I’ve transcribed the following from Rosédan’s account to me of what she saw in the valley of the gods. Despite all my persuasive arguments, Thipērek Thüzranahü refused to let me accompany Rosédan any farther into the valley than I’d already gone, telling me that it would be too dangerous for me. I pointed out that I had faced the wolves of the Uste, the Crocodile of Dūrī, and whatever evil stalked the darkness of Dumun, but to no avail. So all I could do was watch Rosédan descend into the valley and wait for her to return. After a while Thipērek Thüzranahü told me to follow her, and we took a path around the left side of the valley. A mist seemed to have risen to obscure Rosédan and whatever trials she faced from my view, and I prayed to the Flame that she would be safe.
----------------------------------------
I really don’t think Thipērek Thüzranahü wanted me to undergo the trials. She was suspicious of me from the beginning, in fact, and I can understand why. And yet at the same time she genuinely wants to see some new and strange kind of magic, the kind that you and I offer. They all do. All the college of magicians here, I mean.
I didn’t know what to expect from the trials any more than you did. The valley of the gods, that name suggested a religious ritual, which I wasn’t looking forward to, given my devotion to Heaven alone. When I left you and Thipērek Thüzranahü, I had with me only my ring of invisibility, and I wasn’t certain whether or not I would be allowed to use it during the trials.
The first thing I noticed was that the air was growing thicker, like a mist was rising from the ground around me. Then a woman approached me out of the mist and spoke to me. Her appearance is fuzzy in my memory, though I had the impression that she was very old. She asked me my birthplace, and because I had a feeling I shouldn’t lie to her, I told her. I should say that all these conversations were in my own language, maybe because of a magic like yours or maybe for some other reason. The dialect, oddly enough, was not my own but a style of speech that I associate with the priests.
She nodded, though surely the name of an obscure town in Ghadáreim couldn’t have meant anything to her. “You are a long way from your home, aren’t you?” I was about to agree, but I had the feeling that there was a hidden meaning to the question, beyond the literal words. So I took a moment to think. The woman didn’t seem to be impatient at all.
You can probably guess how I answered in the end. “No,” I replied. “I am a student of magic, so this college is my home.”
“Welcome home, then,” said the woman, and I have the impression that she smiled before the mists took her again.
I walked a little further before I had another visitor: a man with the head of a frog who stared at me with his popping eyes before he said to me, “What is it that you first saw in this world?”
Well, the first thing I can remember seeing is a magical ring that my father wore, and I presume that the first thing I saw as a babe was my mother’s breast, but it didn’t seem to me that these were the answers the frog-headed man was looking for. I thought maybe it was significant that he’d added the phrase ‘in this world,’ suggesting that there was another world from which I’d come. If this was the doctrine of the college, then was there some sign that a true magician was supposed to remember from their passage into this world? I had certainly never heard of such a sign in any of my training.
I repeated the question to myself, and this is true, Kësil, I saw the frog-headed man’s eyes bulge out to nearly three times their size. “She doesn’t remember,” he said. “For her who cannot remember, what power is there? Where can she go who does not know where she has been?”
I had been pretty full of myself after correctly answering the riddle of that first woman, but now I despaired, and realized just how foolish it had been for me to think I could attempt to pass the trials without preparation. It seemed backwards to me to have the exam before the lecture, but you know, I think I understand better now. You’ll be proud of me: I figured it out.
After all, what is prior to any act of seeing? That is to say, what is the substance that we need in order to see anything at all? It is light, of course! Probably there’s some deeper meaning and light is an allegory for something, but my answer was good enough for the frog-headed man. When I exclaimed, “Light!”, his eyes shrank to points like the head of a pin.
“That is good, that is good,” he croaked. “You’ll need light in the days to come, not to mention the nights.”
He hopped away, leaving me to continue down the slope. I was frightened at this point, Kësil. I had only barely managed to answer the frog-headed man’s question, so how would I deal with the questions to come? I was actually trembling as the next figure formed itself out of the mists. It was a woman this time. She was tall, very tall, and her face was covered by a veil.
“You are a beautiful girl,” she said to me. “What is your true love?”
Well, I, I thought immediately of you, of course. But again this seemed like it was too easy to be the answer she was looking for. Besides, you know that in the end we’ll go our separate ways. I love you, but if I have a true love it has to be the magic, which I’ve devoted so much of my life to. And yet, as I thought it over, I wasn’t at all sure that the veiled woman was interested in my magic. She had called me beautiful, not wise or skillful. What does beauty have to do with magic? There have been great magicians who were as ugly as the night is dark. So maybe she did mean you after all, I thought. You’re the closest thing I have right now to a husband.
I opened my mouth then shut it again. Why, after all, do I love you even though I know we must part? You’re certainly not bad looking; I particularly like your deepset dark eyes. But I think more than anything else I see, oh, this is embarrassing, you’re always in all these situations where you don’t know what you’re doing, but you act like you do. It’s no wonder everyone likes you so much. I misspoke just now when I said you’re the closest thing I have to a husband. Really you’re more of a brother, a dear and beloved brother.
“Beauty,” I said. “My true love is beauty, and that which is beyond it.”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
The veiled woman drew herself up to such a height that I felt like a child staring with craned neck at her mother. “That which is beyond beauty is no concern of mine. But if you are a lover of beauty, I have no quarrel with you, and I welcome you to the last temple where beauty is honored.” Then she faded as well, and I continued onward.
