It wasn’t long after the deaths of Enikkhe Konahu and Sawanin Lusahu that I went to visit Ostalos Elsahi. It was the first time I had ever been to his study, which he had been given several months back by one of the masters of A’ula Zölkhöh who had, I understood, been impressed by his work. It was a fairly small room, every corner filled with bowls of water or wheels painted yellow and white, items which I am sure had some arcane significance to which I was not and am not privy.
“It’s a pity,” said Ostalos Elsahi, looking up at me from the bench where he was staring into an empty dish. “And it was so unnecessary too.”
“You mean what happened with, with our friends?” I asked, finding myself momentarily unable to say their names.
“But of course I do. And I wish I could have done something to prevent it, but either I ripened too late or they ripened too early. For all their dreams of rebirth, between them they only accomplished destruction. So maybe it was because they refused to acknowledge their dreams as dreams. But look, Kësil, what do you see in the bowl?”
“Thipērek Thüzranahü wants to talk with you.”
“I’m sure she does! But it’s too late. There was a time when I dreamed that our futures might be joined together, but that was a long time ago. She chose her path and I chose mine. But she will not mourn her widowhood long. Now look into this bowl and tell me what you see.”
My readers will understand my reluctance to take part in anything with even the remotest hint of magic, but Ostalos Elsahi was so insistent that I gave in. I wrote above that the dish on the bench was empty, but when I stood in Ostalos Elsahi’s place and squinted down, it seemed to be full of a cloudy material that shifted under my eyes. For a moment I thought I saw it take solid form and a miniature landscape filled the bowl: a dry rocky plain with a single tree growing in its center, its roots spread out over the rocks and its branches touching the vault of the sky. I forced my eyelids open, marveling at what I was seeing, but too soon I blinked and it was lost in the clouds again.
I reported this to Ostalos Elsahi, who nodded as if he was not surprised. There was a wistful look in his eyes (if I am any judge of wist) as he peered into the dish from the opposite side of the bench and said, “And it is your dream.”
“I’ve never seen that place before.”
“Despite what the skeptics say, our dreams are not born solely from our memories and our minds, but carry words and images from elsewhere, seeds planted in the womb of our souls. And that was Sawanin Lusahu’s mistake, the Flame receive him. He wanted to take something from outside unmediated and raw, but it’s only in our dreams that we digest raw food. I don’t know where your dream came from, but you’ve made it a part of yourself, available to be dug out and made manifest.”
“That’s your magic, then,” I said. He didn’t answer at first, so that I began to feel awkward, and reached out to touch one of the wheels out of simple idleness.
“Don’t!” he said sharply, very sharply, and I recoiled as if the wheel were a coiled serpent. “I nearly died when I carelessly touched the first of those. And if it hadn’t been for Thipērek Thüzranahü, I would have. Though there are dreams that I can summon, there are also nightmares.”
“If you have a bowl full of nightmares, I’d rather not look in it,” I said. I meant it as a joke, but Ostalos Elsahi nodded seriously.
“And that is the course of wisdom,” he said. “For we are all haunted by dark presences when we sleep. I have made myself a master of the inward portals in the hope of releasing my dreams, but there are also nightmares waiting for their chance to break in.”
All this was making me very uncomfortable, so I cleared my throat and asked politely why Ostalos Elsahi had invited me here.
“For I have been withdrawn into myself lately, haven’t I? But my friends died, and died fighting one another, and so I have been quiet, for what good can words do? But I need advice.”
“I’m not sure that my advice can help you,” I said. “I’m no magician.”
“But that is exactly why I need your advice. For you’re surely aware that I am an outsider, that my parents came from elsewhere and that it can be seen in my face.” I squinted at him; he was perhaps slightly darker of complexion than most of the natives of Alka’ales, Reniye and Sukaye alike, but I couldn’t honestly say that he stood out all that much. Though by now I was able, if barely, to distinguish Reniye and Sukaye, and Ostalos Elsahi maybe did seem more Reniye than the Reniye, if that makes sense. “Therefore I value the perspective of those who are, like me, outsiders. But what I wanted to ask is this. You were there when our friends fought one another to the death. And you heard their debates outside the stupa. So do you believe that I will meet the same fate as they did?”
