So, hungry! I’ve only been able to drink from the pool of the waterfall when my grandfather takes pity on me, but he won’t let me drink enough to drown my hunger. I can barely focus on the lecture my grandfather is giving. He says something about the mitochondria being the powerhouse of the cell, but I’m not grasping much of what he is saying. I’ve been under his tutelage for nearly two weeks, and I haven’t eaten once.
I hear a sharp sound emit from my desk. I weakly bring my head up to see my grandfather who brandishes a metallic stick that can be extended to various lengths in his hand. The four walls of the classroom in my head were now plastered in papers with various diagrams on them. Some of which are mine and have golden stars on them. All those papers that I had worked on with gold stars were written in my first three days of training when the hunger was present but not mind consuming.
“Skath, microbiology is essential to understanding your questions on where illness comes from and how to cure them! I purposely catered this material to you! So please focus,” says my grandfather returning his attention to the glass wall which had diagrams displaying an animal cell, a plant cell, a bacterium, and a virus particle.
“I’m sorry I just feel so weak, and so hungry,” I say my stomach clenching in on itself, “and it seems like these lectures are growing longer but my instruction on soulcraft is non-existent. In fact, how is it that your lectures grow in length but when my perception returns to the outside world only a few hours have passed?”
“Time is relative, which I guess could be next week’s material, but general relativity without basic physics may just go over your head,” says my grandfather with an exasperated sigh, “all you need to know is that your mind is operating so much faster than it once could and can do so because how you are experiencing time is different now than in the past. To a certain extent you are experiencing time at a reduced rate as your mind is operating under higher laws that permit you to cheat it.”
“Does that mean I can go back in time?” I ask happy that the discussion is something that now distracts me from my emptiness.
“No, unfortunately the flow of time is a one-way street, you can choose to go slower or faster through it but going back even with the reality bending powers of a celandil is nigh impossible. Even if you were to go back, the world you are experiencing now is technically the result of said time travel so in a sense the past is fatalistically determined, only the present holds free will, and the future doesn’t exist yet,” says my grandfather while the board behind him shifts and now depicts a diagram of a singular line with lines going back and disappearing into it while the line grows in size at different speeds.
“But you mentioned that I can go forward, doesn’t that mean I can travel to the future, but you just said it doesn’t exist?” I ask looking at the board again as it seemed like it thought we were done with this conversation and was returning to the diagrams of the microbiology lecture.
“I’m afraid traveling to the future is but a speeding up of time for you while all the rest of reality experiences time as they do normally. It’s not as if the future exists for you to just appear into it, it is being generated as you travel through time,” says my grandfather with a shrug, “thus the future doesn’t exist, and time flows ever forward the experience of it being subject to its perceivers. Anyway, back to microbiology.” Says my grandfather as the board redraws the timeline diagram, only to draw a picture of a rude gesture to return to drawing the microbiology diagrams.
“So, when I’m here in the classroom with you I am traveling through time at a slower pace and your lectures can go as long as you want?” I ask, “so why don’t we use that for celandil practice?”
“Who said we weren’t currently doing celandil practice,” says my grandfather with a smile, “anyway the mitochondria!”
After an eight-hour lecture on microbiology, my eyes open to the world around me and only four hours have passed in the real world outside of the classroom in my head. My head feels numb and heavy. I desperately need a break, but I know I won’t get one. Seeing the water in front of me I muster all the energy in my body to make a mad dive at it to get a drink, only to feel my body freeze before a drop could enter my mouth.
“Not yet, we still have to work your body,” says my grandfather, “only then can you rehydrate!”
“I’m not sure how much more my body can take,” I say as I feel myself get up to my feet and get into a position to begin running. My whole-body aches as I force it to move, and parts of my body no longer function as well as they once did. I’m sure that my grandfather has been overtraining me, and I have injured myself because of it. My arms hang limply at my sides and I prepare to run.
“Less complaints more running, we will be doing three laps of the valley today, as today is leg day! Tomorrow we will be working on your chest to give your legs a well needed break,” says my grandfather now beginning to sing a song he told me he learned in his time in the celandil military.
Every day I must endure some sort of extreme exercise. Yesterday I went through hours of powerlifting, until my arms couldn’t move anymore. The day before that hours of swimming until I nearly drowned from exhaustion. Whatever sadistic machination my grandfather can come up with he puts me through it, and I must survive without my body’s fast healing as my grandfather has taken that away from me.
My legs scream, but their screams are nothing compared to my stomach’s yowls. Just put one foot in front of the other, come on you asked for this Skath. If this is what it takes to save Uzuri, then I have to do this. I need to do this. My breathing becoming more labored, I feel my body growing heavier and my sight began to grow fuzzy. The only thing driving me forward was almost a mantra of thoughts whispering, ‘just one more, just one more step.’
