The corridors of the Raqini Tower were narrower than anywhere else in the Keep.

The others had gone to meet with the group Asfan had gathered for training. Only I remained at the Abbasid’s Keep with the scholars. But it may as well have been empty, for in the northeastern Raqini tower, it was silent and cut off from all the others.

I walked the halls in the early morning, passing locked doors down to a balcony with cool stone pillars which opened up to a view of the ocean. Located on the northeastern end of Abbasid’s Keep, the Raqini Tower faced the eastern sea.

The Wraithtaint was not visible from this side, and it was like a different ocean altogether. The fluttering sail of a lone trading ship broke the horizon line in the distance, the only guiding mark in the endless waves. I had come to the edge of the world to find whatever it was that visited my dreams — but now that I was here, I was uncertain if it was connected to my powers at all. I was following a ridiculous dream and I had followed it into nothing.

The view overlooked the eastern edge past Abbasid’s Keep, opening out onto distant forestland and craggy rocks upon which ancient ruins of crumbling stone, half-caved in, rose like broken shards into the skies.

In the midst of the center of the ruins grew a tall aged Ashari cypress, its thick aged trunk twisting like writhing, suffering limbs, frozen in time, sentinel to mankind. I stared at it — it could not be. It resembled the same tree as the one in Lalbagh Fort all of those years ago.

Were the two beings connected in any way? If I touched the trunk of this behemoth, what would happen?

I raised my hand, when a voice spoke behind me: “I did not know another would come.”

I turned to find an old woman.

As she reached for my face, she moved slowly as if time was distorted for her in another dimension, as if she had all the time in the world — which I could not imagine she had, because she was the most ancient person I had ever laid eyes upon. Her frail hands were gnarled and twisted by time, mottled by the passing of hundreds of thousands of seconds building on each other, to create this woman, who sat as if there was nothing that ravaged her mind, no tomorrow that drove dread into her skull, and no yesterday that haunted her heart.

Her hands held my face and I stared back at her. Her hands were cold and I wanted to take them and pull them off my face.

“Another what?” I asked.

But she let go and stared up at the tree, studying the trunk thoughtfully. “This place has a strong reaction on the artifact.” She patted her robes, nodding to herself. “It is possible that this is where Ilyas Rahman must have found it…hm, yes…” she muttered.

“Ah,” I said, as if I knew who this Ilyas Rahman was. “What is this place?”

But the woman was in her own mind and did not seem at all to hear me. “I thought,” she said, studying my face. “That the Raqini path was dead. I feared that this creature would be left behind in untrustworthy hands.” She reached out a hand to me. “Come.”

“Where —?” I began, but she grabbed my hand in a grip I had not expected, and nearly dragged me with her.

Through the ruins and the craggy rocks, she climbed back up towards the Keep. We reached the stairs, and up along the winding steps to the terrace.

Through the passageway and the hall. But this time when we passed the doors, one stood open.

Beyond it, hundreds of rectangular frames seemed to float as if portals to many worlds.

Canvases and pages illustrating stories of the divine, of the earthly dimension, of prophets and mages and civilizations. They studied the heart, light, symmetry, the patterns of the earth. In one corner stood panels dedicated to nothing but studies of the variety of butterflies — speckled, striated, in iridescent sheens of azure, jade and violet.

“Such minuscule creatures hold a world of beauty and symmetry on their light wings,” the old woman said. “Illustrating such beings…with every brushstroke, every pattern and detail, I am in awe of the Creator.” The woman was gazing closely at me. “How long has this placed called to you?”

I let go of her hand. How could she know of my dreams jolting me awake, night after night?

“You are here because you are supposed to be here,” the old woman nodded. “Yes, yes,” she muttered to herself as she took a seat in the middle of her panels.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I am nothing now but a fading whisper in the dunya. You, on the other hand, are as concrete as the stone beneath my withering toes.”

When Irfan spoke of Al-Yaser, I had assumed it was a man, but — “You are Al-Yaser?”

“Yes.”

“You are the last living Raqini from the oldest order.”

“If you knew what the Raqini really are, you would know that is not true.”

I examined her illustration. It resembled a spiraling of stars, galaxies in the heavens. “That is beautiful,” I remarked.

“That,” Al-Yaser smiled. “Is arguable.”

“Anyone who disagrees that it is beautiful does not know what beauty is,” I said.

“No, that is not what I meant. This very strand of thought is the fissure that split the Raqinis themselves for decades.” Al-Yaser tilted her head. “Is it the work that is beautiful, does our capacity to create such beauty make us gods, make us invincible?”