I shook my head. “How could I possibly answer a question like that? Ask one of your teachers, the master magicians, but don’t ask me.”
“But I’ve surpassed them,” he said, and I do not believe he was boasting, but rather stating what seemed to him a simple truth. “And they don’t have any secrets I don’t understand, not anymore. Though you do. Whatever you hide under your hat is a mystery to me, though I can perceive dimly that it is not far off from a dream itself. But I ask you not as a magician; rather as a judge of men.”
I have never been a magician, but a keen judge of character I certainly have been. “Well,” I said boldly. “It is a sin to speak ill of the dead, but it seemed to me that Enikkhe Konahu was very sure of himself.”
“Sawanin Lusahu, too,” he murmured.
“Really? I confess that I always thought him to be rather diffident, if anything. But he was different when he put that crown on, more like Enikkhe Konahu. Then they were like two bulls running at one another.”
“And am I so different?”
“I think so,” I said.
“I want my dreams to be good dreams, and that is all. For I intend to open up doorways within myself and I want to bless Alka’ales, not curse it. So do you think that my magic will bless or curse?”
I realized then that I was in a fairly dangerous position. I had seen what Enikkhe Konahu and Sawanin Lusahu had done to A’ula Zölkhöh, and that had been in the course of a single day. Only the Shimases knew what Ostalos Elsahi was planning and what he could do to Alka’ales if things went wrong, or even if they went right. And yet now, for whatever baffling reason, he had chosen me to decide his fate.
Then I realized something else, something that I would certainly have realized much earlier if I had not been so occupied with magicians and pilgrims, not to mention fish. The gap in years between this time and my own was so great that I had never before bothered trying to find connections with what I knew of the past, a puzzle that was made even more intractable by leaping from place to place. Yet Alka’ales was not so far off from Alkāl, after all, and every child knew of the immortal Lord of Dreams who ruled over the kingdom of Alkāl with magic that was left over from a previous era. Like every imaginative child, I had my own mental picture of the Lord of Dreams, a man who wrapped himself constantly in cloak and shadow, perhaps, a man with a hard face who had gone beyond all human passions.
It was a far cry from the man I was looking at now. Ostalos Elsahi was a young man, at least a decade younger than me, and though he certainly was withdrawn and secretive, he was simply too friendly to match the Lord of Dreams of my imagination. Indeed, the more I thought about it, the harder it was for me to believe that they were one and the same. Even if Ostalos Elsahi called himself a master of dreams, I said to myself, it didn’t make him the one and only Lord of Dreams. It was as if the Hawk of White Mountain was at my shoulder, telling me not to jump to conclusions like his assistants were so prone to doing.
“I really don’t know,” I told him. An abdication of my responsibility, perhaps, but I felt more uncertain than ever. Ostalos Elsahi’s face became a mask that I couldn’t see past. If he wasn’t the Lord of Dreams, maybe he was a precursor, the first in a line of magicians that would culminate in that immortal sorcerer.
He sighed and waved me away from the bowl. “And I’d hoped you would, but I understand,” he said. “For it’s a weighty thing, to hold the future in your hands. Some men seek out power, of course, because they enjoy ruling men and women, but I don’t believe that’s how it is with me. So I have only ever wanted to bring back what was lost, for Alka’ales, for myself. Now leave me, and I must meditate on the Flame.”
The first thing I did after this interview was to go see Thipērek Thüzranahü to ask her about the incident in which Ostalos Elsahi claimed he had almost died, about which I had a great deal of curiosity. Of course, I was not so boorish as to make this the only reason for my visit. Rosédan was gone for the day: it was something to do with the dragon, some sort of practice flights, I believe. I use the word ‘believe’ loosely. My readers will probably share my sentiments when I remark that it was hard for me to believe, in the fullest sense, that these creatures existed, much less that my Rosédan was able to master and ride them.
