Post by Eurydice on Jun 13, 2015 9:58:09 GMT -5
((For the record, I blame Doctor Who))
The devoted of Liara woke with the sun.
Prayers of love, light, and life were the proper way to greet the new day. Regular rows of slender glass windows, etched with patterns of blue and gold, lined the walls of the worship hall, and the early-morning sun made the patterns glow like fireflies. It was an art form born of minute precision, extreme patience, and devotion. Some of Liara’s devoted kissed their fingers to the window nearest the door as they passed on their way into the hall at daybreak and out again at the end of morning services.
From there, the days were marked out in service. The senior sisters oversaw the halls of healing, managing the flow of service to the supplicants who sought out medicine in exchange for coin, goods, trade, or (when they had none of these things) service to the temple. The juniors assisted, providing care to the less severe cases, providing support for the more severe cases. Trainees learned and studied particulars of medicine. Caretakers saw to the maintenance of the buildings. Novices followed and cast cantrips and carried and cleaned.
Novices who got into trouble cleaned the stairs by the gatehouse, for that was the entrance by which the middling to poor supplicants usually travelled, and it was forever streaked with clay mud and farm filth, baking in the sun, even on a day that saw little traffic. The stains needed constant scrubbing, sometimes more than once a day. Worse, novices on duty there sometimes had to double as runners, but this was a duty that they were expected to carry out in a clean, composed manner. It was exceedingly tricky trying to stay clean and composed when you spent hours kneeling and scrubbing.
It was one of those blissful, blessed moments of early-midmorning stillness when someone spoke to the novice on duty at the stairs. “Well, I must say: I’ve never seen this particular method of cleaning before.”
The novice seated on the stairs jerked awake with a groan, shielding her face against the sun with her little fingers, and she peered up at the speaker, clear blue-green eyes through haphazard brown hair. “Hzumphuh,” she attempted. And then, blinking fiercely, “You’re not Sister Gwenna.”
“You are correct, my dear girl. And you’re not enthused about being here. I can hardly blame you, of course, but your little brothers and sisters all seem to take to the work much more.”
“Oh. Yeah.” The girl rubbed her eyes, screwing up her face. “Sister Linhe says I have to learn to rejoice in the work as an act of service, faith, and love.”
Her visitor nodded with a smile. “What is your name, young lady?”
“Maura, sir.”
“And how old are you?”
“I’m ten, they reckon.”
“Well, Miss Maura, let me assure you – in all my years, I have met very few who could scrub down filthy footsteps in a rejoicing sort of way.”
The novice called Maura giggled. Then, she sprang to her feet, eyes widening with a sudden, undisguised oh no realization and concern that only a ten-they-reckon-year-old girl could muster. “Oh—are you here for healing? Do you need someone to take you in? Are you hurt? You don’t look hurt. No—no, wait, I’ve done it wrong, I’m supposed to—welcome in peace, traveler, to the Temple of Liara. Blessings of—um—blessings of the lady of—of—oh, flames, how does it go…”
An upheld hand cut her off. “Dear girl, please don’t fuss. I arrived two days past, and I have had all that mishmash said to me already.”
“Oh, good,” Maura sighed, sitting back down with a little huff. “Who are you, then?”
“Merely a humble scribe of Ermayaniya.” He sat on the dirty steps beside her, leaning on a tall staff wrapped in tattered cloth. “I’m making a survey of the medical libraries of all the notable healing temples, and this great house has been most kind in allowing me access. I’ll be moving on again at midday, so I thought I should see more of the temple than the rooms where the books live, before I left.”
Despite the mud underfoot, the steps here were very fine indeed, well worth the second look. They didn’t have the wide grandeur of the main gate’s wide white steps, but little pieces of glasswork, like those in the worship hall, punctuated the wall behind it.
“They look best at sundown,” Maura confided, following his gaze. “Everyone talks about how nice they are at dawn, but when the sun’s going down, if you can get a look right through them at the woods, everything looks all glowy and bendy, like it’s got a spell on it.”