One lap comes and goes, and my vision begins to tunnel. The second lap I feel myself beginning to sway. The distance I had to run growing larger as my feet no longer take the most efficient route. I feel my grandfather force my body into a faster rhythm every time I begin to slow down, and his voice drills me as my body feels like an inferno is erupting within it. The third lap my vision is but a pin prick and I feel myself guided along by prods of my grandfather’s specter.
“There you made it boy,” says my grandfather, “now let’s finish with some squats.”
At this point I have no energy to complain, and my body goes down to squat and I collapse on the ground. My body can’t make it any further. I feel a numbness taking over my body and I feel frightened. Am I dying?
“Finish the squats Skath or I will not give you instruction on soulcraft,” says my grandfather’s voice.
“What’s the point you tire me out with your lectures and these grueling exercises and then you just suck me dry of my essence and call that my day’s instruction. You haven’t even taught me anything on soulcraft, and I’m desperate to learn how to feed myself!” I whisper, as what little energy I have is not enough to scream.
“I move your limbs all the time Skath, yet I’m just the essence of a memory,” says my grandfather, “think beyond the physical and move. It took long enough for me to break your body to this point, now move!”
What does he mean? My body can’t move anymore, and I can do nothing to heal what is broken. I try to move my arms, but they hang lifeless at my sides. I beg my legs to move, and they won’t even tremble for me. All I can do is breath and even my thoughts seem strained. My mind and body are spent.
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“If you are going to die, go and do it already!” says my grandfather but his voice isn’t in my head, but speaks to something inside me.
I feel my mind slip and I hear my heart as if it is beating in my ears. The beats are getting slower, and my breath becomes more and more shallow. My eyes feel heavy, and my body once plagued with torment now feels light. My stomach for the first time in days is silent.
My eyes flicker between the real world and misty realm of essence until they seem almost one in the same. My body becomes still and my mind quiet, but I still think. Where am I, I think to myself as I feel like I’m floating. My thoughts are no longer in my head, I feel disoriented, and my eyes close.
Where am I? I find myself floating in a void. I look at my hands and body and I’m made of the glimmering substance of the orb in my chest. This is my soul, and my soul is me. From my hands spills the mist of essence, but as soon as the essence emerges from the material of my soul it spills out into the void no longer to be seen. I want to follow it, but I feel a hand grab at my shoulder.
I fully expect to see my grandfather, but I see me. The me I see is made of the misty substance, but the longer I look at him he begins to take on my features in more definite detail. He smiles at me and I feel another hand grab my shoulder. Yet again I see another me but beckoning me to follow the stream of essence going off into the void almost forming a pathway to heaven knows where.
“Follow me, and we will go off to peace,” says the me that beckons me to follow him down the path of misty essence, “we weren’t strong enough. We were just too human I’m afraid. There was no way for us to be a celandil. Let us go as Uzuri will be waiting for us. This was our destiny from the beginning.”
The longer I look at the me on the path, the more peace I feel. What confusion there was, what pain I felt, every discomfort fades as my eyes wander down the path the misty me tempts me to take. I reach out my hand as if to take his, and I feel myself yanked again by the first specter. He looks at me with a look that I could not misinterpret. He was disappointed.
“What are you doing?” says the me standing in the void, “You wish to cast aside your life that easily? Are you just going to give up and die the first time you come close to the beck and call of death? We must save Uzuri! We love her and we still have a life debt to fulfill. We are celandil!”
I look both ways and I feel torn, as I stare at the two ghosts. The longer I stand in indecision, I notice that I am being dragged forcefully to the misty path. The longer I stand the more my mind fogs and I feel like there is only one decision.
“Don’t listen to either of those shades!” yells a voice, “they are nothing but your essence. They are pieces but not a whole. Only one can control the essence of their existence!”
I look around trying to find the source of the voice and find that it is my own. I suddenly find myself filled with an understanding of where I am. I am within my body deciding if I am going to die. I look around at the void around me and immediately know how dire my situation is.
My essence is leaving my body and if it leaves in its entirety there will be nothing binding my soul to this mortal realm. My consciousness floods with ideas and thoughts that would seem foreign to my mortal mind but to my soul they are familiar and innately known.
I look at the mist pouring from my hands and how it slows in flow with each second, I drift in the void. With less than a thought the mist coming off of me speeds up in production. I refuse to die today; I have much to live for yet! I look around the void, and I notice I am naked and with the same concentration to move an arm the mist coils around me forming a cloak of sorts.
I look out to the void and see the misty specters and the fading path made of my essence and summon them to me. The specters and path lose their shape and stream into my cloak. My soul is me, and it is I that forms my essence, my very being. I wish to explore my surroundings and I find my essence spread behind me like wings that propel me around the void, the void of my body. With that revelation the void around me quite literally begins to flesh itself out to me, as I travel amongst the organs and flesh of my body.