But I wander from my narrative. Before she left, Rosédan had given me a bauble to pass on to Thipērek Thüzranahü with some words of condolence that she had made me memorize carefully, a precaution that was hardly necessary given my excellent memory. With this bauble and these words I went to Thipērek Thüzranahü’s house. She was wearing a widow’s headdress, its black threads swaying back and forth over her face as she spoke.
“Thank you, Kësil,” she said. “And thank Rosédan for me too.”
I had been pondering the best way to turn the conversation to Ostalos Elsahi, and settled at last on an indirect approach. “Speaking of thanks,” I said, “Ostalos Elsahi said that you saved his life once.”
“Oh? That’s right, I did, but that was years ago.” She laughed quietly. “I suppose it will occupy my mind to tell you. Everyone says that it’s good to keep my mind occupied. Come inside, but I’ll warn you that it involves magic and you might not understand it all.”
The story she told me went something like this. It’s true that I didn’t understand parts of it here and there, but I believe I have the essential nature of the story down. Ostalos Elsahi, it seemed, had after years of study been able to make a portal, not like the portal that took Rosédan and me here from the western coast, but a portal into the depths of his own soul. (There was a technical term for this that my Bird simply refused to translate). Whatever it was that he hoped to do, the outward end of the portal had released a shadow, a demon, a nightmare, that spoke mockingly, echoing whatever Ostalos Elsahi said but putting a sinister twist on his words. When he asked for help, it asked for him to be beaten. When he asked for water, it asked for urine, or fouler substances. This lasted for a week or so, the demon growing more and more aggressive until one day it latched onto Ostalos Elsahi’s back with claws dripping pitch and tore strips of flesh from his back. He was able to banish it in some fashion that Thipērek Thüzranahü didn’t understand, but his wounds were serious: not only in themselves, but because they were filled with the pitch from the demon’s claws.
It had taken all of Thipērek Thüzranahü’s skill to keep him alive. Where, I asked, were her teachers in the art of medicine when all this was happening? “We didn’t tell them about it,” she said in a hushed voice. “Ostalos Elsahi wasn’t strictly supposed to be doing what he did, and we didn’t want him to get in trouble.”
“He was already in trouble, it seems to me.”
“We were younger then,” she told me as if that explained everything. “Since then he has been more cautious. And now he’s the last of us standing. Alka’ales is his. We can only hope he’ll be a gracious master.”
I turned this conversation over in my mind as I returned to my room in the dormitory, but I wasn’t able to come to any settled conclusions. At least it explained why Ostalos Elsahi had been so desperate for my advice.
Although it was still early in the day, the instant I sat down on my bed I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I recall is that I was, or at least so it seemed to me, sitting on the back of a vast leathery animal and looking out over the world that was revealed to my eyes, which was such a curious state of affairs that it had to be a dream. Though everything around me was as dark as night, I could see hundreds of little fires around me, and a sudden vertigo came over me as I realized that they could just as easily be stars and I could be hanging upside down. To resettle my mind I stared down, or up, at the back of the creature that was supporting me.
Even as I looked at it, its outline became clearer in the darkness, and after a few minutes I understood that it was a great elephant, as pure white in color as Rosédan’s dragon, its trunk raised as if in salutation. The elephant I had seen in the menagerie long ago had saluted me in such a fashion, and I wondered what was ahead of us to be greeted thus.
Then I saw him walking along the elephant’s trunk towards its head and towards me. His face was hidden behind a veil of thickly folded cloth, but his voice was definitely that of Ostalos Elsahi. “Do you like what I have in mind?” he asked me.
“I can’t see,” was my honest reply.
“But that’s all for the best. We strain our eyes trying to see what we’ve lost, but wouldn’t it be better just to close them and rest, and dream?”
“Well,” I said after a moment’s thought, “I’m rather fond of the waking world, myself.”
“As am I. For I love the world more deeply than I love myself. But it is gone in the blink of an eye: children age, rivers dry up, trees die. And the only way to keep what we love is to keep our eyes shut.”
“Maybe so,” I said, wanting to be polite.
“It is so. Now look again and tell me what you see.”
