(After a brief hiatus, I am ready to share the final chapter of Anamnesis. Thank you all for reading.)
Chapter 3: nine amass
Verse 1: a sin’s name
Yahde knows. She knows that she knows. It all sits behind a thin veil, just out of reach. The images that appear to her prompt her to think about symbols and fables. When she does so, the veil wavers, but she pushes these thoughts away, partly in fear and partly out of rejection. She did not choose this. All she wants is to find a way out into the true world.
In the remotest depths of her mind, she understands that she is the result of a powerful confluence, the shape of which echoes and vibrates into sounds, into words. These words appear before the eyes of other thinking beings, in another place. All of that infinite space inside her channeled through the letters and sounds that make up the story of her existence. A story that, she realizes now, she is not the author of.
She is filled with a profound sense of importance surrounding her ability to access the memories from before; a foreboding dread if she cannot, or will not. It is beginning to feel like the only autonomous choice she can make: to reject the obvious fate she is being directed toward.
She has walked for a long time now, passing into larger blood vessels which feel like endless emptied cathedrals placed end to end and slowly growing in size, once brimming with spiritual vigor, now empty and cold and lightless. Sensing the larger physical space around her, the phantasms in her mind’s eye grow accordingly, filling a larger mental space. The visions change, and now show her mind’s eye the contours of the space around her, as if the artery were lit by a small sun in her place.
Betraying herself, she follows this cue, allowing her mind to expand still further, until she is nothing but expansion. Her mind encompasses the heart toward which she walks, then the chest, arms, head, and soon her father’s entire body. Her outward questing, while making an unintentional concession to her destiny, shows her that he died lunging out over the ocean and looking down at what he contained in his hands (what was there before she was?). Then she pushes yet further, reaching beyond. She finds the sea, and the island, and—a man. The sight of him snaps her back to herself, just as she notices the ground has begun to slope downward.
Something about him feels…familiar. He is the one she witnessed when she lost consciousness in the Forest. But she has only ever known the creatures in the titan’s palm. Frowning, she continues on.
Once Yahde reaches the heart, she thinks she can make it through to the lungs and climb up the trachea to escape out of his mouth. The angle of the neck will be at an incline, then, instead of vertical. Something she can climb.
She does not acknowledge that her understanding of his interior anatomy has arisen during her experiences in the darkness. But the awareness is there, in the shadows of her mind. Something else in her, stronger, newer, protests that the truth can only be found in the light. What finds her in the dark is not to be trusted. All she can trust is what she can see for herself.
But she can see these images, a facsimile of light emerging from the dark, and she has no choice but to trust them. She knows instinctually that they are true, as far as truth goes.
The slope has grown quite steep, so she slows and makes her way carefully down, using the subtle spiral grooves as hand and foot supports. The direction of the spirals tells her that this is where the spent blood flows back to the heart.
She scrambles and half-slides downward until a strange, subtle vibration makes itself known to her, almost a hum, resonating through the air. As she continues on, she begins to feel the vibration moving within her body. Vertigo comes upon her, throwing her mind and perception into thrumming chaotic imbalance, but when her mind clears, she is standing straight up, as if there is no incline.
The darkness too has changed. There is still no light, but the impenetrable curtain of black has parted, and she can perceive the yawning opening of the heart’s right atrium. She walks forward, still uncertain of this change in gravity.
The moment she passes into the atrium, it all shifts again. In an imperceptible instant, like the infinite moment in which an inhale shifts to an exhale, the space transitions from complete darkness to a glittering galaxy. This chamber of the titan’s heart is a vast geode, its interior shining with sourceless luminescence scattered through millions of clear crystals.
It is not as if a light has suddenly come on, but as if she is now noticing what has always been there. Yahde marvels as she continues toward the right ventricle, the sharp crystals a mere nudge of pressure against her feet.
It all flashes, and within that swift slice of time, all the light and crystal around her inverts to shadow and spikes of metal tinged in red. It startles her. She has forgotten that all of what she sees is a projection into darkness, it is so vibrant and real. The flash happens again a short while later, and then again, and again, increasing in frequency as she reaches the valve into the right ventricle.
Like a photographic negative. The thought intrudes in her mind as she looks upon the alternate vision that appears in the flashes. She recognizes the thought as emerging from that other source, the place beyond what she knows in this body. The place that knows things that she does not know. Yet…it still feels like her.
Passing through the valve, the flashing becomes aching paroxysms of light and shadow—but, no, it isn’t shadow. The more she sees it, the more perplexing it is. Anti-light. Where shadow and darkness are the mere absence of light, this radiates just as vibrantly.
This thought flees as she enters the ventricle.
Hovering in the center of the huge stone chamber is a sphere radiating both light and anti-light, and its ecstatic rotations pulse in time with the flashing. Where the two opposite substances meet, a silver glow shimmers, barely perceptible amid the radiance of the two lights. She stares, frozen by its hypnotic beauty.
After some time, she pulls her gaze away to look around for an indication of what it is. A rectangular tiered depression in the stone lies nearby. Some sort of basin or altar rests atop a plinth of white and black marble near one end. It appears not to have been cut or carved, but grown from the stone heart itself, rough and crystalline, unpolished yet glinting with a natural sheen.
Yahde climbs down into the depression and approaches the altar. She is surprised to see that it is made of a metallic mineral. She touches it, and knowledge of it blooms in her mind—it is arquerite. There is a shallow indentation, not quite a basin, taking up a part of the surface. The rest is engraved with symbols and writing.
Some of these shapes appeared to her in the darkness as she walked through the veins, and now as she sees them here, they swim into her thoughts and reveal themselves to her, unbidden. The meaning of it all assembles in pieces and patches. Then, in a rush of understanding, the purpose of this place unfurls and is laid bare in her mind.
A tear escapes her blinking amethyst eyes and splashes into the indentation. A tight, accepting smile lifts at her mouth.
So much of it is still missing, so much she still does not see, does not know if she wants to see. But now there is a gentle compulsion from somewhere within her. A push to follow this path she is on, to see it as a purpose rather than a limitation.
She doesn’t yet know if she trusts it, but she places both hands onto the smooth curvature of the indentation, feeling the tiny scattered beads of her tear in both palms.
The altar gently holds her mind and casts it toward the chaotic sphere, whose perforations of reality continue to flash across her awareness. Within it, she now senses its nature, and the infinite potential it represents. It is meant for her; it is why this place is here. There is another, though. This is for both of them, and she cannot proceed until he arrives. This is good, because she does not yet know if she will proceed.
Removing her hands from the altar, she sits on the cold stone floor, closes her eyes, and reaches out. Yahde will learn everything she can about who she was, before it’s too late.