Meta-Conversation: Corrected

            I may go where I please in Kherishdar, seen or unseen, and no place is barred to me… like an aunerai Exception, I am allowed license and I know it, keenly, that I am a thing apart and named: Datyani, the channel through which Kherishdar arrives into aunerai hands. It feels like a dream, or maybe I’m the dream they’re having…?

            But for all that license I am careful with my presence, and tread lightly, as lightly as an alien can. And I am treading lightly here, in this very personal place. Even knowing I’m allowed here, that I’m allowed anything—that I’ve been here before, and recently!—I don’t come close to the stand, nor touch what hangs on the wall. I sit instead, and then, feeling that too lacking in courtesy, I shift until I’m kneeling.

            I am not the most vigilant of people, but I hear him entering the room. When he kneels alongside me, it looks easy. They always make kneeling look natural, the Ai-Naidar.

            I look at the knife this time, not the mantle. “It was Tsevet’s.”

            “One of the set, yes,” Kor replies. I think. There’s a touch of Shame in him, but this is his yuvrini, the room in Qevellen set aside for contemplation of his priesthood’s mysteries.

            “You don’t use this room often,” I say. “You used to.”

            “When Qevellen was new,” he says. “Before it became what it was to me, and I became what it shaped me into.” I can hear the smile in his voice. “When we trained Kef, we needed it more often again.”

            And Kef his successor, I think, feeling the echoes forward in time. Amath.

            “Why are you here, qiqirini?”

            “Tsevet,” I say, and falter. I sense Kor’s understanding. I am groping for stories so old they persist solely in the memory of an immortal… I think. “How did you learn of him? Did Thirukedi tell you?”

            “Yes,” Kor said.

            Because, who else? Who could transmit that experience to a new priest… and particularly to a priest who succeeded Tsevet in full, at last? Did Thirukedi tell other priests of Shame the same tales of their founder? Or did He modify those accounts?

            “Also, there is a book.”

            My thoughts tumble to a halt so abrupt it’s almost comical. “What? A book?” I want to say ‘are you kidding me’, but he wouldn’t tease about this. About other things, sometimes. But about this? “There’s a history?”

            “Written by his successor,” Kor says. “One of his lovers, a former Guardian.”

            “There’s a literal book,” I say, unable to believe it. “And I haven’t seen it!”

            “You may if you wish,” he says. “It is kept at the capital shrine.”

            But his offer is so diffident, I know better than to think it will be useful. I remember Haraa’s descriptions of Ai-Naidari history books from her story. “He doesn’t talk about Tsevet in it, does he.”

            “Only as the founder of the priesthood,” Kor says. “It is a book about the precedents and the theory of our work. A… guide, you would say.”

            I mouth that word. Foshret vaf. A map of behavior. Guide. Then I get back to the topic. “So all you know of him, you had from Thirukedi.”

            “And so all you know of him, you should learn from Him. Which describes the task you have taken on yourself, doesn’t it?”

            “Yes,” I say, because I know that if I tell Tsevet’s stories at all, it must be in Thirukedi’s voice. “But… I keep coming back here.”

            Kor stands, reaches to the wall. But he doesn’t take down the mantle, the way Thirukedi did when the two of us spoke here. He unhooks the knife from its holder and presents it to me.

            To say ‘I couldn’t’ would be the gravest of rejections. I can’t do it. So I take the knife—a knife that’s millennia old and dimmed to the color of smoke—and it is so sharp the edge gives me a papercut across two of my fingers.

            He meets my eyes. “Tell me the true thing.”

            The words escape like prisoners, bursting through a cracked door. “There was a time of darkness in my life, and I don’t remember it. It’s like a hole, and all the memories and feelings associated with it are just… gone. They’re gone, Shame. It shaped me and I can’t remember anything about it, except that it hurt. Must have hurt.”

            “And if I told you to close your hand on that knife, would you?”

            That startles me out of my pathos. “Kor?”

            “Would you grip it until you bled, knowing it would slice you to the bone?”

            “I… I would prefer not to,” I whisper, because the idea is nauseating.

            Gently, he says, “Then why do you believe you would have done so with memories cruel enough to flay your spirit?”

            I gasp as if he’s hit me.

            Shame raises the knife from my palm, careful of my fingers. Setting it on the narrow table frees him to take my hand and tilt it, studying the thin slices. “It is enough that the experience shaped you, datyani. You need not live in it.”

            “But what if it’s not done with me yet?” Tell me the true thing. “What if it comes back?”

            “It won’t,” he says. “You aren’t the same person. Its claws were designed for that you, not this you. What do we say, qirini?”

            “You are one thing or the other: the past is done,” I say, still breathless.

            He smiles and cups my face with both hands, and it feels like safety. “You travel your paisathi, like all of us. Which is not to say there are no dangers awaiting you, nor cruelties. But they will not be the ones you suffered before. Lose no sleep over those hollow years. They are sped, and you remain.”

            “I lived,” I breathe.

            “No small thing,” he agrees.

            “Sovevil qininith nem ve shevi revasili laininihh,” I say. Thank you for the grace of my Correction.

            “Jzote,” he says; always; and it’s a promise and such a gift that my heart skips. Because he’s Kor, he finishes, quiet, “Your art will always bring you home, so long as you are honest with it.”

            Like Shame, I think. Shame also brings the Ai-Naidar home… and in this case, one flawed and perfect and imperfect aunerai. I rest my head against his. “I don’t know if I can do this,” I say of Tsevet’s story. Of any of the stories that Kherishdar might tell me next.

            “You never know,” Shame says, “until you have.” A smile. “And then your doubts are in the past. And the past is gone.”

            After that… after that, I stay in the room for a while longer. Maybe I’ll come back to it, but I think the impetus that kept drawing me back is gone… lanced by Correction, as Correction is designed to do. I have put some of my deepest griefs in Kherishdar before, like offerings set on an altar and burned in the name of civilization. But such offerings must be prepared and this, I think, is part of my preparation. Ufrin, I think. Preparations. But I’m betting there’s some other word specific to the process leading to the sort of gifts I’m making.

            Little by little, I am seeing more clearly. And the path will unspool beneath my feet, so long as I’m walking. I get up, finally, and go back to work.