“You look like you have seen a mardykhor beast or a jinn,” Sulayman said.

His voice came to me as if through a long tunnel. I forced myself to clear my head and look at him. His face framed by the dark braids came into clarity, and his soft brown eyes stared back at me.

“Yes, its that face of yours, Sulayman,” I forced out a smile.

Bilal laughed and Sulayman grimaced at him.

The hours shuffled along that morning in the studio.

As the ink swiveled in my fingers, I remembered Abba’s hands over my own instructing me how to carve cypress wood as a child. He existed in a state of suspension to me — like the particles I had seen in the chemists’ labs in the Northern Tower, suspended in a liquid form. The liquid and the particle occupied the same space, within the same tube, together and yet always separate: always extricable from each other, always fleeing away.

I inscribed in calligraphy the words I’d taken down the night before, in elegant, beautiful, poetic script, curving along the pages: “It is in our very biology, one made superior and one inferior, as dictated by nature, science and God.”

Then I began to notice other things, things that I would before have not given another thought.

“The Wrath and punishment of the Creator reign greater than mercy.”

I traced them in the calligraphy of the Holy Language: intricate, elegant, unearthly language, the language of the heavens.

I thrust the pen down on the desk and stared at the words. They leapt off the page and whispered in my ears.

I had thought my fellow calligraphers fools for being blind, born of royal elitism. I had thought myself immune; and yet I had been as blind.

I rushed out of the studio before the evening to head for the library.

The library was empty, and bleak light shone through the latticework of the windows and tall shelves towered over silent rows. High vaulted ceilings worked in stellated tiles rose above. Rows of multifoil arches bordered the library entrances on all sides, intricately shaped like curves of scalloped leaves overhead.

The librarian, old fumbling Abdullah, was snoozing at his writing desk, his white mustache bristling with every snore. A snowfinch sparrow perched on a pile of books next to him. The sparrow followed Abdullah everywhere he went, perched on Abdullah’s shoulder or flitting around his head as he went off down the halls of the Tower carrying loads of books.

I headed for the shelves, pulling out tomes one after another like a madwoman, not even looking at the binding or the titles. I sat down on one of the nearby cushions surrounded by the books, but each one I picked up gave nothing.

The technicalities of jurisprudence, the modes of interpretation, histories of battles and treaties, records of the soldiers in Hayshem’s army during the Second Age, instructional manuals on manners and legal distributions of family land.

One afternoon I sat by the window surrounded by useless fluttering pages, watching the sparrow across the room as it cocked its head at me curiously while uncle Abdullah slept.

“There’s nothing, is there?” I whispered to it. “It’s just these mad thoughts in my head.”

My eyes fell on something. At the side of a shelf, something was wedged in between two boards at the bottom of the floor and the wall. I pried it out and dusted it off. The top and bottom of the cover were bent.

It was not a book from the records of the library.

And it was never meant to be. For it was hidden behind all the way where Abdullah the librarian would never likely bend down, with his old back. He would have no reason to, for there were no books shelved in that corner.

The pages were yellowing and brittle with age, and the first entry was signed ‘Rashid’. I opened to the first page.

I should have begun this journal since I first set foot here, but alas, sometimes we recognize things only after it has already passed by us. Time works in strange ways, I daresay. I once thought I knew everything - everything. I thought I knew that this is what God wanted. I thought I knew that there is only one specific way of doing things, and everything else is wrong. But now I see that it was my own ego.

There are things that I understand now, that I see now, that I would never be able to comprehend if I had not been what I was. If I had not done the things I had. I wish I had not done them; and yet, without that guilt, I would not have understood. Sometimes, you cannot arrive at the point of knowledge without being crushed by your own mistakes: without having committed things out of a lack of knowledge.

These are the paradoxes: weaving in spirals of time.

I turned to another page, where the writing seemed more harried:

I came to the Tower to find the Godly Truth, thinking that it was something clear-cut written in stone. Yet, the more I ‘know’ now, the less I am certain of that —

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When caught in the complicated mesh of being human - of emotions, pain, happenstance, fate and chance beyond one’s intentions, of flaws and mistakes, of ignorance, of not knowing enough, or failing and falling again and again - what then? How then to apply the rigid, sharply cut black-and-white laws to the hazy, complex mesh of being human? How then to judge, to decide, to dictate? Is it then so easy so judge another’ s sins, another’s life?

I know that they will soon banish me from the Scholars’ Tower forever. I know I can no longer be part of the establishment. They will come for me soon. I hope that one day, someone out there thirsts for these questions.

For the more I questioned, the less I understood. The more I felt that there is no certainty in truth or knowledge any longer, the more unsettled I became — The more I was driven to madness, questioning my own reality.

But now, after so long, it gives me peace. I found peace in the floating ambiguity. The only certainty is uncertainty. The only objectivity is in subjectivity.

Because I will never truly know any of it — I never can. I found peace in accepting the limitations of my own feeble, human mind, compared to the Vast unlimited Creator.

I can never know. All I can do is try.

“Don’t let my father catch you reading that, or you may be banished right out of the Tower.”

