#85 - She is Yes

“Why are you so angry?”  The voice out of the darkness was feminine, though not overtly female, Ahrimaz thought.  What? How can a voice be feminine and not female?

“Ummmm.”  I sound like an elephant calf.  “Because I’m frightened.  Rage and despite and anger all keep me safe.”

“Do they keep you safe, in a world where only one person has ever truly attacked you, and he’s dead?”

“You mean the Cylak King who Pel replaced.” Even here he would not say the man's name.

“Yes.”

“In my world he was an ineffectual, foolish man who insisted that the world was by right his.  I disabused him of that thought.”

“You also disassociated him from his head as I recall.”

“Yes.”  For a moment Ahrimaz had the flash of memory  in his hand as the Flamen burned through the man’s neck.  At full gallop, he didn’t have time to see him fall off his deer.  One more opponent lost on the battlefield. One more killing he could use to try and assuage his rage and his pain.  He didn’t see him fall, but he knew the man’s clothing and body would be on fire.  The Flamen did that to people. And things.

“Who are you?” He asked though he knew icy well. Scorching well.  He knew.

“Liryen is what you call me in this tiny portion of understanding.”

“Goddess. Demon. Divinity.”

“Some of what I am.  I just am.”

“And You’re just talking to me.”

“Why not?”

“Because You are those things? Because I killed Your followers?  Because I raped and beat my wife to control her, and beat my daughter because she was defiant?  I am a monster, not a… a… priest.”

“Don't you already long to correct those things? To recompense the innocent, somehow?  That is part of the pain you feel.  Your inability to fix what you did. I am speaking only to you. You are broken enough to hear Me.”

“I’m certainly broken.” Below… Ahrimaz suddenly realized he could see the salt pan below him again, and he could see a man struggling across the waste that was salt and brine and reflection of sky and sun and nothing else.

“Who is that?”

“You know.”

Ahrimaz watched his brother stop at an enormous canyon broken into the land, where fire rose from below.  There was a bridge across it but it was made up of weapons.  Sharp weapons.  On this side of the bridge there were the stinking corpses of the Kenaçyen family shambling around, slashing each other with words and with whips, bleeding on each other and the land.

Across the bridge a little girl sat on a white tiger, green plants growing up out of every one of the great cat's footprints.

“Go!  Arnziel you can get out!  Don’t be afraid!”  For an instant he was the older brother, hiding his little brother under his bed and stepping in to take the beating his father wished to lay on someone’s hide.  It didn’t matter if you had done wrong.  The old monster just had to make one, or all of them, hurt.

The image faded as Arnziel stepped out, barefoot on the bridge of swords.

“It’s not really swords he’s walking on,” Ahrimaz said.  “It’s his fear that makes them edged weapons. He's doing that to himself.”

“He’ll learn that,” Liryen said.  “But it will take his own time to do so. Just as you will.”

“Are we all different in all the worlds we exist in?”

“Yes.”

“How do You stand it?  It would be a cacophony of prayers.”

“It is.”  He could sense her smile.  “You might be able to understand it if you consider it a choir or a garden.  A tapestry.  An opera. A story. A vast chord that encompasses everything.  I am a music lover.”

“And You like apples.”

“And songbirds.”

“And cats that kill songbirds.”

“Yes.”

Ahrimaz glared around himself looking in the dark, in the light, in the rainbow of colours in the vastness that had no edges, no limits, no time forward or backward, struggling to glare the Goddess in the face.  “EVERYTHING IS A YES TO YOU ISN’T IT!?” 

His rage fell into the enormity and was less than a dust speck’s dust speck.  He felt another scar of his rip open, with the rush of pain and joy and relief.  “It’s not about me, is it?”

He could hear her smile. “Not really.  Though I could say yes.”

He had no air to laugh with, but laughter bubbled through him and around him, the only response other than a shattering madness.

“Yes,” She said.