The scribe gave her a twinkling little smile. “You may be onto something, my dear. Perhaps the wood is under a spell, and only the glass reveals the truth of the matter.”
“That would be amazing!”
“Perhaps. Not all spells go as intended.”
The novice contemplated this statement and came to the conclusion that it was indeed sensible. “Your hair is really neat,” she said, apropos of nothing.
“Is it, now?” the scribe chuckled. “I thought it just kept my head warm.”
“It’s all shot through with silver,” she said. “It’s beautiful. It looks the way bards talk about the moonlight looking, in songs and things.”
“But not like actual moonlight, eh?”
“Of course not – the actual moon is white. Most people’s hair just goes white. Or grey. But that’s really properly silver. Moonsilver silver. Quicksilver silver. It’s lovely like that.” The girl sighed. “I hope I get silver hair like you have, when I get old.”
The scribe said nothing to that. His eyes, behind their slender glasses, were distant.
Maura sensed the shift in mood after a moment. “Oh—um, oh, wait—I mean—I didn’t mean to call you old!”
“Not at all, dear girl. No reason to be embarrassed, for either of us. I am old. And I hope you get your wish.
A shout called their attention to the road below, a little ways into the trees. Maura scampered down the stairs and out along the path.
The travelers – of a slightly higher station than the usual travelers that came by this entrance – were a heavyset father, his veiled daughter, and a gaggle of other family members in orange and gold robes, huffing and bustling along behind. Maura tried to give them her mangled greeting to the temple, but they did not seem interested in hearing it. The father only shouted in some Southern dialect, gesticulating emphatically and angrily shaking his fist at the skinny novice girl in the tardy robes. After some futile exchanges, one of the sisters came hurrying out to escort them in, shooing Maura away and back to her stairs.
“What an amusing fellow,” the scribe commented blandly. “Very chatty. Any idea what he was after?”
Maura bit her lip, peered after the departing sister, and lowered her voice to a child’s urgent, noisy whisper. “It was his daughter. He was mad, because she’s—umm. You know. She’s, like… she got…”
“In ‘some difficulty,’ as they say?”
The girl nodded emphatically, relieved that she hadn’t needed to say the words, and relieved that he’d managed to articulate the matter without resorting to embarrassing explicitness. “I couldn’t get much else. But yeah; Sister Maebhe will get it sorted. She’s not afraid of people yelling.”
“Neither are you, I notice. Are you brave, Maura?”
The novice scoffed. “Nooo. He just wasn’t scary. You get travelers and patients and people like that all the time, making a racket, but they’re usually just sad or scared. They’re not actually going to, like, try to hurt you or something.”
The scribe peered down at her, eyes floating over glasses. “Even so, to stand there and not shy away from someone three times the size of you, shouting and threatening you like that? I think that must be at least a little brave. And brave ones don’t always realize that they’re being brave, my dear.”
Maura considered that, thoughtful wrinkles etching along her nose. “I guess, maybe. It just seems normal, though, for here.”
The sister who had shown the family in brushed past. She gave a respectful nod to the scribe and a mildly scolding look to Maura, who caught the hint and hurried back to her scrubbing brush and bucket of water. Little rivers of mud sluiced down the edges of the stairs as she worked. The sister nodded and disappeared back into the gatehouse.
After a few minutes at scrubbing, the novice was surprised to see that her new friend the scribe was still there watching her. He spoke, his voice lilting and playful. “I’m wondering why it is, Novice Maura, that I haven’t seen you before today. I take my meals in the dining room, and I thought I had seen all the faces of this place, but today, I see that I’m wrong. Surely you haven’t been hiding back here morning, noon, and night, have you?”
Awkward silence fell. Maura found herself newly, intensely invested in the stairs she was cleaning.
“I’m sorry, my dear. Have I said something I oughtn’t?”
“Nooo,” she said, stiffly and after too long of a pause.