Zakariyyah approached in his Light Scholars’ robes. He wore those robes differently than any Light Scholar I had seen. On him, the attire looked loose, almost as if it did not quite fit him. He joined me on the floor, leaning against the wall.

“Here I was thinking I had been the first to discover it hidden,” I said.

“I assumed the same.” Zakariyyah took a seat across from her.

“What do you think of it?” I asked.

“I think that this Rashid was a traitor, a madman. My father certainly deems him a traitor. They studied together here, back in their early days.”

“Ah. What happened to the scholar?”

“It is as he writes — he was banished from the Tower.”

“Zakariyyah,” I said, leaning forward towards him. “Perhaps some people go mad because they see what we go about avoiding because it is terrifying for us to acknowledge?”

“However you want to interpret his madness, the man was blasphemous without a doubt,” Zakariyyah said.

“That is a hasty charge to make, isn’t it?” Rahena said.

“Hasty?” Zakariyyah said. “Rashid was a Light Scholar who may as well have questioned everything we do. Everything we work on.”

“What does your father think?”

“My father,” Zakariyyah said. “Is one to prefer concrete meanings, not malleable ones.” Zakariyyah began twirling a silver band around a finger of his right hand, round and round. It was the silver band given to each Light Scholar with words of the Testimony of Faith engraved upon it.

I set down the book. “I have been thinking — Don’t you think, Zakariyyah, that there may be a danger in identifying a singular, concrete meaning written down in stone?” I asked. “Because who are we? To declare ourselves to know better than the Creator. To declare with such certainty, in this complex ambiguity of life, a final meaning?”

Zakariyyah narrowed his eyes in curiosity, and twirled the band around his finger again. “Why should there be a danger in that? Isn’t the danger in not identifying any concrete meaning — a world where anything goes? There is no danger of hubris in its concrete meaning — because you don’t seem to see it is not our declaration. We Light Scholars merely study it, but it is the Holy Word of the Creator.”

“But —” I tried to unfurl the thoughts that had become a web inside my head: “It is filtered through human language — that cannot capture the whole divinity of the meaning of the Creator’s words, can it? What if human language can only capture one dimension of meaning, can get close to it — but can never see the whole meaning?”

Zakariyyah’s fingers stopped moving on the ring. “If that is the case, as you say, how should we act at all? We would be lost within a vast ocean with nothing to grasp onto; without knowing how to act on anything. We would be frozen by the inability to act.”

“Perhaps,” I said. “But I think it is like time.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“For us, there is a past, present, and future: we experience time within each momentary point. But God sees the entirety of Time all at once. What if all Truth, all meaning, is like that too? We go about, here and there sometimes just close to it, given just a glimpse of the ranges of Truth, but can never see the whole meaning?”

Zakariyyah gazed out along the row of shelves.

I continued, “What if the Interpretations conceive of the Word in such a way that…we reduce it to a black and white understanding of the Creator, and we label it Truth? I have been searching for a way to understand — ”

“— Are you not arrogant to think that you have the answers?” Zakariyyah turned sharply back to her. His frame — the silhouette of his nose, his jaw — was a knife. It cut cleanly through the air as he turned. He looked for a moment very much like his father, the offspring of Aziz Ardashir.

“I could ask you the same,” I said. “I never said I have the answers.”

“Then what is it that you are searching for, calligrapher Suryan?” His voice had turned cold, accusing.

“I don’t know,” I said. What if we needed less of the hubris of certainty, and more of the humility of uncertainty, when we spoke of the truths of the world, and determined fates and judgment based on them?

But I could not say this to him, to a Light Scholar.

From the other end of the room, the snowfinch sparrow peered out at us curiously.

I stood up. “I must return to the calligraphy hall.”

Zakariyyah nodded but did not look at me. He no longer twirled the ring around his finger, and he was still.

Abdullah the librarian’s head rose from the desk. He half-mumbled something and stretched, his eyes partially closed in drowsiness. The snowfinch sparrow chirped as if to greet him, or to inform him of the strange conversation that had been occurring inches away from him.

I walked out of the library. Down the halls, down the stairs, past servants carrying loads of trays and books and documents for the scholars.

What if it was not always Truth the scientists always sought within nature and the cosmos. What if it was not always Truth the holy scholars sought in seeking the Scriptures? What if they sought their own selves?

The Jhansari people were forced to different lands across the Ardth to build cities. The scientists said it was because of their ‘biological inferiority’ that they could be made slaves.

They took ‘scientific’ measurements of skulls and bones. They drew up charts and illustrations and mapped the brains and the bodies and the blood. They declared what the ‘truths of nature’ told them of the Jhansaris’ status on the scale of humanity; they published reports and manuscripts: cold, hard, neutral, objective numbers, data. Numbers could not lie, they said; science and nature could not lie.

Under the name of piety, of God, of virtue and of sin, under the name of nature and biology and evolution, man tried to legitimize their own egos. A way to validate and glorify the self, while casting others below — creating imaginary spectrums of human value in the name of science and divinity.

Was that not the story of the human ego? Extorting the unfortunate and the damned, the earth and the seas. Then we tried to exploit God in our own names.