She dipped the brush into ink. “Man thinks he is invincible for his capacity to create and to destroy. We imagine things into existence that do not exist, we create machines that build and weapons that destroy.” She closed her eyes. “But tell me, if human-crafted creations are beautiful and terrible at the same time, what word is there to describe the One who created the Art that is us, in all our living, breathing, whirling minds, made to produce such things?”

“Why would such an idea divide the Raqinis?” I asked.

“Because there are those who took the power to create and destroy and endowed themselves as gods, invincible. And there are those — those who struggled against themselves not to.”

“But they were an order of artists, illustrators. Irfan said the Raqinis are considered mad now. Why is that?”

Al-Yaser put down her brush and wiped her hands on a rag. “Because, as sad as I am to say it, they did go mad.”

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

“What about you,” I said. “You are still here.”

“How do you know that I am sane?” Al-Yaser laughed. “I appreciate that you do not treat me as if I am not, however. But I am another story. There was a time when I, too, was not myself. How did I survive? I am still not quite sure to this day.”

“Why did they go mad then?”

“Because it was the only thing to do with the things they saw. And they continued to illustrate because it was all they could do.”

Al-Yaser’s gaze was sharp for a woman of her age, eyes like whorls of time staring back at me.

“What did they see?”

“I suspect you know,” she smiled brusquely, and a strange hope bloomed inside my chest, of the possibility of a reality where someone else, too, felt what I had felt for the past twenty-five circles of my life since I was five. “They saw through the Veil so many of us go around walking in, through which we look at the world, unseeing and unknowing beyond our selves and our own bodies and our own minds. It protects, but it also divides. And to tear that Veil apart completely…why do you think it drove the Raqinis mad?”

Al-Yaser stood up from her seat with an effort. The old woman pulled something out from her robes that looked like a stone. Taking my palm, she placed it in my hands.

But it wasn’t cold like a stone. It was warm, almost like a lifeblood: thin lines curled around it, intertwined like veins or roots; nearly translucent, it revealed within soil in several shades, intermingled together. It throbbed in my hands like a heart.

“Soil, from the seven corners of the Ardth,” Al-Yaser said. “Seven corners from which man was created.”

It was said that the Creator ordered the archangels to bring seven handfuls of soil from the earth so that the First Man would be created of all the colors of the Ardth. It was said that was why we were all born of a spectrum of shades, yearning for different strands of life.

“And what does this…soil…do?” I asked.

“It has protected and yet caused destruction too. It has caused wars and death and yet brought tranquility and peace.”

There was something eerie about holding it, as if a living creature’s lifeblood flowed in my palm. I almost let it go. Shattered stone, the soil of the seven corners of the earth, spilling out onto the cold floor. It would be like committing murder, somehow.

“It helped the Raqinis to temper their visions. It is what aided them in their foraging past the Veil. It is what saved my life, in the end,” Al-Yaser said.

“I do not want responsibility for such a thing,” I said, holding it back towards her. “Please take it.” I held it away as if it was a volatile weapon.

“It does not matter what you want.” Al-Yaser’s eyes as she stared back at me as if I was a mere shred of fabric and her eyes a ray of light that shone through. “You will need it some day. I am no longer in need of it. I am far too old and far too long gone. I can live without it.” Why did she look at me that way? It was unnerving. “When you need it, when the visions come upon you, seek it. It will not release you of the pain, but it might abate it. But,” she raised her head. “I believe it is more than a mere remedy stone. One day, you will need it for more than your own self.”

Reluctantly, I closed my fingers around the strange artifact-creature. “And when might that be?”

But Al-Yaser sat down on her cushion with a long groan. “Come each day after the noon prayers. I will show you, what it means to use the Ardth-stone.” Her eyes closed in upon themselves as if she was already moving far away, away to something I did not know, could not possibly know of. “Stepping down into those grounds among the ruins always tires me, saps my being. Hm, yes tomorrow, tomorrow…” And she sank into a deep sleep.

____________________________________________

The next morning, I headed for the Raqini room with curiosity and an excitement I had not felt in a long time.

At first I could not find Al-Yaser and I was certain I had imagined the entire encounter. This sea-salt land was beginning to give me severe delusions, I began to think.

But then a voice emerged from behind a half-circle of work panels at one corner of the room: “Bring me the stone.”

Al-Yaser sat in the middle of the panels with a row of empty inkbottles before her and different-colored piles of what looked like dirt.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“What does it look like I’m doing?” she said. “Making paint, of course.”