“Then pray tell me. Illuminate me. Where have you been?”
The novice frowned down at the brush, scrubbing fiercely at the mess. “Trouble,” she mumbled after a moment.
“Ah,” the scribe nodded. “The sort they lock you in your room for, eh?”
The dam seemed to break then. “It wasn’t my fault! Iorath started it—he was hitting me, and he was calling me names—I just wanted to stop him hitting me, but—I can’t help it that I’m stronger than he is—and I’m sorry, I am sorry, and I didn’t mean to hurt him, but Sister Gwenna didn’t believe me—she never, ever listens to me, and it’s not fair…”
Through thin glasses, the scribe could see angry little tears eking out a path from the corners of the girl’s eyes as she went on. With the greatest of care, he put an arm around her shoulder and thanked the Goddess that she didn’t shy away or take offense or cry harder. Maura the Novice sat there and sniffled into his sleeve.
“I can imagine this is a place where physically harming another grants the highest punishment,” the scribe said after she had calmed down.
Maura rubbed her eyes. “That wasn’t the end of it. After Sister Gwenna got there and saw what I—what happened, she made me try to heal him. She made me do it while everyone was watching. She knows I’m awful at spell work. I can’t heal up a skinned knee, even. It was awful. She just made me keep trying and failing, and it felt like—it felt like I was just throwing up magic until there was nothing left, and it didn’t help him at all. And she said I wasn’t trying—that I was being spiteful, and that I hated Iorath, and then she made me stay in my room to think about what I’d done and pray for forgiveness.”
The scribe winced. “Oh, my dear girl.” He gave her shoulder a little squeeze.
“Dunno why I’m telling you all this,” Maura mumbled, going back to the water pail on the stairs.
“Because I asked, of course. I’m a pesky old thing like that. Tell me this, Novice Maura – do you hate this boy that you hurt?”
The novice scowled down at her fingers, slick with filthy water and thick with calluses. Her knuckles whitened as she clenched the brush. “…No,” she said finally. “I don’t hate him. I don’t think I hate anyone. But he makes me mad. I don’t know why he just looks for awful things to say at me. We used to get on really well.”
“Oh? What changed?”
“He…” Big, tear-reddened eyes fixed up at the scribe, and for the first time, he saw fear there. “I started having these dreams. Weird dreams, where the moon was following me. Or I was the moon. Or I was fire. Dunno. I thought it was weird, but kind of neat.” She stood, retreated a few steps down, as if preempting some terrible reaction. “And then I’d started telling Iorath about them, when they kept happening, and he got all quiet and serious, and he said it meant I was bad—like a demon or something—and I thought he was joking, but he kept saying it, and then he stopped sitting with me at dinner, and we hardly ever talk now.”
The scribe sighed. He wanted to have honest, comforting words. He wanted to tell her that it would be fine and that she would never, ever be anything like a demon. He wanted to tell her that some friends come and go, like the passing seasons, and that you got used to it after long enough. He wanted to tell her that a cruel name or a wielded word couldn’t harm her.
He said none of those things. He couldn’t bring himself to lie like that. “Do you ever think,” he asked after a time, when the shh-shh-shh of the brush had resumed. “that this Iorath is just sad or scared, like those patients you talked about who lash out?”
The girl’s eyes widened slightly. “Like he’s scared of me?”
“Or scared that he won’t be able to keep you as his friend. It doesn’t matter if these thoughts are true or real, Novice – if he fears them, then they’re real enough for him.”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Nor do I, of course,” the scribe admitted. “But it is good to consider these things.”
The sister from the gatehouse came out again, to give the same nod to the scribe and the same reproachful look to the novice.
“You haven’t run away,” the novice noted after they were left alone again. “Does that mean you don’t think I’m like a demon?”
“I am quite certain,” he replied, “that you are not like a demon.”
“But am I ever going to get better at the healing?”
“I suppose that’s rather up to you,” said the scribe, tapping his staff on the stone, toying with the fraying fabric. “Do you really want to be a healer?”