So I looked out at the hundred fires (or were they stars?) and tried to make out patterns in them. Underneath me the elephant continued at a steady pace forward and I shifted from side to side on its back with every step. The man who sounded like Ostalos Elsahi had reached the top of the elephant’s head, where he stood motionless, perfectly balanced, his hands folded under his chin. Something changed, whether in my eyes or the night, I couldn’t tell, and there were vast wings moving in the dark. At that moment I knew that the dream had turned into a nightmare and terror flooded over me. When I turned my eyes back to the man with Ostalos Elsahi’s voice, he was gone.
That is the last I remember of the dream. After that I was lying in bed awake but with no idea of what time of day it was. But the dream was still sharp in my mind, as was the terror.
I mentioned the dream when I shared dinner with Rosédan after she came back from her excursion with the dragon. (She had it stabled, if that is the right word, in a cave in the mountains. I visited it once with her and found it rather alarming to see that beak and that neck emerging from the shadows. In fact, it reminded me of the wings in my dream, though I didn’t mention this to her, since she took a bizarrely motherly attitude towards the creature).
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
“It certainly sounds like a strange dream,” she said. “Do you think it means anything?”
I shrugged. “Who can say? Likely it’s just because my conversation with Ostalos Elsahi was on my mind.”
“My people believe that dreams are given to us by Heaven,” she said thoughtfully. She gave me a significant look; at least, I assume it was significant, but I was not sure what the precise significance was. I smiled pleasantly back and soaked up the last of my sauce with a morsel of spiced cake. “And the way you described it, it wasn’t any ordinary dream,” she added. “I’d like to see one of those animals you call an elephant some day. It’s hard to believe that creatures like that really walk in this world.”
I looked at her in such a way as to convey the full weight of my skepticism. “You say that, but what about your dragon?”
“What about it? Dragons are perfectly normal, everyday animals, unlike elephants. I believe you’re making up what you said about its nose.” I denied it fervently, and she laughed. “Besides, dragons spend more of their time flying than walking.” It was, unfortunately, hard to argue with this, and so I changed the subject.
“I’m worried about what Ostalos Elsahi might be planning,” I said. “Enikkhe Konahu was bad enough, trying to stir up those old grudges. And I doubt that whatever Sawanin Lusahu had in mind was as good as he claimed.”
“It wasn’t. It was an abomination, what he did. The magic of my people should never have been twisted like that. It’s meant to do work for us, to allow us to see and to talk across great distances, things like that. Not to make mountains into gods.”
“I really should ask someone about it, someone who has some idea of what Ostalos Elsahi’s up to.”
“But I don’t think anyone does,” said Rosédan with a slight smile and shake of her head. “I’ve learned so much from the masters of the college, but things are strangely reversed here, where many of the students are far beyond their teachers. And Ostalos Elsahi is, I believe, the only one in all Alka’ales who understands the portals.”
“You don’t understand them yet, then?”
“I don’t,” she said, and frowned in such a way that for a moment I wanted more than anything else to kiss her. But she raised her face towards the sky and the moment passed. “I’ve tried to get Ostalos Elsahi to explain some of his methods to me, but it’s like trying to get water out of a rock. And he says he’s busier now than ever before.”
“You should keep trying,” I said, though without much confidence in my own words. “I have the feeling that we should leave as soon as we can. Something terrible is about to happen.”
“Insight from your dream?”
“No,” I said.
She met my eyes with a calm, curious gaze. “Insight from your past, which is our future?”
“I could be wrong,” I admitted, as I rarely have opportunity to do. “But time will tell.”
Not much changed the next few days, at least not to my knowledge. Ostalos Elsahi continued to hide himself away and despite all our efforts, neither Rosédan or I were able to learn anything at all from him. Then one morning as I descended to the main hall of the dormitory, I discovered an uproar. The students had divided themselves into two groups that were exchanging pleasantries in loud voices. When I say pleasantries, I mean of course that they were calling one another fools, lunatics, blind men, and words of that nature. I inquired as to the cause of their dispute and learned that a message had been distributed throughout the college (by word of mouth: I doubt most of the students were capable of reading much beyond the sacred scriptures) challenging the masters to a duel of magic. These were the words that were reported to me, though for all I know they were altered as they were passed from ear to ear:
“I am the greatest and the deepest magician in the realm of Alka’ales. And therefore I claim the right to decide its future. Let any master of the college who thinks himself wiser or mightier than I face me in the stupa of the chalice and I will prove to him that my dreams are not idle.”