I sat down next to her on the floor, watching her sift the dirt from leaves and broken twigs.

“But this is not just any kind of paint. This earth is taken from the ruin grounds.” She took the stone from my hands and dropped it in a jug of water. The roots around the stone instantly unfurled like wings, submerged inside.

“I don’t understand, what does the paint have to do with the stone?” I said.

She only nodded. After a few minutes, she poured drops of the stone-infused water into each inkbottle, and the piles of earth in each. Soon, we were mixing it together into a paste, until we created ink in shades of crimson, umber and ochre yellow. There was even a shade that, once mixed in water, exuded something like a blue-violet hue.

“This is what we will be creating. But first, I want you to see it for yourself.” Al-Yaser pushed me towards one of the canvases that surrounded us. “Do you see anything?” she said.

“What am I supposed to be seeing?” But it was as I had imagined it when I’d first walked into the room — they had seemed like portals into another world, and as I traced my fingers over the ink, I felt it. There was something beyond the texture of the paint itself, beyond the canvas, something that thrummed with energy.

“The Liyyisin dimension,” Al-Yaser said behind me. “That is what we call it. Liyyisin, in the old Khardinian tongue, timeless.”

I pressed my fingers upon the texture of earth-composed paint, and felt something give.

“Through this method, some rare Raqinis have been able to master the visions in some sort of way, injecting the emotions of the visions they feel, of others and of themselves, into the Liyyisin dimension.”

But her voice became a blur behind me.

I entered through, and everything was gone.

The world tilted.

I floated. Fluid colors and shapes that I could not pin down. But I tried to get a foothold, grip, something, anything, and it was as if I was swimming in it— in whatever this was. But it felt — pure. Nothing could be as pure, as whole.

The further I steered, something like steps formed before me. The deeper I went inside the sensation, the more it warped the nothingness around me.

But I felt it receding, something was pulling me away, and I did not want to leave…

I fell on the stone floor of the room gasping. “Why did you bring me back?” I gasped, coughing. “I didn’t want to come back.” The stone floor felt cold, but solid, too solid, as I knelt upon it.

“Stop it,” Al-Yaser admonished me. “Those who venture into the Liyyisin the first time, if they don’t know what they are doing, they can get lost in it and never emerge again.”

“And I would be perfectly alright with that,” I said.

Al-Yaser gave me a look of disapproval. “You will not master your powers with that kind of thinking. No, Rahena of Bayrun, you need to shove aside your own misery, for I think — I believe you have a different role to play through this ardth-stone.” She nodded to herself again “Hm, yes it must be…”

I stood up. “What if I do not want to play any role?”

“You don’t get to choose that, sometimes,” she said. She motioned for me to step away from the canvas, still thrumming. “Each time you come back through the dimension, a part of the Liyyisin dimension remains with you, changing some part of your chemistry, and that is what you are feeling right now. It is calling to you.”

I brushed my linen robes. “You could not have bothered to tell me that before I entered?” I asked.

But she continued as if she did not hear me at all. “Time does not exist in the Liyyisin dimension, only the soul does. And the soul, my dear one, is eternal, beyond time.”

“I need to know,” I said. “How to channel my visions into the dimension. I need to control it.”

“I think some part of the Liyyisi dimension needs to be in our world,” Al-Yaser still murmured to herself. “I think it exists alongside us, but we diverged from the Liyyisi dimension into this crass, crude body. It is only within that dimension we are closer to our true selves.”

I picked up the blue-violet inkbottle. “How do I create it?”

Al-Yaser laughed. “You do not rush the process of the Raqini stone. It must be steeped with the paint. That will take at least two suns’ circle.”

“Two suns!” I cried. Restlessness overtook my fingers. After I had experienced what I had, I did not want to wait.

Al-Yaser handed me the Raqini stone back, whose roots had furled back into itself innocently.

“I will teach you to channel the power of the art of Liyyisi. But first, you need patience. We do not get anywhere without it.” I was up against the entrance now, and she closed the door upon my face.

What in the Ardth was I supposed to do now? Two days.

I started pacing down the hall. Despite the restlessness, I was breathless with an exhilaration I had never before felt. The closest I had ever come to feeling this way was when I first discovered calligraphy.

From below down past the rocks came a swinging of steel. I looked down from the terrace below into the courtyard.

Surayyah was by a pomegranate tree, moving like a wave on the ocean as she twisted and swung her sword in the air. Her black robe fluttered in the breeze.

I climbed down into the courtyard.

When she saw me, she put down the sword. “Rahena.”

“You promised me some lessons,” I said.