The novice gave him a look which indicated that she thought this was a silly question. “That’s a silly question,” she confirmed verbally. “What else would I be?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” He turned the staff nimbly in his fingers. “Fire? The moon? Someone that the moon follows? Sky’s the limit, Novice Maura.”
She went quiet again, considering her options, strong stubby fingers clutching the brush. “I don’t know,” she said finally, looking away at the forest below, a gnawing longing in the pit of her stomach. “I just don’t want to scrub the stairs for the rest of forever. I want to do better. Do you think I’ll do that, at least?”
“I am quite certain,” he replied, “that you will do better.”
Maura nodded. “I just want to be good.”
The scribe went to her, knelt by her step. Silver-streaked hair framed a handsome face with its boyish charm and old, old eyes. “Maura,” he solemnly said, “you will be better than good. You will be remarkable. On that, you may rely.”
It got a little smile out of her. And then, her smile widened, and she gasped aloud. “What’s it doing? What did you do?”
From the base of his staff, the water and dirt on the stairs were moving of their own accord, water reaching like fingers along the stone and muddy buildup creeping away under the water’s approach. Brown footprints peeled back from the stairs like a snake sloughing its old skin until the stairs were bleach-white clean, so bright that it almost hurt to look at them, and Maura clapped her hands over her mouth, gasping breathlessly. “Wonderful…!” And lacking any more coherent means of expressing her delight, she threw her arms around him.
The scribe held her in a child’s fierce embrace. He patted her hair, a little awkward at the suddenness of affection. “Take heart, my friend,” he whispered urgently, “and have faith in yourself. You will need it in the days to come.”
If the little girl thought it strange that this scribe of Ermayaniya could make such decisive statements about her path and her future, she said nothing of it.
With a bittersweet joy in his heart, the scribe left the Temple that afternoon. As he melted into the shifting sea of time that night, he held tightly to the memory of a little girl’s hug, the scrape of the brush, and as ever, the quiet echo of his teacher’s laughter, replying through the abyss.
The devoted of Liara woke with the sun.
Prayers of love, light, and life were the proper way to greet the new day. Regular rows of slender glass windows, etched with patterns of blue and gold, lined the walls of the worship hall, and the early-morning sun made the patterns glow like fireflies. It was an art form born of minute precision, extreme patience, and devotion. Some of Liara’s devoted kissed their fingers to the window nearest the door as they passed on their way into the hall at daybreak and out again at the end of morning services.
From there, the days were marked out in service. The senior sisters oversaw the halls of healing, managing the flow of service to the supplicants who sought out medicine in exchange for coin, goods, trade, or (when they had none of these things) service to the temple. The juniors assisted, providing care to the less severe cases, providing support for the more severe cases. Trainees learned and studied particulars of medicine. Caretakers saw to the maintenance of the buildings. Novices followed and cast cantrips and carried and cleaned.
Novices who got into trouble cleaned the stairs by the gatehouse, for that was the entrance by which the middling to poor supplicants usually travelled, and it was forever streaked with clay mud and farm filth, baking in the sun, even on a day that saw little traffic. The stains needed constant scrubbing, sometimes more than once a day. Worse, novices on duty there sometimes had to double as runners, but this was a duty that they were expected to carry out in a clean, composed manner. It was exceedingly tricky trying to stay clean and composed when you spent hours kneeling and scrubbing.
It was one of those blissful, blessed moments of early-midmorning stillness when someone spoke to the novice on duty at the stairs. “Well, I must say: I’ve never seen this particular method of cleaning before.”
The novice seated on the stairs jerked awake with a groan, shielding her face against the sun with her little fingers, and she peered up at the speaker, clear blue-green eyes through haphazard brown hair. “Hzumphuh,” she attempted. And then, blinking fiercely, “You’re not Sister Gwenna.”
“You are correct, my dear girl. And you’re not enthused about being here. I can hardly blame you, of course, but your little brothers and sisters all seem to take to the work much more.”
