"I am freed of the bonds of responsibility for now," he replied. ?You have gotten your wish, my son, for Transcendence is now an event for the future. Yatol has called upon me to remain here and oversee the momen-tous events of the day. Our Chezhou-Lei warriors will march south, likely within a couple of months, to do battle with the Jhesta Tu. And now this, Abbot Olin defeated by his brethren. No, Yatol will not let his flock be vul-nerable during these times, and so I am called to lead. And lead I shall."
Merwan Ma beamed at the proclamation, but there was something else in his expression that Yakim Douan could not quite decipher, and that unknown reminded the Chezru Chieftain poignantly that he had to remain careful.
Still, Douan could not help but feel refreshed.
Yes, Transcendence had been taken away from him, and yes, the hematite hidden in the chalice was giving him new strength and vitality. But the true change here, the true reason why a smile was often evident on his face, was exactly as he had explained it to Merwan Ma. For months, years even, his focus had been on tidying up so that he could make the transformation to a younger body. Even as the events of the day had continually dictated other-wise, Yakim Douan had stubbornly held on to his hope for Transcendence.
Now he had let go of that dream for the foreseeable future. These two events, with the Kaliit and the abbot, had shut the door and locked it. Now Douan was focused on the events at hand.
Perhaps it was time for him to revel in the present glory.
PART 3 ENLIGHTENMENT Chapter 23 What Agradeleous Wants...
Nearly every day, Brynn descended the long staircase of the Walk of Clouds, down to the base of the rocky valley nestled within the Mountains of Fire, and then out the valley trails to the fields where Runtly ran with the other horses. Sensitive to her desires to spend time with her pony, the Jhesta Tu mystics gave her duties that would have taken her to the floor anyway.
As summer gave way to autumn, her job was to collect the black lava stones from the broken landscape and bring them up in buckets so that they could be ground into powder and used to fertilize the many gardens about the monastery. Brynn worked without complaint, taking the bur-dened climb back up the five thousand stairs in the same stoic manner she had utilized to get her through her years of training with the Touel'alfar. In Andur'Blough Inninness, like all of the other ranger trainees, Brynn had spent many days collecting spongelike milk-stones from the bog, carrying them back to a distant trough, then squeezing the bog juice out of them. In those mornings, Brynn had learned the power of meditation, of falling within herself to block out unpleasant external events, and so she used that now, slowly walking up the stairs each afternoon, deliberately and carefully placing one foot in front of the other so that she did not twist her leg, with a pole across her shoulders, a full bucket of stones dangling from each end.
It was a good life for the young woman, a necessary respite from the trials of the wider world, a time to reflect and to grow strong again, mentally, emotionally, and physically.
She spent most of her nights with Pagonel and other Jhesta Tu. Unlike her days in Andur'Blough Inninness, her times at the Walk of Clouds were full of openly asked questions and brisk discussions about philosophy and the ways of the various religions. Here Pagonel often led the way, inevitably veering the discussion toward the Behrenese Chezru religion and the con-cept and ways of Yatol. o n soon enough recognized that he was doing this for her benefit, that in times while learning about herself, the young woman was also learning hie lessons about her enemy. Even more than that, she came to believe U Pagonel was subtly forcing her to view her enemy not as the singular- a ded and thus, singularly hated, Wraps, but as a collection of people fol-precepts that were not so variant from her own, or from anyone else's.
"You try to distract me from my destiny," she said to the man one night fter a particularly heated discussion about how the To-gai-ru, the Abelli- ns and the Jhesta Tu were not so different in the artistic renderings of their respective pantheons.