Excerpt: Nine Hearts

RESTS WITHIN, THE SCRYING FAULT.
TURN TO ASH, TURN TO SALT.
HOLD YOUR HANDS ABOVE YOUR HEART.
NINE THERE ARE, ONE IS PART.

The beast perches still as ever yet spreads its wings as far as it can in the glowing, fluvial sphere. Where they touch the sphere they bend like wax paper at the bottom of a bottle: flattening against the caging surface as they press outward.

Sorgin notes, ‘It’s trapped.’

June says, with a lifted finger, ‘Or that is how it exists.’

Repeating an adage of their father, Sorgin concurs with, ‘Though it has wings it may not fly, though it can’t see it has an eye.’

‘Let’s go inside, see what it means.’

Sorgin insists on going first, as the beast’s cryptic words could mean danger, if they meant anything at all. He leads her up a shallow ramp that leads to a dark entrance. The smell pouring out from this orifice is rife with age and life, as if the ever-living were juxtaposed with the long-dead. Skylights guide them deep through a hollow vein of a corridor, until everything begins to alight with its own dim, vague, foggy blueness. June and Sorgin walk without fear: their breaths are deep despite the air and their hands are open at their sides.

The corridor winds in all directions, with no sign of tributary or chamber. Soon all of the tall skylights vanish, the haze of luminescent color fades away, and they are left in the dark, which worries Sorgin at first. ‘I don’t like that we cannot see where we are going,’ he says. ‘There may be danger ahead.’

‘No,’ June says confidently, ‘the beast said that this place is dead. Remember that the dead do not have business with the living, human or otherwise.’

‘I was more thinking about sudden drops.’

‘Oh, well…yes, I suppose that’s a good worry to have.’ June laughs nervously, adding, ‘We should have brought a lantern!’

Before they can worry any longer the blue glow reappears like a slow dream. Still no change comes to the corridor’s shape, but still they walk on in hopes that the blue light doesn’t go out again. Judging from their external view of the building, they adopt the notion that the corridor should have ended by now, but still it winds on in one vague direction, swiveling only minutely from side to side, but mainly ramping up and down. The blue light doesn’t leave them, but it dims and brightens over spans of distance, and so slow and dreamlike that they begin to think that none of this has been real.

And then something happens that completely dashes their human/half-human sensibility of reality (though the Lashrie children have always been aware of the veil between reality and unreality that many mistake to be an impenetrable wall).

The corridor comes to an end.

June and Sorgin find themselves side by side at the edge of the floor, looking into a spherical room that looks as if it may be the exact size of the glowing water that housed the beast atop the temple. Other ends to other corridors can be seen across the room, opening up at different heights and asymmetrical positions on the reverse globe. Resting at the bottom of this room is the source of the blue light—though it is puzzling how it could have greeted the visitors with light many paces back. It is a small pool of liquid, and looks to be the same as the rushing, spiraling encompassment of water around the riddling beast. This water stays perfectly still, as if frozen.

June and Sorgin can do nothing but stare in awe at the room, left only to wonder what it is they have stumbled upon. Both of them, though they do not speak of it, feel a weighty warmth in their chests like a mother’s embrace on their very souls. Absently, they place their hands over their hearts. Suddenly Sorgin stutters a gasp and nearly slips from his stance.

‘June!’ he says, overcome with the reverberation in the sphere. ‘Do you see that?’

‘Yes,’ she says with austerity, though her wonderment is immovable. ‘I see it.’

The stars come out. From every point on the walls of the sphere, the stars puncture through the blue-lit sandstone as if it were the sky at dusk. Another gasp, but this time from June, is incited by the rising of the moon: brilliant, vividly yellow-white, climbing from the left of them all the way to the topmost position of the room. There it stays, and there it casts its light down upon them.

June, pulverized with the overbearing occurrences, finally looks down. Something lies under the water, and she feels a pull to retrieve it—if not just see it closer. So she moves down and sits upon the edge of the corridor, then sliding onto the inside of the sphere. She can hear Sorgin calling after her, but in the echo of the room and the euphoria of the atmosphere, she knows not what he is saying.

Her feet hit the water first. Any expectation of temperature is dashed, for it feels like nothing. When her sliding body comes to a stop, she is sitting with the water up to her neck. She stands and fails to notice that every muddied thread of her clothes is now perfectly clean, and wades over to the object in the water. Even this close to it she can not discern what it is, so she bends down and picks it up from the pool.

‘What is that?’ Sorgin asks.

June whispers, but in the shape of the room, it gets to her brother’s ear: ‘Nine there are, one is part.’

It is a silver plate, heavy, intricate in molding. In the middle is a symbol that she has never seen before but somehow recognizes. Somewhere deep within her she feels that it is a heart. The metal of the plate shimmers in the star and moonlight, and she can swear that she hears it make a sound: the sound of a vocal hum, the sound of a sigh, the sound of the wind, the sound of birds crying at the morning. With the stars in the walls swirling around her, she is flying, alone, ascending to that which no sentient mind can comprehend. Lights fill her eyes from the inside out, noises fill her brain, overwhelming sensation pulses out from under skin. Every breath is like a movement of the earth in her chest, every heartbeat is a drum that holds her within. And when she finally believes her ascension will bring her beyond…she is standing in the pool of a spherical room in a temple hidden away in the outlands of Missiti.

June sets the plate down where it had lain for centuries.

‘I think I’ll need some help getting out of here,’ she says to her brother with a smile. The stars and moon set back into the walls, and they are left only in the blue.