“Oh. Yeah.” The girl rubbed her eyes, screwing up her face. “Sister Linhe says I have to learn to rejoice in the work as an act of service, faith, and love.”
Her visitor nodded with a smile. “What is your name, young lady?”
“Maura, sir.”
“And how old are you?”
“I’m ten, they reckon.”
“Well, Miss Maura, let me assure you – in all my years, I have met very few who could scrub down filthy footsteps in a rejoicing sort of way.”
The novice called Maura giggled. Then, she sprang to her feet, eyes widening with a sudden, undisguised oh no realization and concern that only a ten-they-reckon-year-old girl could muster. “Oh—are you here for healing? Do you need someone to take you in? Are you hurt? You don’t look hurt. No—no, wait, I’ve done it wrong, I’m supposed to—welcome in peace, traveler, to the Temple of Liara. Blessings of—um—blessings of the lady of—of—oh, flames, how does it go…”
An upheld hand cut her off. “Dear girl, please don’t fuss. I arrived two days past, and I have had all that mishmash said to me already.”
“Oh, good,” Maura sighed, sitting back down with a little huff. “Who are you, then?”
“Merely a humble scribe of Ermayaniya.” He sat on the dirty steps beside her, leaning on a tall staff wrapped in tattered cloth. “I’m making a survey of the medical libraries of all the notable healing temples, and this great house has been most kind in allowing me access. I’ll be moving on again at midday, so I thought I should see more of the temple than the rooms where the books live, before I left.”
Despite the mud underfoot, the steps here were very fine indeed, well worth the second look. They didn’t have the wide grandeur of the main gate’s wide white steps, but little pieces of glasswork, like those in the worship hall, punctuated the wall behind it.
“They look best at sundown,” Maura confided, following his gaze. “Everyone talks about how nice they are at dawn, but when the sun’s going down, if you can get a look right through them at the woods, everything looks all glowy and bendy, like it’s got a spell on it.”
The scribe gave her a twinkling little smile. “You may be onto something, my dear. Perhaps the wood is under a spell, and only the glass reveals the truth of the matter.”
“That would be amazing!”
“Perhaps. Not all spells go as intended.”
The novice contemplated this statement and came to the conclusion that it was indeed sensible. “Your hair is really neat,” she said, apropos of nothing.
“Is it, now?” the scribe chuckled. “I thought it just kept my head warm.”
“It’s all shot through with silver,” she said. “It’s beautiful. It looks the way bards talk about the moonlight looking, in songs and things.”
“But not like actual moonlight, eh?”
“Of course not – the actual moon is white. Most people’s hair just goes white. Or grey. But that’s really properly silver. Moonsilver silver. Quicksilver silver. It’s lovely like that.” The girl sighed. “I hope I get silver hair like you have, when I get old.”
The scribe said nothing to that. His eyes, behind their slender glasses, were distant.
Maura sensed the shift in mood after a moment. “Oh—um, oh, wait—I mean—I didn’t mean to call you old!”
“Not at all, dear girl. No reason to be embarrassed, for either of us. I am old. And I hope you get your wish.
A shout called their attention to the road below, a little ways into the trees. Maura scampered down the stairs and out along the path.
The travelers – of a slightly higher station than the usual travelers that came by this entrance – were a heavyset father, his veiled daughter, and a gaggle of other family members in orange and gold robes, huffing and bustling along behind. Maura tried to give them her mangled greeting to the temple, but they did not seem interested in hearing it. The father only shouted in some Southern dialect, gesticulating emphatically and angrily shaking his fist at the skinny novice girl in the tardy robes. After some futile exchanges, one of the sisters came hurrying out to escort them in, shooing Maura away and back to her stairs.
“What an amusing fellow,” the scribe commented blandly. “Very chatty. Any idea what he was after?”
