
Keveh felt old instincts flare up again, though he did not know from where.
“No.” He blurted out. “No no no. This is heresy. You are heresy. I want nothing to do with this. Veye is my provider.”
“Yours maybe.” The lips said. “But not the people’s. They starved while you hid away working on your relics. They starved all the more when you sent those relics to be used in battle and the king stole hard working men for his army and innocent women for his service.”
“This is blasphemy.” Keveh did not feel like he knew much, but the words felt familiar and true. “Veye is powerful. Veye is just. Veye is…”
“Veye did not raise you.” Yafai interrupted. “You served Veye for thirty years. But where is his hand in your life?”
“Veye was…” Keveh tried again.
“Where was Veye when you died?” The lips asked in a slanted expression. “Or when the people in your care died?”
“Veye…”
“Pray now.” The lips said, stern, but not without empathy. “Pray to Veye. We will wait.”
Keveh stared at the lips, then up at the sky with its eerie strands of lonely lightning, but he did not offer a prayer.
“You chose me.” Yafai said, and Keveh could hear a distant whisper of his own words, echoing an oath.
Keveh shook his head.
“If you are right, then I have shown myself to be no good judge of gods. It means nothing that I chose you to save me from death. Anyone would choose anything if death was all that was before them.”
“True.” Yafai said, and it felt like warm rain on his heart. “And false. The choice is not enough. I can only act on a seed.”
“What seed?” Keveh asked.
Yafai did not respond, and somehow, Keveh could feel the aihalan’s attention turn toward the lips in expectation. The lips frowned, carefully choosing the coming words.
“A vaishineph is a fruit grown from a seed of regret.” The lips began. “The aihalan is the gardener, the rain, and the good soil, but nothing grows without a seed. That seed is in you, and proof that there is something worth growing.”
“What is regret worth?” Keveh asked.
“It can be worth nothing.” The lips said. “Or a it can be worth the infinity of a new life.”
“I do not want a new...” But Keveh could not honestly finish the words, and it did not seem like the right place or time for weak attempts at deception.
“What is my regret?” Keveh asked, head bowed low.
“Only you can answer that.” Yafai said.
“It is always there.” The lips said. “You will find it. We will find it together.”
“We?” Keveh balked. “I do not know who are you. Some woman in the shadows. Foreign by the accent. Probably from Lisrai with those sing song vowels. You worship Haj, and break the godaihan’s kadir with your face paint, indecent closeness, and aggressive speech to me. We are enemies. I would try to capture or kill you in another time and another place.”
The lips frowned. Keveh knew he was speaking brashly, and he was at a disadvantage in a strange and dangerous situation, but his mind was bruised and his heart was distressed and he had no words to voice bu words of pain. And even as these thoughts became apparent to Keveh, he knew that Yafai knew them, and he knew that the woman across from him knew them, and he knew that both decided to look past them though they did not have to.
“That is the Writhing.” The lips said with sadness.
“What?” Keveh balked
“Tremors in your soul from your past life.” The lips explained. “Hatreds you have etched in your flesh. Reflexes you have been trained to feel on a level even more deep than your waking mind. Words you have been taught to say. Distinctions you have been taught to make. Prejudices you have been taught to hold. They cling to you now, sensing your new life approaching, and their hold over you falling away.”
Keveh looked down at his hands in the fire light, as if he might see these forces the lips were speaking of.
“The Writhing.” The lips repeated. “It will hurt. For a long time. But you can overcome it.”
Keveh clenched his fists.
“I was dead.” Keveh said. “I cannot even remember who I was. I have no memories of a family. No memories of love. No memories of desire for life. Nothing but these...aches. This Writhing. I have nothing. What can I overcome?”
His tone had become sharp, not with anger, but with pain.
The woman in the darkness stood, and she shed the shadows that were layered so thickly atop her as one might shed a blanket. When the shadows fell away, Keveh saw a woman standing before him, shorter and younger in appearance than a voice in the darkness might imply. She did have the fiery red hair of Lisrai birth, with ember black eyes, and a small, upturned nose. She wore a simple sheath dress, the color of the midnight sky, and ruby rings on two fingers, and silk leggings tucked into well made leather strapped sandals. Her arms were small, but densely packed with muscle. Keveh realized that he was used to glancing at someone and knowing so much about them from their dress and their manner, but none of those tools allowed him to judge the woman before him. Too elegant and finely kept to be poor, too utilitarian to be a noble, too strong to be anything but a laborer, and too out of place to be that.