I pondered these words, then asked the young man who relayed them whether he thought Ostalos Elsahi would be able to do what he said. This provoked, as I perhaps should have anticipated, the argument all over again. A smaller faction, composed of Ostalos Elsahi’s followers or at least admirers, insisted that Ostalos Elsahi was able to do anything short of restoring the chalice, and perhaps even that was not outside his grasp. I noticed that some of them were imitating Ostalos Elsahi’s distinctive speech patterns, if my Bird’s rendition was accurate. (Rosédan tells me that his peculiar way of speech likely stems from a peculiar way of thought, this his magic has inclined him to think along certain lines that influence his grammar.)
The larger group insisted the contrary, that the masters would overcome Ostalos Elsahi without any difficulty at all. I thought some of their remarks about him were unnecessarily personal, and in light of recent events they seemed to be rather too confident about the masters’ abilities. But I kept my mouth shut and left. My reticence to speak when silence is called for is one of my finest qualities, I think.
It wasn’t difficult for me to find Rosédan. She was standing right outside the door with her arms folded, and as soon as I opened my mouth to greet her, she took my by the hand and said, her voice quick and quiet, “Come with me.” I followed her, of course, and she brought me to a little garden nearby, about halfway between the dormitories and the college. It was strange, but in all the journeys back and forth I had taken over the past year, I had never before seen this garden. The path to it was hidden between a pair of overshadowing rocks, which may be part of the reason, but I’m convinced that it had to be hidden by magic, even if Rosédan has since told me that I’m being absurd.
Thipērek Thüzranahü was there, kneeling in a bed of earth where she seemed to be drawing or writing in the dirt. “He’s started, hasn’t he?”
“We don’t know yet,” said Rosédan. “I haven’t had a chance to go to the stupa. I wanted to find Kësil first.”
Thipērek Thüzranahü nodded. “I understand,” she said. “Go there now and see what he’s up to.”
“I’ll go too,” I interjected before either of them had a chance to say anything to me, and I followed after Rosédan. I was determined to see Ostalos Elsahi again and figure out once and for all whether he knew about my dream with the elephant, and what it could possibly mean.
However, it proved remarkably difficult to reach the stupa itself. As my readers can probably imagine, the streets of A’ula Zölkhöh were quite crowded, even more than they had been when Enikkhe Konahu broke the arch. It took us some time to make our way there, and several times we were nearly separated, but at last we were able to find a balcony where we had a passable view of what was going on in the stupa and the area directly around it.
We could not see Ostalos Elsahi, as presumably he was within. But we saw the masters that surrounded the stupa, all wearing their robes of office marked with their distinctive insignia. Some of them were consulting one another in little circles while others gathered at the entrance to the stupa, but there was a general sense of agitation that I could discern even from our balcony. Every so often one would go inside, but no one ever emerged again.
“I wish we could see through those walls,” I said idly.
“But we can,” she said.
“Yes, it would be nice,” I replied. A couple seconds later her words echoed in my head and I realized what she actually meant. I turned my head to face her, and I must have looked fairly bewildered.
“I have a ring here somewhere,” she said, opening the satchel she carried, which seemed in the glimpse I had of it to be full of various trinkets and toys. “Ah, here they are.” She pressed a silver ring into the palm of my hand. Turning it over, I saw that there were symbols inscribed on both the inside and outside, but they were too small for me to interpret them. “Put it on,” she urged me, so after a moment’s hesitation, perfectly understandable given my experiences with magic, I did.
As soon as the ring encircled my finger, my eyes changed. That’s the best phrase I can find to describe what happened. I saw the walls of the stupa, but I also saw past them, to the layered chambers within and the empty room where I was assured the chalice had once been kept. As I write this I’m aware of how contradictory that sounds, but it is the truth. How it was possible is beyond me and I can’t even put into words how it was: whether I saw the outside with one eye and the inside with another, or whether I saw the outside at one moment and the inside at the next. But that really doesn’t matter now, not anymore.