Maura bit her lip, peered after the departing sister, and lowered her voice to a child’s urgent, noisy whisper. “It was his daughter. He was mad, because she’s—umm. You know. She’s, like… she got…”
“In ‘some difficulty,’ as they say?”
The girl nodded emphatically, relieved that she hadn’t needed to say the words, and relieved that he’d managed to articulate the matter without resorting to embarrassing explicitness. “I couldn’t get much else. But yeah; Sister Maebhe will get it sorted. She’s not afraid of people yelling.”
“Neither are you, I notice. Are you brave, Maura?”
The novice scoffed. “Nooo. He just wasn’t scary. You get travelers and patients and people like that all the time, making a racket, but they’re usually just sad or scared. They’re not actually going to, like, try to hurt you or something.”
The scribe peered down at her, eyes floating over glasses. “Even so, to stand there and not shy away from someone three times the size of you, shouting and threatening you like that? I think that must be at least a little brave. And brave ones don’t always realize that they’re being brave, my dear.”
Maura considered that, thoughtful wrinkles etching along her nose. “I guess, maybe. It just seems normal, though, for here.”
The sister who had shown the family in brushed past. She gave a respectful nod to the scribe and a mildly scolding look to Maura, who caught the hint and hurried back to her scrubbing brush and bucket of water. Little rivers of mud sluiced down the edges of the stairs as she worked. The sister nodded and disappeared back into the gatehouse.
After a few minutes at scrubbing, the novice was surprised to see that her new friend the scribe was still there watching her. He spoke, his voice lilting and playful. “I’m wondering why it is, Novice Maura, that I haven’t seen you before today. I take my meals in the dining room, and I thought I had seen all the faces of this place, but today, I see that I’m wrong. Surely you haven’t been hiding back here morning, noon, and night, have you?”
Awkward silence fell. Maura found herself newly, intensely invested in the stairs she was cleaning.
“I’m sorry, my dear. Have I said something I oughtn’t?”
“Nooo,” she said, stiffly and after too long of a pause.
“Then pray tell me. Illuminate me. Where have you been?”
The novice frowned down at the brush, scrubbing fiercely at the mess. “Trouble,” she mumbled after a moment.
“Ah,” the scribe nodded. “The sort they lock you in your room for, eh?”
The dam seemed to break then. “It wasn’t my fault! Iorath started it—he was hitting me, and he was calling me names—I just wanted to stop him hitting me, but—I can’t help it that I’m stronger than he is—and I’m sorry, I am sorry, and I didn’t mean to hurt him, but Sister Gwenna didn’t believe me—she never, ever listens to me, and it’s not fair…”
Through thin glasses, the scribe could see angry little tears eking out a path from the corners of the girl’s eyes as she went on. With the greatest of care, he put an arm around her shoulder and thanked the Goddess that she didn’t shy away or take offense or cry harder. Maura the Novice sat there and sniffled into his sleeve.
“I can imagine this is a place where physically harming another grants the highest punishment,” the scribe said after she had calmed down.
Maura rubbed her eyes. “That wasn’t the end of it. After Sister Gwenna got there and saw what I—what happened, she made me try to heal him. She made me do it while everyone was watching. She knows I’m awful at spell work. I can’t heal up a skinned knee, even. It was awful. She just made me keep trying and failing, and it felt like—it felt like I was just throwing up magic until there was nothing left, and it didn’t help him at all. And she said I wasn’t trying—that I was being spiteful, and that I hated Iorath, and then she made me stay in my room to think about what I’d done and pray for forgiveness.”
The scribe winced. “Oh, my dear girl.” He gave her shoulder a little squeeze.
“Dunno why I’m telling you all this,” Maura mumbled, going back to the water pail on the stairs.
“Because I asked, of course. I’m a pesky old thing like that. Tell me this, Novice Maura – do you hate this boy that you hurt?”
The novice scowled down at her fingers, slick with filthy water and thick with calluses. Her knuckles whitened as she clenched the brush. “…No,” she said finally. “I don’t hate him. I don’t think I hate anyone. But he makes me mad. I don’t know why he just looks for awful things to say at me. We used to get on really well.”