I fly to my heart knowing that it has either stopped or is beating dangerously slow. Flying to the organ that would be the size of my fist to my physical self, it appeared to stand taller than a watchtower before my spiritual self. It sat silent and dormant before me, so I sent some of my essence into it. I had no idea I could fill my body with essence, but my soul does which means I know now.
My heart begins to beat as the essence forces my heart to move. I then move onto my lungs and force them to expand and contract. I fly around my muscles and sail between the fibers at an incredible pace fusing each fiber with essence and fixing where the muscle fibers had broken under the extreme stress my grandfather had put them under. I was now traveling at an extremely fast rate fixing damage caused by my grandfather’s training and fortifying what was once broken.
My essence moved with little to no thought or focus. In the past it felt like a separate part of me, but now that I experience it as my soul does, it is so clear to me now. My soul and essence are not separate parts of me that dwell inside my body, they are me. The flesh that surrounds these parts of myself are the vehicle for my soul to experience the physical world. My body, mind and soul are all part of me. The limb of the soul is essence, and it moves as effortlessly and thoughtlessly much like making my physical arm move. It seems so intuitive now, but now is not the time for epiphanies, as I’m still dying and still need to fix a few things.
My mind fills with the ideas of what needs to be done and what needs to still be fixed. I fly up and down my veins and arteries and my essence flows into the tubes and transforms into nutrients that flood into my blood cells that then carry the nutrients to the rest of my body. I then continue my travels guided by my soul’s promptings to what needs to be done to continue caring for my broken body. I finally reach my brain where I felt satisfied with what I had been able to do and feel myself merge with my mind. The body of my soul drifts into the physical material of my body, and my eyes open once more.
I’m breathing again and my body feels good, better than good, well except for one thing. My stomach growls, but for some reason I don’t feel like I need to eat. It’s as if the growling is just some physiological reaction of my stomach being empty. I don’t need food; I think to myself as my soul is providing me with exactly what I need to live.
I feel myself get up to my feet, feeling a lot like a puppet on strings, except I am simultaneously the puppeteer and puppet. The sensation is odd to move my body, but not physically. My soul is me and I am the master of my essence. It isn’t something for me to control it is a part of me. These pieces that once felt separate are me. I let my body assume a bit more control of its movement, but with my essence acting in union with my body.
I try doing a squat, and it is surprisingly easy as my body and soul work together. My muscles strain and my essence in union with my muscles feels like it is lifting me and strengthening my muscles, making the exercise extremely easy to perform. I increase my pace and I still feel like the exercise is surprisingly simple. I continue to increase the speed of my squats until it feels like I might be jostling my insides and I stop. I find myself laughing as I’m doing squats after I nearly died. What am I doing? I continue to laugh, as I’m just glad to be alive and to have finally made some progress.
What used to take a great amount of strain now was second nature. The essence in my body moved in accordance with my will which was seated in my mind and soul. I find myself jumping and running around the pool of the waterfall. My body no longer being in pain, I can’t help but move and enjoy having control over what once seemed damaged beyond repair. My mind is rejuvenated, and I am now moving with so little physical strain that I reckon I can run double what I did today and still have energy to spare.
“I really thought I had killed you for a second there, but it looks like you’ve learned better essence control,” says my grandfather, “how do you feel my boy.”
“I feel fantastic, like I’m somehow whole now. I feel like I’m now complete, or rather at one with myself,” I say recalling all the times I had struggled within myself just to make a small spark appear, “Before it seemed like the essence and my soul were not really a part of me. Maybe in the past I was the one getting in my own way, ascribing my own thoughts as truth when the truth was within me. My soul is the core of my being, and my mind is the core of my physical experience and they work as one. My essence, fate, whatever you want to call it are but the evidence of my mind and soul carving their way through reality. I am the sculptor, and my tool is the essence of my being. We are one as it’s all just one body.”
“Waxing a bit poetic, but then again that could be the endorphins kicking in from a near death experience,” says my grandfather in my head, “also, now that you know how to maintain your body, I’ll stop trying to tamper with your body and soul’s ability to heal itself. I probably wouldn’t be able to stop you from healing yourself now to tell the truth. It was difficult to minimize it before, and it’s partially why it took so long for your body to collapse the way it did. Well, I guess it may finally be time to eat.”
“Really?” I ask my mouth watering and my stomach giving a growl.
“No! just joking! Perish the thought! I think that we remove water now to make sure you have learned your lesson,” says my grandfather maniacally laughing within me, “survive three days without food and water and I’ll let you go home to eat a home cooked meal. Also, now that you know how to feed yourself through essence try providing your body more protein, your looking scrawny and emaciated and I want to bulk you up.”