What matters is that I saw Ostalos Elsahi in that central room, surrounded by the bodies of the masters. Not that they were dead, I hasten to add. They were asleep, even if it took a few seconds’ careful examination to make sure that their chests were rising and falling with slow breaths. And Ostalos Elsahi was weeping as he stood atop the column at the stupa’s heart, his hands raised to the vault, and he cried out. Rosédan’s ring, I should add, allowed me to hear as well as see what was happening inside the walls.
“My dreams are stronger than theirs!” he said. “But my dreams are stronger!” I could even see the tears running down his cheeks. He was to all appearances a man in the utmost anguish, and I wondered if there was anything I could have said in our last conversation that could have forestalled this, though I doubt there was. I was a stranger here, with little understanding of the depths and history that had brought Ostalos Elsahi and Alka’ales to this point.
This is perhaps the proper place to insert a list of the greatest masters who faced Ostalos Elsahi and failed. It was given to me by Ostalos Elsahi himself with the curious, though certainly gracious, remark that he wanted them to be remembered somewhere, even if they were forgotten in Alka’ales.
Par Enikkhe fell asleep, of the school of chiromancy, who lifted what could not be lifted.
Par Hūmzos fell asleep, of the school of astromancy, who saw the twelve.
Par Yarises fell asleep, of the school of pegemancy, who opened what could not be opened.
Par Zā’os fell asleep, of the school of ceratomancy, who found and drank.
Par Pelenmethkhe fell asleep, of the school of dromomancy, who jumped from one edge of the world to the other.
Par Taurokos fell asleep, of the school of coelomancy. who was acquainted with the three princes of the east.
Par Sülkhö fell asleep, of the schools of toxomancy and ophidomancy, who overcame the greatest of his foes.
Par Phēries fell asleep, of the schools of icthyomancy and photomancy, who obtained what he sought.
Par Tharenes fell asleep, of the school of polimancy, who balanced and tore apart.
Rosédan seized my arm suddenly and whispered, “Something’s happening!” This seemed so obvious that it was hardly worthy of comment, but I know by now that I should pay close attention to what Rosédan says. I looked around and was met with such an overwhelming combination of perspectives that I had to sit down suddenly. I felt Rosédan slip the ring off my finger, which to my great relief resolved what I was seeing into a single image.
She stood up and I saw her tap her finger against the rail of the balcony, her lips moving without uttering audible words. “What is it?” I asked. “What’s happening?” She only shook her head and continued to tap.
Then the tapping stopped and she said to me, “Go find Thipērek Thüzranahü and do whatever she says. Now!”
“But what will she want me to do?”
“Now!” It was the first time Rosédan had ever spoken to me with such vehemence, and I was taken aback. Despite my desire to ask another sensible question to clear everything up, I decided that it was probably wiser to do what she said. I sighed and went down to push my way through the crowd once more.
The first time I passed Thipērek Thüzranahü’s garden I missed it entirely. Only when I noticed that I was nearly back to the dormitory did I realize my mistake and double back. A simple error, but I can’t help but wonder if it was pivotal in what happened afterwards. I found Thipērek Thüzranahü standing in the middle of the garden, facing in a direction that I was fairly certain was that of the stupa, and Ostalos Elsahi. She didn’t notice me at first, so I cleared my throat.
“Thipērek Thüzranahü,” she said.
“Yes,” I replied, “that is your name.”
She turned around and I saw that she was holding a rose in her hands, which she proffered to me. I looked at it, then looked back up at her face. It was not an expression I recall seeing before, on her or indeed on anyone. There was anger in it, but also grief that nearly matched Ostalos Elsahi’s. It certainly didn’t help me understand why she was giving me a flower.
“Take this to Ostalos Elsahi,” she said. This didn’t help me understand any better, so I asked her why. She stamped her foot in the dirt and said, “Do it now, Kësil! Or do you think any of our wise teachers will be able to stop him with all their art? This is the only way!”