“Oh? What changed?”
“He…” Big, tear-reddened eyes fixed up at the scribe, and for the first time, he saw fear there. “I started having these dreams. Weird dreams, where the moon was following me. Or I was the moon. Or I was fire. Dunno. I thought it was weird, but kind of neat.” She stood, retreated a few steps down, as if preempting some terrible reaction. “And then I’d started telling Iorath about them, when they kept happening, and he got all quiet and serious, and he said it meant I was bad—like a demon or something—and I thought he was joking, but he kept saying it, and then he stopped sitting with me at dinner, and we hardly ever talk now.”
The scribe sighed. He wanted to have honest, comforting words. He wanted to tell her that it would be fine and that she would never, ever be anything like a demon. He wanted to tell her that some friends come and go, like the passing seasons, and that you got used to it after long enough. He wanted to tell her that a cruel name or a wielded word couldn’t harm her.
He said none of those things. He couldn’t bring himself to lie like that. “Do you ever think,” he asked after a time, when the shh-shh-shh of the brush had resumed. “that this Iorath is just sad or scared, like those patients you talked about who lash out?”
The girl’s eyes widened slightly. “Like he’s scared of me?”
“Or scared that he won’t be able to keep you as his friend. It doesn’t matter if these thoughts are true or real, Novice – if he fears them, then they’re real enough for him.”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Nor do I, of course,” the scribe admitted. “But it is good to consider these things.”
The sister from the gatehouse came out again, to give the same nod to the scribe and the same reproachful look to the novice.
“You haven’t run away,” the novice noted after they were left alone again. “Does that mean you don’t think I’m like a demon?”
“I am quite certain,” he replied, “that you are not like a demon.”
“But am I ever going to get better at the healing?”
“I suppose that’s rather up to you,” said the scribe, tapping his staff on the stone, toying with the fraying fabric. “Do you really want to be a healer?”
The novice gave him a look which indicated that she thought this was a silly question. “That’s a silly question,” she confirmed verbally. “What else would I be?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” He turned the staff nimbly in his fingers. “Fire? The moon? Someone that the moon follows? Sky’s the limit, Novice Maura.”
She went quiet again, considering her options, strong stubby fingers clutching the brush. “I don’t know,” she said finally, looking away at the forest below, a gnawing longing in the pit of her stomach. “I just don’t want to scrub the stairs for the rest of forever. I want to do better. Do you think I’ll do that, at least?”
“I am quite certain,” he replied, “that you will do better.”
Maura nodded. “I just want to be good.”
The scribe went to her, knelt by her step. Silver-streaked hair framed a handsome face with its boyish charm and old, old eyes. “Maura,” he solemnly said, “you will be better than good. You will be remarkable. On that, you may rely.”
It got a little smile out of her. And then, her smile widened, and she gasped aloud. “What’s it doing? What did you do?”
From the base of his staff, the water and dirt on the stairs were moving of their own accord, water reaching like fingers along the stone and muddy buildup creeping away under the water’s approach. Brown footprints peeled back from the stairs like a snake sloughing its old skin until the stairs were bleach-white clean, so bright that it almost hurt to look at them, and Maura clapped her hands over her mouth, gasping breathlessly. “Wonderful…!” And lacking any more coherent means of expressing her delight, she threw her arms around him.
The scribe held her in a child’s fierce embrace. He patted her hair, a little awkward at the suddenness of affection. “Take heart, my friend,” he whispered urgently, “and have faith in yourself. You will need it in the days to come.”
If the little girl thought it strange that this scribe of Ermayaniya could make such decisive statements about her path and her future, she said nothing of it.
With a bittersweet joy in his heart, the scribe left the Temple that afternoon. As he melted into the shifting sea of time that night, he held tightly to the memory of a little girl’s hug, the scrape of the brush, and as ever, the quiet echo of his teacher’s laughter, replying through the abyss.