The woman came around the violet hued fire to stand by Keveh’s side, and he felt a wave of rain scented air come with her. Before he knew what was happening, the woman had pulled a Lisraian short sword from behind her back and slashed a shallow cut across Keveh’s forearm.
Keveh sucked in air between his teeth.
“Damn it. Why...” Keveh pulled his fingers away from the wound. There was no blood. Instead, slow moving wisps of frost colored fire moved atop his skin.
“Manna.” Keveh said, his voice half between awe and contempt.
The woman sliced her own forearm and held it beside Keveh’s. Keveh pulled away from the contact on account of instincts he was not even conscious of, but after a moment, he returned his arm and watched the two trickles of flame dance in time with one another.
“This is our kind now.” She said, pointing to the manna. Then she threw her sword into the dirt and it stuck standing up. “The ground beneath our feet is our kingdom.”
Then the woman pulled Keveh to his feet and bid him to look up at the sky and its cloudless thunder.
“This is our god now.” She went on, and clasped his hand in her own. “You are my brother and I am your sister. All of those old ways of thinking, all of those old ways of naming things, and people, and the world in which we live, all of it died with our mortal lives. We are vaishineph. This is our calling. This calling is our love.”
Keveh looked deep into the woman’s ember eyes, and though he knew he did not fully believe her words, though he doubted he could ever believe them, he saw as plainly as the dawn’s light that her words were born from honest conviction.
“And what are we called to?” Keveh asked. “What place could I have in the world now?”
“Come with me.” The woman said.
Keveh and the woman walked down and out of the dry hills above Onevre. Rocks gave way to unkept paths, and unkept paths gave way to a main thoroughfare that ran into the city. Even at a distance, smoke could be seen over the city, and a ruckus of sounds could be heard. As Keveh and the woman entered the city’s six chambered gate they could see people streaming through the streets, all headed in one direction. Keveh and the woman allowed themselves to get swept up into the crowd and carried along, passing stone houses with windows and curtains open to the night. After a few minutes, Keveh saw where the sound and the smoke was coming from as the street came to a dead end.
Ahead was a small hill with a switchback approach leading up to the Onevre culthouse. At the base of the hill a crowd of thousands had gathered, shouting and cheering, smiling ear to ear on faces of celebration and relief. Children we hoisted aloft to see what the adults could, and what they could see was the culthouse burning in a green and yellow fire. A hint of sulfur was on the wind.
“Demon fire.” Keveh said.
“Yes.” The woman affirmed.
“But the people,” Keveh gestured all around with helpless hands, “They are cheering.”
“Look there.” The woman pointed and Keveh followed with his eyes. At the gated entrance to the culthouse about two dozen men had been hauling food, supplies, and richer treasures from within the culthouse and setting them in a long, winding pile leading down the switchback. People were taking them up in their hands, one at a time, and carrying them off to their homes.
“They are looting…” The words dripped from Keveh’s lips.
“There are no more koh here to loot from.” The woman said, then she turned to examine Keveh. “You were the last.”
Keveh felt the full force of her words.
“Look how happy they are.” Keveh said, as if it were not the most obvious thing in the world.
“I see it.” The woman said, like she was tending the wound of a child. “Some they will eat, some they will keep, some they will sell as the winter months dawn. For a time, they will forget that they are poor. For a time, they will not be bled dry from taxes and tithes. For a time, they will dream their own dreams on full stomachs.”
“A long time ago,” Keveh began, with tears in his eyes, “All I wanted to do was help these people. For Veye. For them. For myself. I remember that, even if I cannot remember anything else.”
“We will grow that seed and you will have your chance.” Yafai’s voice bloomed again in Keveh’s mind.
The woman gave a small bow to Keveh, and, in the manner held in common in many lands for women, she held her hands out before her, palms up, one atop the other, and formally introduced herself.
“I am Ajira. Vashineph and Hand of Yafai.”
Keveh looked her over and took a deep breath, feeling a weight he did not know he had been carrying fall away. Then he held out his fists, one atop the other, and replied.
“I am Keveh. Vaishineph and Hand of Yafai.”
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