Generally I prefer to have a firm grasp on the reasons for my actions and the goals towards which they are pointed. But this seemed to be a special case. I took the rose, but incautiously, and one of the thorns pricked my hand so that I nearly dropped it.
“Careful!” she told me.
“All right,” I said, and I ran back to the stupa, holding the rose in one hand and pressing my other hand (which was now bleeding more profusely than I had expected) to my chest. Once I stumbled, but I don’t think it delayed me for more than a few seconds. I remember that when the stupa was in my sight, I found new strength to run, though I had been about to collapse. I barely noticed the people, masters and students alike, who were in my way as I shoved them rudely out of the way, telling myself that I would apologize to them later. But things turned out as they turned out in the end, I suppose.
Even now it isn’t clear to me exactly what happened or what I could have done differently. I made it into the stupa, even to the threshold of the central chamber, where Otstalos Elsahi was still standing amid the sleepers. He saw me and I saw him and knew that I was too late.
How can I describe what happened next? I have often seen, on the surface of a pond or a river, bubbles appear and then vanish. Now, as Ostalos Elsahi and I stared at one another across the room, he clapped his hands and the air between us shimmered and danced, colors on the surface of a bubble. The bubble grew, swept towards me, and there was an instant in which I felt something pressed against my mouth and chest with suffocating strength. Even my eyes felt heavy. I fought the urge to close them, and as soon as I took a deep breath, the pressure was gone.
At some point while I had been distracted, Ostalos Elsahi had changed his position on the pillar so that he was now sitting, his legs swinging almost childishly against the stone even as his face and arms were utterly still. I looked down at the rose in my hand and was surprised to see that it was already wilting.
“But it was a worthy effort,” he said. “Now bring your wife here. For I would speak to you both.”
“What did you do? What happened?” I asked as I let the rose fall to the floor.
“I’m very tired. Now hurry so I can rest.”
When I left the stupa, I discovered that everyone outside, from master to student, old man to child, had been stricken down by the same magic as those inside. They lay sprawled or curled up on the ground, every single one of them. I even saw one of the dogs that normally roamed the streets, its legs twitching in some imaginary chase.
I met Rosédan at the doorway of the tower we had climbed to reach the balcony. She was trembling, and I embraced her. It seemed the thing to do to comfort her; at any rate it certainly comforted me. “He wants to tell us something,” I said after a few moments of this comfort.
“I imagine he does. We don’t have a choice, do we?”
“No, I don’t think so. At least he didn’t send us to sleep like everyone else,” I said as we walked back to the stupa. She seemed so distraught that I felt myself compelled to add some more encouraging words. “Maybe this means he’ll help us return home.”
“Or maybe he’ll only taunt us before he puts us under his spell too.”
This was a dark thought, and I said so, to which her response was to ask me where exactly I’d been for the past few days if I didn’t regard dark thoughts as appropriate. To this I could only make a weak appeal to our friendship with Ostalos Elsahi. She stared at me for a moment, then she squeezed my hand and gave me a sudden and welcome smile.
Then we reached the stupa, where Ostalos Elsahi was waiting for us. He stood in the doorway, his arms outstretched to either side, his head lowered so that at first I thought he was asleep too, overcome by his own magic the same way Sawanin Lusahu had been. Then he lifted his head and gave us a slow nod. “You need not fear for yourselves. For you are strangers here. You and the pilgrims who have not been initiated are not under my authority and will be permitted to leave. And you need have no fear for your friends or anyone else in A’ula Zölkhöh, or all of Alka’ales. They will waken before sunset tomorrow, and when they do things will be different.”
“Different in what way?” I asked despite Rosédan’s nudges and pinches, which I assume were meant to convey some kind of message.
“You will see. And do you have more questions for me?”
“No,” said Rosédan.
Unfortunately, at the same time I said, “If I may ask, what magic was in the rose?”
“Magic? But there was no magic, at least no magic that does not rest in the simplest of actions. For it was merely a symbol of love. Not that Thipērek Thüzranahü really loved me. Not that it was anything more than a dream. But then, what is the title I have seized for myself?” He dismissed us with a wave of his hand.