Before me I could see, and I don’t know whether it was a physical building or something akin to the figures that appeared out of the mist to question me, but I saw a row of stairs leading up to a platform under a half-open dome of brick. A man was sitting under this dome, his legs stretched out before him so that I could see one of them was withered and bent.
“I’m glad you came,” he said, and his voice was amazingly rough, as if he had a smoking fire in his throat or something like that. “Tell me, if you can, why you have hands.”
This was a question I had no hesitation in answering. “I have hands in order to create.”
“And so do I, but my hands and arms are stronger than yours, even if my legs are weaker. Even if I can’t move from this one place, I can make things you cannot imagine. Do you claim the name of magician?”
“I do,” I said.
“Then show me.” He held out his hands and lightning, or so it seemed to me, flashed from one to the other, and my hair began to stand on end. “Show me your magic, or whatever it is you call magic.”
As I mentioned, I only had my ring of invisibility with me, and not knowing what else to do, I put it on my finger. At once the lightning stopped, and the man propped himself forward on his arms to stare in my direction.
“Now that is something I haven’t seen in many a year. What did you build your art upon? Whose blood runs through your hands when you work?”
“Only my own,” I said. “You asked to see my magic, and I’ve given you a small glimpse of it.”
He shook his head, chuckling to himself. Then his chuckling turned into grumbling. “I wasn’t put here to judge cases like this. All she had to do was pick up a rock. That’s the foundation of it all. Authority.” His grumbling grew deeper and quieter, until it was like the grumbling of the earth itself, and at the same time he faded back into the mists. I took off my ring and walked on, past the brick dome. But as I did, the mists themselves began to fade, and there was one final row of ascending stairs that brought me to a sort of open platform sticking out over a ridge, from which I could see the entire valley spread out before my eyes.
I had an epiphany at that moment. You’ll ask me what all these questions meant and how they were supposed to prepare me for the college, and I honestly don’t know. Not yet. I hope they’ll be illuminated for me later on. Certainly they tested my wits, and I think a magician needs wit no matter the country. But there is a mystery here beyond the techniques of Ghadáreim that I look forward to exploring. Are the light and the beauty of the questions connected to the Ideas that we use in our art, or something deeper?
Well, I saw the valley, like I said, and it was full of ruined buildings and great statues with their heads or arms missing. It was an impressive thing to see, but I wasn’t sure where to go or what to do next. Then I saw a path going down from where I was standing and curving off to the west, on my left. I took this path, thinking over everything I’d seen and heard, and I was so wrapped up in my recollections that I didn’t see Thipērek Thüzranahü until she quite suddenly appeared from behind a pile of rocks in front of me. I don’t like the way she grinned at me when I jumped in my surprise. I was much more pleased to see you, of course, just as you were delighted to see me.
“Well?” she said, or rather you said for her, of course. “What did the lame man tell you?”
“Mostly things I didn’t understand,” I replied. “But they all let me pass.”
She smiled again, this time more warmly, I think, and said, “Congratulations! You’re a sister of the college now! I can introduce you to all my favorite teachers and help you when you struggle. You will; we all did when we started. But it’ll be all right, I promise.”
“Who were they?” I asked her. “What were they? Were they the ghosts of the dead?” I was thinking of course of the ghosts we encountered in Edazzo.
“Not quite,” she told me. “I’ll tell you more once we’re well away from the valley. They wouldn’t like it otherwise.”
You had to hold my hand as we left, didn’t you? Even though you know it isn’t wise. It’s only by accident that we met, and if Heaven has laid out our future paths, they do not lie together.
----------------------------------------
My readers will no doubt be interested in the story that Thipērek Thüzranahü told us about the origin of the Valley of the Gods. The people of Alka’ales, she said, had once worshiped many gods, but there came a time when they abandoned all their old gods in favor of the One in whose light they burn. (This description is suspiciously similar to the Flame, and I will have to inquire further into this matter). They held a council to decide what should be done with their idols, and finally they decided to gather them all together and throw them into that valley. But in the months afterwards they began to suffer from dreams in which their old gods visited them and scolded them for their neglect.
But the people were firm in their new beliefs, and they consecrated a man to be a kind of exorcist and sent him into the valley to deal with the gods. He saw the gods rise out of the earth before him, and he rebuked them and asked them what they thought they were doing.
“We only want what belongs to us by right,” he was told.
“And what is that?” he asked them.
“To try and to judge. Was that not why we were put on this earth? Are your souls not grist for our mills?” was their reply.
“Very well then. We have among us students who long to inquire into the deep secrets of this world. Some of them are worthy but others would dishonor themselves by their search or worse, make themselves into monsters to burn our land to ashes. If it is your nature to try our souls, then try the souls of our students. I set you to this task for a thousand years.”
Thus the story went. Upon hearing it, Rosédan remarked to herself, “So now I know what it’s like to meet a god!” For my part, I thought of the Crocodile and I shuddered. I would prefer if neither Rosédan or I went near the Valley of the Gods again, exorcist or no exorcist.
As for the celebrations that followed our return to A’ula Zölkhöh, there is little need for me to describe them in detail, I think. But we met several students and teachers of the college who we would come to know quite well later on. I will leave them for another time. For now, my readers need only know that Rosédan and I danced until we were exhausted, and she wore a crown of ash leaves. But when I finally slept late that night, I dreamed of the Crocodile swimming up from the depths of the water to take me in its jaws.